Emily Ruehs - Articulation

First, as a very brief continuation of my blog from last week, I want to briefly comment on Hall’s understanding of positionality. I am still wrestling with how to place myself into my most recently research, and I like how Hall says that “the ‘I’ who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, ‘enunciated,’” making all that we write and speak “ in context” and “positioned.” I like his use of the word “enunciated” in the context of having a dialogue: as I insert my ideas into the discourse on (in this case) the immigration of unaccompanied minors, I not only come with ideas but my own enunciated voice.

The second thing that caught my attention this week (and that I will spend more time on) was Clifford’s explanation of articulation alongside of Hall’s conversation of identity/experience. I am having a difficult time both understanding the concepts, and more importantly, seeing how these would apply to (or limit) my research.  In my own work, I have relied on the use of intersectionality as a framework for understanding how an individual’s identity and experience are shaped by multiple, intersecting social locations. This is a difficult starting point for research on a specific community because the countless social locations of a given individual separate that individual’s experience from most anyone else, making generalizations about a population difficult. At the same time, I understand how I can look at different social locations and the multiplicative effects they might have on one another. Similar to intersectionality, Clifford suggests the use of articulation in understanding the diversity within a culture: “something that’s articulated or hooked together”… “is more like a political coalition or, in its ability to conjoin disparate elements, a cyborg…” and “…there is no eternal or natural shape to their configuration.” My understanding is that this differs from intersectionality in that we are, first, not looking at multiplication of social locations but rather the arranging of social locations in numerous alignments, cuts and mixes. We are looking at “discourse or speech—but never a self-present, “expressive” voice and subject” (477)—and, I suppose, that intersectionality suggests a voice and a subject. The question, then, is how my research would like different if the identities of my participants were articulated instead of analyzed through an intersectional lens. My initial thought is that I would move away from talking about “unaccompanied minors” as a subject but rather looking at the discourse that creates this subject: I would place their experience into the discourse on youth, borders, and violence. Similar to the question of what “indigenous peoples” have in common as a group, “unaccompanied immigrant minors” might share little except for what Hall suggests: that their “common history” is profoundly formative (296). My research, then, would move away from an “identity” of an unaccompanied minor to the shared experience of youth who traverse borders by themselves.

Finally, Clifford raises the question: “Just how expansive can notions of indigenous or native affiliation become, before they begin to lose specificity, falling into more generalized ‘postcolonial’ discourses of displacement?” (470) This idea also makes me wonder if, just by naming my subjects according to the legal term “unaccompanied minors,” I have already fallen into a displacement discourse—although I’m not entirely sure what that means.  He goes on to suggest that there is often a “sharp line” between indigenous and diasporic affiliations (which he doesn’t necessarily agree should exist). I wonder if the reason I’m having trouble applying some of these readings to my research is because I am looking at a more diasporic community—I imagine these questions will be addressed in later weeks.