Initiating the Fieldwork Process

Prior to undertaking the PhD program, I had been working in a university which provided me with opportunities to be involved in a number of research and community projects. Through such activities, in the early of 2013, I was connected for the first time with KARINAKAS, a local NGO which is based in Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia. As an

institution, KARINAKAS is owned by the Indonesian Catholic Church and part of the Caritas International (a Catholic humanitarian agency). Many of their programs are funded by

donation from the Caritas International network such as Caritas Germany, Caritas Italy and the Catholic Organisation for Relief and Development Aid or CORDAID. Despite its association with the Indonesian Catholic Church, KARINAKAS is operated as a secular organisation (KARINAKAS, 2011; Suharto, 2011).

KARINAKAS has mainly worked in the area of disaster risk reduction. In partnership with a number of local communities in Yogyakarta Province and its surrounding areas, this NGO has been interested in developing local communities’ capacity to mitigate and overcome the risks of disasters. The CBR program that was implemented in the Bantul District was one of the community-based projects managed by this NGO. A number of faculty members from

the university where I worked were involved in the early stage of this program, in their capacity as consultants to the KARINAKAS staff. I was not directly involved in the project, but the partnership between these faculty members and KARINAKAS had provided me with opportunities to meet and interact with the staff of this NGO. Through these interactions, I learned about their CBR programs, including the one that was implemented in the Bantul District.

The discussions with KARINAKAS staff had developed my interest to study the issue of community participation in the implementation of their CBR programs. From their field experiences, I learned about the complexity, paradoxes and challenges that emerged in the interactions between KARINAKAS and the partnered local communities. Inspired by such observation, I shared with KARINAKAS staff my intention to pursue a PhD program and my interest in conducting research, which is based on one of their CBR programs. At that time, the CBR program in Bantul was the latest program in KARINAKAS and there had been no study about it. Considering this situation, the CBR program manager suggested to me to do a study based on the CBR program in this district.

I maintained my correspondence with KARINAKAS staff after officially enrolled in the PhD course, in July 2013. Initially, I developed my study proposal by focusing on the issue of community participation. I was interested in investigating the experiences, thoughts and reflections of the local people who participated in the implementation of the program. At that time, I had known that PWD are among the local people who were involved in the program. However, at that stage, I did not have the awareness that the study needed to be particularly situated within the context of disability studies. I also did not have the insight that I needed to specifically focus my study on the FPDB as one of the key local organisations that were involved in the CBR program. It is therefore the Plain Language Statement (Appendix

1) and Consent Form (Appendix 2) for the participants mainly covered general information about investigating the local people’s experiences with the CBR program.

The awareness that I need to focus my study on FPDB came later, after I started the fieldwork process and had more intensive interactions with the PWD who were involved in the program. Prior to the fieldwork process, I was reluctant to situate the study within the disability framework. My reluctance stemmed from my insecurity as a non-disabled person. What do I know about being disabled? What if I accidently do more harm to them through my research? What if I cannot contribute much for their struggle as much as what they would possibly do for my personal development? Driven by this kind of question, I avoided

engaging with the core issue of the program. At that time, I thought I did justice by thinking that only PWD who have right and competency to do a study on disability. However, as I started to interact more with the PWD who were involved in the program, and engaged with the readings on the social model of disability, I became aware that through my reluctance I have instead reproduced the marginalisation of PWD.

Through my interactions with the PWD in the program, I realised that by avoiding the issue of disability, I had reinforced the marginalising assumption which views that disability is the problem of those who have disability. I was unable to see that as a non-disabled person who is embedded in an ableism-driven society, I am part of the problem. In addition, by running away from my own vulnerability, I had reiterated the expert-centred assumption which views that a credibility of a researcher is determined by her expertise to help and save the research participants. I failed to see that as a collaborative process, research should be experienced as a transformative setting for both the researcher and the research participants. Driven by this awareness, I changed my approach to the study.

The ethics application for the study was approved on September 29, 2014 by the Victoria University Human Research Ethics Committee (VUHREC). Comments and feedback

from KARINAKAS’s staff became one of the considerations in developing the research ethic application. As an organisation with seven-year partnership with the local community, KARINAKAS was well placed to offer constructive advice to ensure the appropriateness of my fieldwork plan to the local context and its cultural protocol. KARINAKAS agreed to vouch for me and facilitated access to the potential participants. In order to ensure that the study was conducted in culturally appropriate ways, the CBR manager in KARINAKAS agreed to allocate time for a monthly meeting with me to discuss and to provide feedback about the fieldwork process.

Following the ethics approval, I started my fieldwork by the end of October 2014. In the beginning of the fieldwork, I had meetings with KARINAKAS’s staff and management board to get better understanding on the latest development of the program in Bantul.

Afterwards, I started to join any community activity related to the CBR program, which were located in five villages. I visited the fieldwork site for five to eight hours almost every day. In general, my daily routine consisted of attending KARINAKAS staff meeting, doing archival study in the KARINAKAS office, and participating in any CBR activity that happened on that day. The activities included community workshops, meetings with local government staff and visiting families. Sometimes I spent a whole day in one village, some other times I went to two or three villages in a day, depending on the community activities that happened on that day. Including in the daily routine was having informal conversations through activities, which were not directly related with the study such as going out for meals, having after office drinks and attending gathering invitations.

My first interviews were mainly with community health cadres who were involved in the CBR program in their capacity as a resource person in their village. All of them are

women and none of them has disability. The interviews with these women provided me with a better understanding of the broader socio-cultural context of the villages. Such an

understanding was instrumental to develop my early observation of how disability issues have been generally responded in the villages. Later on, through one of the regular coordination meetings organised by KARINAKAS, I was introduced to a member of FPDB. The meeting was attended by key actors and organisations that were involved in the implementation of the CBR program. FPDB was one of such organisations.

Following this introduction, toward the end of November 2014, I started to make connection with FPDB. Starting from informal visits to their office, gradually I became a regular participant in their daily activities. The activities included attending their meetings, participating in their group projects and spending hours for hanging out in their office. It is these interactions that raised my awareness to shift the way I approached the topic of the study and consequently to amend the ethics proposal.

Before the fieldwork, I assumed that the data collection would be looking at how different groups in the community (which are identified as the stakeholders of the CBR program) gave meaning to their participation in this program. I aimed to explore how different social actors in the community (i.e., PWD, local governments, and community members) responded to this program, which was initiated by an external agency. With such a question, implicitly, I positioned these different groups in an equal position to each other. At that time, I thought my study would be investigating the tensions between the internal actors and the external agency in relation to the notion of community participation in a CBR program.

However, during the fieldwork, I became aware that with such an assumption I was oblivious with the fact that those groups, which were identified as the local stakeholders, were not equal to each other. Particularly through my interactions with FPDB members, I became aware that the relations between these different stakeholders reflected the way disability as a form of social injustice has been reproduced, maintained or challenged in this community.

This thought became my point of departure to shift the approach I was going to use in developing the dissertation. I made the change by investigating the notion of participation from the vantage point of the local people who participate in FPDB. The data gathered from the other groups were used as a background against which the voices and experiences of FPBD members were situated and analysed.