GRASS Routes and RCR

As I took on the position as an associate dean in the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota, I was introduced to two women, Cathy Jordan and Susan Gust, who were at the heart of the Phillips Neighborhood Healthy Housing Collaborative (PNHHC), a collaborative research project into ameliorating the effects of lead poisoning on children in an economically disadvantaged, multi-ethnic community in Minneapolis. Cathy is a pediatric neuropsychologist on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, and Susan works in community building management and renovation and is a long-time community activist and organizer. The PNHHC was initiated by community members, who approached the University, and the project continued under community leadership (Jordan et al. 2000). I was immensely impressed by the way Cathy and Susan thought and spoke about what it meant to do a federally grant-funded, controlled trial in a deeply collaborative way, under community leadership and with community input at every step of the way, from study conceptualization and design, to implementation, and to the interpretation and dissemination of results. Part of the ethos they shared concerned the compatibility of scientific rigor and participatory democratic process—compatibility that required hard work and a commitment to working through conflict and misunderstanding.

Although I never participated in the work of the Collaborative, I joined with Cathy and Susan in organizing a conference called Designing Research for Change, which brought together community members, university researchers, and funders to explore the challenges to collaborative research. Based on what we learned, we formed an initiative we named GRASS Routes (GRASS stands for Grass Roots Activism, Science, and Scholarship), which received support from the Graduate School, the Office for Public Engagement, and the Academic Health Center (Jordan et al. 2005; Gust and Jordan 2006). We envisioned three main areas of focus. The first was on helping university researchers—graduate students, postdocs, and faculty—to acquire the skills needed to work in genuine partnership with non-academic community members; the second was providing guides to bring together the necessary members of research collaboratives, including helping community groups unfamiliar with navigating the university to find academic partners and providing mentors to help collaborations weather the complexities of relationship building; and the third was what we called a PUBLICation Fund to provide support for making research findings available to communities in engaging, accessible, and useful formats. Most of what we actually accomplished was in the first category, and Cathy and Susan have continued offering classes and workshops. They have also gone on to contribute to national efforts to foster communitybased participatory research, especially in the health sciences.

I brought to our work together a framework for articulating and arguing for the value of serious, mutually respectful engagement, especially as informing the ethos of university research. What I learned from Cathy and Susan also informed my participation over the years in a range of RCR initiatives, especially as RCR “training” became mandatory across the University. Often the only nonbiomedical researcher in the room, I tried to convince my colleagues that seeking ways to coerce faculty—especially in the humanities—to take even watered down RCR training requirements seriously was seriously misguided (a majority of such faculty would hack their way through the underbrush to avoid going through even a hoop ten feet in diameter, placed on the path they were already walking along). Rather, we had to find ways to engage all faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in interesting discussions that we could argue were relevant to their own concerns. We needed in particular to make a case for the importance to all of us, as actually or aspirationally employed academics, to be responsibly reflective about our complex enmeshments in the institutions that socialize, discipline, reward, and punish us; institutions that play complex— valuable, threatened, and often problematic—social roles?

Recognizing that epistemic normativity (as expressed, for example, in scientific method) was inseparable from moral and political normativity led me (with a little help from my friends, most notably Hilde Lindemann) into bioethics, mostly in order to argue that the supposed tension between pursuing knowledge and behaving ethically is mistaken. Rather, an ethos of mutually respectful engagement is better suited than an ethos of disinterested objectivity to realize the aims of accurate, trustworthy, usable knowledge. Seeing the ethical as a constraint on (rather than as intrinsic to) the epistemic leads, for example, to a protectionist stance toward the involvement of human subjects in research— “protection” being the word used in the guiding federal statutes and policies. The perceived need for protection is understandable, given the genesis of the relevant policies and programs in notorious cases of abuse, from Nazi experimentation on concentration camp inmates to the Tuskegee study, in which effective treatment for syphilis was withheld from Black men in order to study the progress of the disease. And it is, of course, true that researchers are typically in positions of power in relation to their research subjects. The centrality of informed consent to Institutional Review Board (IRB) requirements and, specifically, the focus on the informed consent forms that research subjects are required to sign, however, delineate the relationship between researcher and subject in ways that not only (often appropriately) acknowledge but also both presume and reinforce the differences of power between them. This focus also frames the issue as a matter of protecting subjects’ autonomy, which is presumed to be pre-existing and inherent, rather than relational and emergent?

In general, the mechanisms designed to protect research subjects, while appropriately acknowledging that power imbalance, actually serve to reinforce it and can make it difficult for those who would, rather, subvert it. Thus, for example, researchers are typically required to submit detailed plans to the IRB for the research they intend to undertake before actively engaging those who will be the subjects of the research, effectively precluding the participation of those who might be among those “subjects” (i.e., objects) from participating in formulating the research plans. In addition, the relevant relationship is taken to be between the researcher(s) and individual subjects. Within the usual IRB framework there is no mechanism for taking seriously the ways in which research can affect communities: suggestions that communities’ interests should be taken seriously tend to devolve into concerns about who might be in a position to sign a consent form, and pointing out diversity among community members is typically taken as a reason to reject the possibility of requiring community approval rather than as an important challenge that ought to be embraced as part of serious engagement."'

My work with GRASS Routes and with various aspects of the University’s responsible conduct of research efforts was informed by, and in turn informed, my thinking about the issues that distinguish field philosophy, as those issues arise for all of us, no matter what our discipline. Why are we doing what we do? Why does it matter—and to whom? Whom is our work likely to affect? With whom do we need to be respectfully engaged in order to do that work well? To whom are we—and ought we to be—accountable? Who sets the standards for our doing our work well and who evaluates our efforts? These questions tend to be taken more seriously in some disciplines than in others, and they tend not to be asked much in philosophy. But what I have come to see is not only that we, like those in other disciplines, need to take them seriously as questions about the activity of philosophy, but, more fundamentally, that they are philosophical questions: philosophers have distinctive contributions to make to addressing them, and philosophy will be enriched by our taking them seriously.