Lex's Post on Triangulation and Accountability

Diaz & Kauanui (2001) discuss triangulation as a methodology and specific politics. While triangulation is a fairly common component of research methodology, their use of the term insists on the "sense of one's place at all times" amidst unstable points of reference. Maintaining an emphasis on sociohistorical, geographical and political positionalities when practicing feminist methodologies is something that we discussed in class last week, but for me Diaz & Kauanui's description helped me further conceptualize those positionalities not as static descriptors (white, cisgender, nondisabled, etc), but relations that I work through and within.  

The relationality of positioning is further illuminated for me through Abu-Lughod's (1991) essay when she asserts the difficulty of writing for multiple audiences. She claims that feminist anthropologists write for two groups who have different definitions of accountability.

This dynamic is coming into play within my own work. My dissertation will (hopefully) examine how the most current prenatal testing technologies impacts parents' and physicians' understandings of disability, as well as how this new form of testing impacts decisions about bringing disabled people into the world. There are several tensions among and between my audiences. First, medical/clinical contexts are not often studied within disability studies. I'm using feminist science studies as a framework through which to analyze the production of knowledge about disability within clinical context, and for many disability studies scholars, that is not quite good enough. I hope to center my work on an understanding of disability both as a subject position and a set of meanings that can be constituted through close relation or affinity with disability. At the same time, the debates around prenatal testing have often left disability studies scholars/activists and feminist scholars/activists in disagreement. How can one be pro-people with disabilities while also being pro-choice? I think this should be the goal. But it has not always worked in the past. This is all to say that I find myself with multiple "audiences," some of which have disparate views about my topic.

I hope to declare my positionalities in relation to my audiences (serving here as those shifting reference points that Diaz & Kauanui describe). However, even as I glean the use of triangulation as methodology, Diaz & Kauanui's use is limiting for me in their emphasis on an "unambiguous sense of one's place at all times." When I consider my positionalities within disability studies, for instance, I DON'T always know how to measure or analyze the distance from one audience or place to another. I describe myself as "nondisabled," but I describe my partner as "disabled." (This binary is problematic, of course, but perhaps it is more problematic if I claim that "we are all disabled.") To say that I have "nondisabled" privilege is true, but it is true in so many and in contradictory ways that it almost loses its meaning. How then, do I signify my positionalities without reifying those sets of social relations? How do I communicate those relational positions in ways that multiple audiences will recognize?