Imprimaturs and Making Science More Useful

Imprimaturs are important. Who will emboss my article with the seal of an official publication?

If you want a grant from a national agency or an article in a top journal, you usually need to fit the (systematic, rigorous) exploration of knowledge into a 'scientific' formation: what the field already knows about the question, hypotheses to be tested, possible outcomes. But not all scientific knowledge works like that!

I really liked Clark & Primo's op-ed in the New York Times advocating a broader vision of what social science is trying to achieve. They cite Ronald Giere, saying "the test of a map lies not in arbitrarily checking random points but in whether people find it useful to get somewhere."

How well do our ways of organizing our studies match what we are trying to get out of them?

In education, we are often advocating practices without looking at the whole system. What happens in a school is so complex, and is enormously influenced by broader inequalities and people's and communities' access to cultural and social resources. So teaching different kinds of students can't follow a cookie-cutter pattern.

[SIDEBAR: **The tough part of analyzing education comes from expecting the same outcome for students (e.g. mastering trigonometry or attending a four-year college) when they come with different bundles of skills and are actually headed down different paths. When do we allow expectations to change ("if you want to do that career, then you should..."), and how much do we force students to stay locked in to a given career track? How can we promise all kids growth and satisfaction? **]

When we talk about studies on healthy lifestyles, we often say, "Oh, carbs are bad for you" or "Coffee is bad for you" but those things really depend on your lifestyle. If you are a marathoner, you should probably eat bread and more bread. If you are a more sedentary person, you should probably eat more fruits and vegetables! What if there are few grocery stores near my house, or the price is too expensive compared to Chef Boyardee Raviolis? To get at the individual takeaways and the structural takeaways, we need longitudinal surveys and some exploratory ethnography!

Is It True Trees Live to Be Less Than One Year Old?

Studies, and the articles that report them, often say doing x leads to y. Like, marriage makes men live longer or having children as a teenager means you won’t graduate from college. 

These studies are definitely helpful for certain things. But the next step of applying the knowledge to people’s lives is often bungled and abuses the science of connecting the dots, connecting the causes to the effects.  These often assume it is useful to know what the average is, and how far people may stray from the average.  Married men may live longer than single men in general, but what if the man I’m marrying is an alcoholic trapeze artist with a history of depression?  How might those factors work in concert with other factors to produce what we might think of as a path?  Will he fall off the trapeze drunk, or will he lose his job and start drinking himself to death?

When we gossip about people, we often talk about going down paths.  “He’s going down the wrong path.” “That could turn into something bad very fast.” “She’s on a path to success.” In my work I take this kind of approach, producing different kinds of conclusions than studies that talk about averages.  

One part of my work with undocumented youth is the development of their identity, and how it is impacted by their legal status. So I hang out with them and listen to their stories and try to represent their lives as a multi-layered path. 

This of course means I make my own simplifications, and have my own assumptions. For example, I try to take a messy relationship and put a label on it.

What I am most interested in is how the various layers work together. The different layers I think about are family, neighborhood (from friends to organizations), romantic relationship (and maybe having kids), work (part and full-time), school (relationships with teachers, school activities, grades), and outside organizational and political commitments.

Sometimes people have aspirations on all of these points; sometimes they don’t. Usually youth say they feel more mature, more adult when they are able to juggle several of these at once. Some make decisions to concentrate on certain layers and come back to others later. Some feel that certain layers are not possible or are uninteresting to them. 

For example, Tiger mom Amy Chua raised her daughters obsessing on grades and school activities.  Only!  Some kids have to take care of their parents and ignore most life outside the family. Others are swallowed up by the neighborhood level, and become gang members. Then there is the person who goes from relationship to relationship but doesn’t develop lasting friendships. Others only have friends and don’t develop romantic relationships, like Sydney Fife in I Love You, Man. So I look for these patterns and give them names: Caretaker; Gang member; Serial monogamist; Celibate friend.

A lot of the immigrant youth I talk with tell me how much more important family is to them than ‘Americans’.  But this one “layer” can play out in different ways, can connect to other factors in different ways. While one person says they will stave off having kids until after they have finished an education, all to be able to meet family expectations, another person will forgo education to help support parents or their own newborn.

Bristle Cone Pine

This perspective provides a needed focus on the context of people’s lives that shape their paths, the forest around the tree if you will. The average life of a tree is less than a year.  Of trees that make it past that threshold, some trees grow ever so slowly but for thousands of years, like the Bristle Cone Pine; others like the Southern Red Cedar tend to die out when they hit their twenties.  The different species live in different forests and have different relationships with other plants around.  Sometimes you want to check if Southern Cedars are dying earlier; other times you want to talk more specifically about how Southern Cedars work in one type of forest. 

Southern Red Cedar

Certain types of teenage moms seem to do pretty well continuing their education. What could other similar teenagers learn from them about how to balance several things? When is hanging out with friends a problem, and when is it an important support network? When does working in high school help youth, and when does it hurt them? 

Public (recognition)

Around the corner from my apartment in east Paris 50 years ago, 9 people were killed, scores injured and hundreds traumatized for life. A recent night, organized by the Human Rights League, some 150 protesters, community members, and writers met to mark the anniversary with a showing of the documentary, To Die at Metro Charonne, Why?  The answer is they were protesting the Secret Army Organization (OAS), an extreme right group that supported a continued French presence in Algeria, and that assassinated people that were against them.

To hear the voices of the white-haired tremble as they described how the police beat on their heads and blocked their passage, to the point where children and fathers and sisters were killed, was quite moving and provokes a respect of having lived through struggle.

Witnesses described billowing chaos that makes it difficult to trace the exact way the police contributed to the massacre. They cut off roads, beat those who tried to breach their lines, and forced people down stairwells where they were trampled by other fleeing protesters. 

It is in the hideous melee that the suffocated victims perished.

The police refused to release their confidential documents on the tragedy. The documents that remain will surely not be the most incriminating.  Police who tried to speak about what happened received death threats. In the end, people still don’t know what happened exactly, the accounts can clash, frustrating people’s need for closure.

Why does the Paris police still fail to recognize any wrongdoing?

Maybe the answer has to do with 1) a recognition of their dominance, that it would take an enormous amount of public pressure to force them to come clean, 2) the support of the external war regime within the country would be more controversial today, and 3) it would blemish the prestige of heroic figures like De Gaulle that okayed the reprisal. All of these could potentially reduce the power of the French state.

How can citizens fight against these dominant technologies of the state, of the police, weapons, communications, and outright refusals to provide information?

Who has the right to public recognition has everything to do with how the machinations of power clench on the bodies of its citizens.

Note:  While this event was in my neighborhood, on the other side of Paris, police murdered hundreds of peacefully protesting Algerians, known as the October 17 massacre. Police threw the bodies into the Seine, which were found downriver for weeks. This event barely made the papers.   

An Algerian flag commemorates the bodies of protesters thrown in the Seine river.