Collaborating with organizations: concerns for ethics and validity in a context of marginality

Deciding which method to employ for this dissertation, I was deeply aware that from an ethical perspective, it would be highly problematic to “extract information” from individuals struggling from a marginalized position (Speed 2008; Turton 1996) without engaging with these groups to help shift the relations of power and social structures that help maintain their disenfranchised position. However, as a social scientist, I know that my methods must be grounded in more than moral considerations, such as validity. And when I write “validity” here, I mean the proximity of theoretical assertions to the lived experience of those about whom the theoretical assertions are postulated, a definition broadly derived from Lincoln and Guba’s (2000: 180-181) constructivist “validity as authenticity.” As Hale (2008: 12) writes, “activist research methods have a built-in test of validity that is much more demanding and stringent than conventional alternatives: Is it comprehensible to, and does it work for, a specific group of people who helped to formulate the research goals to begin with?” Greenwood (2008: 331) adds:

Action research, unlike conventional social science, to use John Dewey’s term, issues “warrants for action” where the interested and at-risk parties gain sufficient confidence in the validity of their research results to risk harm to themselves by putting them into action. In my view, this is a “real” significance test.

Thus, by developing this study’s research questions through reflective dialogue with community activists during my preliminary work in Thailand, by merging my expertise and interests with local knowledges and goals to refine methods and to initially interpret

also valid in terms of the experiences and perceptions of activist co-researchers (Perelman and White 2011). Echoing Hale (2008) in his edited volume on activist-

scholarship, this collaborative effort does not necessarily signify a complete rejection and disposal of post-positivist methods or interpretive claims; rather I recognize that in the world of collaboration for action on the level of community and policy, it is often

important to frame assertions from the data in post-positivist terms or categories imposed from external orders (see also Speed 2008).

Those who collaborated in this study brought multiple different perspectives to the table, with varying knowledges and experiences that contrasted well with one another and with my own background. As Table 5 shows, among the organizations who worked together for this study were two health organizations (one solely focused on women’s health), a labor rights group registered as a Thai NGO, an international education NGO, an international NGO broadly focused on humanitarian assistance for refugees and IDPs, and two Burmese groups focused on women’s protection. Four of these groups provide some sort of shelter and safety to survivors of abuse, two coordinate legal assistance through the Thai court system, and one acts a source of curriculum and funding for a network of dozens of “migrant learning centers” along the border.

Table 5: Organization profiles

Organization Established Focus/Type Involvement in project

Burma Lawyer’s Council 1994 Legal assistance /advocacy Key informant Burmese Women’s Union 1995 Womense rights/service & _advocacy Key informant

International Rescue Committee 1998* Service Donor, advisory group, co-_researchers KMR Karen Youth Organization ~1980s** Mediation/Youth Organi Key informant

Mae Tao Clinic 1989 Health/service Advisory group

MAP Foundation 1996 Labor rights/legal _{assistance/activist} Advisory group Overseas Irrawaddy Association 2004 Gen. welfare/service Key informant Peoplefo Volunteer Association 2008 Gen. welfare/ protection Key informant Sana Yar Thi Pan Women’s Center 2004 WomenYa health/service Advisory group, co-_researcher Social Action for Women 2000 Womenl rights & women’s _{health/service} Advisory group, co-_researcher Tavoy Women’s Union 1995 Women W rights & women’s _{health/service} Advisory group, co-_researcher

World Education 1998* Education/service Advisory group

Yaung Chi Oo Worker Assn 1999 Labor rights/activist Co-researcher

*Date corresponds to the first year the organization became involved on the Thai-Myanmar border. Organizations may have been operating elsewhere in Thailand prior to this year.

**Respondents had a hard time pinning down the year the KMR-KYO was established. This may be because there was no formal opening of an organization, but rather a growing presence of a network.

Almost all of them have long-term networks in migrant worker settlements and neighborhoods including through “community contacts” they refer to as “community health volunteers,” “peer educators,” or “community organizers;” or through “mobile health visits,” labor organizing activities, vocational training programs, or “women talk” activities. One of the health organizations involved is the primary health care provider for hundreds of thousands of migrants on the border who do not have access or choose not to

go to Mae Sot General Hospital. This unregistered organization is the oldest on the border; they have provided medical assistance to refugees, migrant workers, and IDPs on the Burmese side of the border since the late-1980s.

As Table 5 shows, participating organizations differed from one another not only in terms of focus but also by what I call type of organization here. I categorize the different participating groups according to whether they primarily carry out their objectives via advocacy, service provision, activism (or mobilization), or “protection;” the latter a reference to the variety of tasks those groups carry out as power brokers and intermediaries between the state and the migrant population. The categorization is not meant to suggest groups’ rigid adherence to one focus or one way of working. In reality, each organization employs a variety of tactics; advocacy groups deliver services and service groups may engage in advocacy or “protection,” for example. Table 5 represents an assessment of groups’ primary focus and strategy. As the rest of the chapter shows— and as I discuss further in chapter seven—organizations’ strategies are significant in that they are often indicative of their broader objectives, including the provision of life-saving services or a commitment to action that is transformative on the level of social and

political structures and systems.

The representatives from the seven participating organizations were also reflective of Mae Sot’s diverse constituencies across social classes, genders, labor sectors, ethnicities, and nationalities. Missing, however, were representatives from Mae Sot’s substantial Muslim communities, itself an ethnically and socially diverse

population. As I note throughout the dissertation, this proved to be an important gap. Moreover, there is always room to include more voices in the process; each member of

the advisory group and the co-researcher team brought her or his own ideas and opinions, which sometimes echoed the perspective of that person’s organization, and which always reflected an amalgam of partial and situated lived and learned experiences.

As this section has shown, the design of the research project had different layers of participation built into it with the purpose of bringing forth and giving attention to a variety of voices. Paying attention to co-researcher’s perspectives about the migrant populations in the four sites where we did research deepens the analysis of conditions in those locales. At the same time, it also enables a critical look at the project based on co- researcher’s reflections and attitudes. In the next section, I show that despite the design of this project, there were numerous unanticipated additional layers of difference and power that emerge in the analysis and that had an influence on the direction and result of the research.