title: Where am I? Locating myself and its implications for collaborative research.
abstract: This paper examines how a younger white female graduate student and an African American female undergraduate viewed the relationship between the graduate student and older African American working class women. This relationship was formed around a community garden project. The graduate student understood the relationship to be based on gender and class background similarities; the undergraduate viewed it based on race differences and unexamined white privilege. Both interpretations are challenged as unidimensional. Through this re-telling, questions are raised about why situating ourselves via our identities is not practiced more frequently. Possible explanations of this lack of attention to situativity include a Cartesian philosophy of science that separates objectivity and subjectivity, a general unawareness of privilege by those who have it, and a dominant scientific discourse that neglects the role of the researcher. This paper illustrates why reflexivity is crucial for the work of community psychology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459, USA. rlanghout@wesleyan.edu
authors.forename: Regina Day
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Langhout
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001741:Black or African American; D000368:Aged; D019058:Community Networks; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016901:Intergenerational Relations; D008875:Middle Aged; D011593:Psychology, Social; D011822:Race Relations; D012106:Research; D012923:Social Class; D014481:United States; D044465:White People