Becoming a Part of My Research and Representing the United States

I was intrigued today by a BBC Headlines feed that read "World views US 'more positively'"so I linked to the article.  Apparently, a BBC world service poll shows that 35% of the "world" says the US has a positive influence, up from 31% from last year.  Apparently now only 47% of the "world" thinks the US has a negative influence, down a whole 5% from last year.  I haven't read through the whole report (downloadable as a pdf) to understand exactly who the "world" is (from what I can tell so far, the sample "world" doesn't include South Africa but does include Egypt and Ghana).  However, the article helps me reflect and frame a phenomenon I experienced over the past two weeks during my research trip as a representative of the United States. 

Entering the environments of the two workshops (each potentially gathering 50-60 "marginalized" women over a period of 5-6 days to create stories, sketches, and cloths documenting their life experience and perceptions of democracy), I certainly knew that I would not function as an invisible observer of events.  I knew that my presence would be noticed by the participants and have to be framed somehow.  However, this particular framing of my presence - as a representative of the United States - was both a surprise to me (it was not the framing I attempted to create for myself) and functioned in a couple of interesting ways.  Although the workshops differed widely in terms of setting and available material resources, my presence was explained at these workshops in the same, two ways:  1)  as a researcher from the United States interested in the project and 2) as a potential contact of United States-based assistance for participants involved in the project.

On the third day of the Parliamentary Millennium Project/Create Africa South Workshop, I approached  Selma Theron, one of the many journalists that visited the workshop, to ask for her contact information in the hope that I would be able to obtain her publication's (Hazyview Herald) coverage of the workshop.  She was instantly interested in my presence and took my name and information and asked to take a photograph of me.  I was surprised that Friday to find that she published the photograph in the article with the caption beneath reading, "Ms Martha Webber, a student at the University of Illinois, was part of the project."  In a moment of almost silly self-reflexivity for me, I found myself a "part" of my research and being reported on in a document that I would be analyzing for research. 

Speakers at both workshops used this first framing - as a researcher from the US interested in the project - to attach importance to the project.  At each closing ceremony (the first on Thursday 20 March and the second on Saturday 29 April), motivational speakers referenced me in their speeches and suggested that the project the women had just participated in possessed importance since I was from the United States and had come to research it.

Perhaps even more fascinating, however, was how in both closing ceremonies, motivational speakers (in the case of the first workshop, a different speaker than the first) framed me as a potential contact of United States-based assistance.  At the first workshop, this was Cathy Dlamini, Chairperson of the Ehlanzani Women's Council, who suggested to the audience that, now that I had met "marginalized" women from the rural areas of the Mpumalanga province, I could serve as a potential resource in identifying NGOs or other groups based in the United States to assist them.  Implicit in this suggestion is an understanding of the distribution of the "wealth" of NGOs that many critics have identified - the majority of NGOs and their economic power tend to be based in the "North" yet look towards the "South" as sites to distribute aid/assistance.   Dlamini's suggestion was set within a speech that thoughtfully criticized the Parliamentary Millennium Program/Create Africa South Workshop as a superficial engagement with the citizens and concerns of the community.

Both of these positions I was given - often by people who had only met me for a moment - fascinated me and in some respects made me uncomfortable (at least in the sense of the amount of responsibility I was given and the inflation of my importance - don't they know I'm just a feeble graduate student?!).  These framings have certainly given me a lot to think about as I slowly transcribe and organize the pictures, audio files, fieldnotes, and video footage I collected over the past couple of weeks. 

I don't know what the "world" really thinks of the US, but I can say that the participants of these two workshops (both facilitators and cloth producers) viewed the US (in which I functioned as a tangible stand-in or synecdoche) as a place that can offer funding, assistance, and opportunity.  In a rural area embedded within a country that generally can offer very little, inconsistent opportunity for economic mobility and access to basic infrastructural needs, then, the US appears positively.   

Comments

[mom]

you sad in picture,well be home april 26

[Mark]

wow... yeah... it's always fun when people decide that you're going to do things for them and tell everyone else before they tell you. i don't mean that in a denigrating way, it just seems like they're expecting a lot without really communicating those expectations to you ahead of time...

[jacksonjimmy]

It is actually simple; the mere method to become a motivational speakersis to train with somebody. To start with you have to make a decision what market you desire to target. You should choose from a meadow, which comprises but is not.