Categories
It was somewhere after our eighth order of fries and ketchup. That we started to feel overwhelmed. Both our bodies and minds. We’d listened to stories of women beaten and berated by husbands, mothers-in-law, fathers. We’d heard descriptions of that decisive escape moment. How women left a bad situation, for an uncertain situation in a shelter, all to try and build a better situation. And here we were, in this shelter, trying hard to be present. To connect – not as social workers or counselors – but as fellow human beings. Who wanted to better support the re-building process. Albeit at a structural level, not at a 1:1 level.
Me being, well, Sarah* wanted to push through. To disregard the headache and the tiredness. Yani put her foot down. We needed to pause. To process what we were experiencing. By reconnecting with our own support networks. Friends, family, church, ballet.
She was right. So we took a day off. This was a real change in our team behavior. As was getting together as a team to frankly talk about ourselves. Yes, we often get together as a team, but the discussion tends to be about our plans and our tasks. This time, we shared what was rubbing uncomfortably with our past experiences, and our current values. What’s absolutely good or bad, right or wrong? And what’s relative to context and culture? We believe violence against women is absolutely wrong. Is it absolutely wrong if women believe their only place is in the home?
Our conversations weren’t just rubbing uncomfortably with our own ways of looking at the world, but with how our organizations structure our worlds. The project is a partnership between InWithForward and Kennisland. InWithForward is small, nimble, without any infrastructure. Kennisland is larger, established, with critical infrastructure to maintain. These environments influence our conceptions of time and of quality, and necessarily shape our interactions with others. When you bill by the hour – and when an hour needs to pay for you plus the rent, the support staff, and a bit of management – you have less flexibility to spend a day and night with women. Of course, flexibility comes at a cost. And that’s uncertainty. We work one-project-at-a-time, but there’s often gaps between projects. Income isn’t continuous. There is little task differentiation. We have to do it all. Photocopying, cutting, and stapling included.
Tension is totally normal for our kind of work. What turns out to be surprisingly hard is naming the tension. Not in a reactionary way. Or in an apologetic way. But in a straight-up way. It can be darn uncomfortable. But discomfort is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. At least that’s what I try and tell myself – and folks new to our team.
Carita, a social worker new to our team, waded right into the tension with us. It was 9pm at night, and we were having dinner with a woman and her kids. The kids started to have a full-on melt down. Yelling, hitting each other, dumping toys onto the floor. As ethnographers, our role isn’t to intervene. It’s to observe. Carita had to stop herself. At other times, we asked Carita to jump right in. To share personal stories and family photographs. To redefine professional distance – and use self disclosure as a way to open-up a more two-way conversation. Our goal? To get rid of the professional – client distinction. Even just for a night.
Putting tensions on the table is the idea behind our regular Debrief sessions. Unlike in past projects, we’re opening up the analysis and idea generation process right from the start. In the past, we (the design team) would be the ones identifying key themes, surfacing patterns, and brainstorming scenarios. All away from view. One of our new methodological hunches is that the more people take part in the analysis and idea generation process, the more they’ll own what emerges. And so on Tuesday, right before we all left for the holidays, we prototyped a Debrief session with social workers from the Shelter. In the New Year, we’ll add women, community stakeholders, and key managers to our bi-weekly Debriefs.
A good Debrief, we think, will enable all the system players to confront the things they hold to be true. On Tuesday, we used photographs, quotes, testimony from Carita, and academic articles to explore disconnects – between dependence and independence, between controlled and control, between bonding and bridging social capital. A lot of language in the domestic violence space is about giving women back their independence and control. And yet one of the women we’ve met who is living well (someone we’d call a positive deviant) has rejected the independence – dependence dichotomy. For her, life centers on interdependence. On calling people for help, on relationships with neighbors and fellow church members, on a real give-and-take that is neither dependence nor independence.
The question is: what can we do to enable more of this interdependence?
I’ll leave that as a rhetorical question. At least until 2014. We’ll be back with more questions and reflections in early January. Enjoy the holidays. And thanks for reading!
* Sarah = this is an adjective the team (endearingly) uses to describe the propensity to take on too much, talk a bit too fast, drop iPhones, and generally be very clumsy!