Reflections on Peer Research: Powers, Pleasures, Pains

I think a warning I would give to peers, or people who are looking to become peer researchers, if anything, is that the messaging around we want your lived experiences, it’s useful, it’ll help us in our research, it’ll give us insight, and that’s false messaging, because what people don’t let you know is that the majority of the work is navigating bureaucracy, that’s the work, not as much lived experiences. It’s like, lived experiences in small pockets that are professional and digestible, and code switched enough and whatever. [But] It’s actually navigating the bureaucracy, and that wasn’t even said in this job. It isn’t said in any of the peer research jobs I’ve done …

Introduction

Social Work praxis includes a commitment to ethical and responsible research practices (BASW, 2014; CASW, 2005), often applied through community-based research (CBR) that can include hiring peer researchers as part of a research team. This article elucidates the reflections of peer research assistants in situ as they worked on the Peers Examining Experiences in Research (PEERS) study. PEERS was a participatory, qualitative research project in Toronto, Canada focused on four intersecting communities often engaged in peer research: mental health service user/survivor, people who use drugs, racialised and trans/non-binary communities. The goal of PEERS was to learn about the experiences and outcomes of peer research positions from the perspectives of those who held them. The project interviewed thirty-four individuals who had worked as peer researchers on the basis of their lived experience with one or more of these communities (see MacKinnon et al., 2021; L. E. Ross et al., unpublished data).

As a participatory research project, the research team was comprised of academically situated lead and co-investigators who had a diversity of research and experiential expertise related to the four communities in consideration, with some co-investigators previously employed in peer research roles (including Voronka). The research team also included community partners, post-doctoral positions, and all research assistants hired had previous experience working as a peer researcher for one of the four communities. The ‘meta’ nature of this study—a research project examining the experiences of peer researchers whilst also employing peer researchers—invited us to treat our own research teams’ experiences as data (L. E. Ross et al., unpublished data). One such method had co-investigator Voronka conduct focus groups with PEERS research assistants mid-way through the project, inviting them to reflect on their own experiences of being a ‘peer researcher’ on a study that is examining the experiences of peer researchers. This article draws out some of these reflections from five PEERS research assistants using this focus group data.

PEERS research assistants reflected on the pleasures, pains and power dynamics of working on this project. Together they explored in nuance how issues of race, space, class, disability, social position, education and more impact their relationship to and experiences of the work. Even amongst a research team invested in social justice research methodologies, individual, structural and systemic experiences of marginality were still experienced by PEERS research assistants. This contribution attends to the uneven experiences that peer work brings, with a specific focus on bodies in space, or what powers pleasures and pains are produced when intersectional marginalised people are brought into the elite space of the university to work. This article reflects our larger commitment to Social Work praxis/CBR that is transparent about the possibilities, conditions and limits of attempting social justice practices within broader contexts of entrenched social injustices.

Both focus group conversations generated a lot of valuable insights, including how research timelines are unreasonable and restrictive; peer-on-peer, researcher/peer and peer/staff tensions and power dynamics; some peers wanting to be named as such, others finding being designated as ‘peer’ oppressive. In this writing, we attend to two interconnected matters: bodies and space, and specifically bringing intersectional and marginalised people into the elite space of the university to work. Research assistants spoke how power fused through their identities in complicated ways, and that these powers pleasures and pains of occupying a peer worker identity in a research assistant role were intensified by working within the elite space of the University of Toronto (U of T).

Intersectional bodies in elite space

PEERS was a project committed to exploring the experiences of four research communities that often employ peer workers: racialised, trans/non-binary, drug and mental health user communities. One of the decisions we made early on as a research team was to hire research assistants (RAs) who had worked as RAs for each of these particular communities. This was often spoken of as ‘community matching’, which was also often experienced by the peer hired as ‘identity matching’. For instance, the RA who was hired for their experiences working with racialised communities obviously also had gender, sexual and disability identities (aka hold an intersection of identities), but in practice for them it could feel like they were hired to only represent and speak to one identity. This tension was a sticky one, and perhaps not surprising given that it is a different experience to hold multiple marginalised identities than it is to be paid to represent one of your identities and/or communities as part of your work role.

One RA noted that any pleasures that come from doing representational work are always happening within the content of larger pains, reminding us that anything ‘nice’ is contextualised within larger systems of oppression: ‘the context in which those things, those nice things happen in, is that the racism is pervasive, and heterosexism and heteronormativity and cis sexism, all of those things, and sanism and mental-ism’ are always structuring our encounters. They note that they came into the work knowing that what ‘would be hard, that I would expect to be hard, would be, like, mostly around intersectionality stuff.’ But at the same time, they found that ‘the way that I found the job posting, and you know, my interview process and the position that I ended up getting, it was all really exciting.’

Another RA elaborated on the complexities of living multiple intersectional identities that are marginalised,

I always say that I should have ‘liminality’ tattooed somewhere … being bisexual, for example, it’s always been a thing to explain to people. And they’re always like ‘Oh, one day, you’re going to pick a side.’ from the LGB, like, from within the community and from heterosexual people. It’s just constant. And then, as a racialized person, because then people will think, ‘Okay, you sound weird …’ And I can see that they’re trying to place me, and that, I guess because I have internalized it so much that, and I’m mindful about it, not to get mad immediately.

She goes on to recall a work experience where her racial identity was questioned that left her ‘yet again trying to explain myself, and trying to validate myself, as a peer, and it really made me think of, like, you might consider yourself part of a community, but, in order to be part of a community, you have to be acknowledged by [them], as such.’ This idea of identity matching, of fitting into particular identity boxes, of having to defend your place in those identity boxes, of feeling pressure to represent particular communities in your work role, permeated the experiences of PEERS research assistants, as those encounters, ‘they’re in imbued with pain, cause all the “isms” have pain in them.’ RAs spoke of also holding privileged identities, the complexities of representing ‘people with lived experiences’, and how some can speak and mobilise a specific identity marker in ways that can benefit them, whilst others may be unable to for a variety of reasons, including their inability to access modes of respectability that are expected of peer workers (Voronka, 2019).

For those of us who have grown comfortable and accustomed to working within university settings, one RA reminds us not to forget class and education, and the difficulty of holding place and workspace in elite academic settings. The ideal of bringing community into these venerated settings belies the complex web of the ‘intersectionality of education and class, and you know, employment stability or whatever, upward mobility all that kind of stuff ….’ As they reflected:

I think, for me, the common one, amongst some of us anyways, that’s a really big piece of me, is the fact that I haven’t finished my university degree. And I know that, it’s, and it was hard for me to, to live that experience, I guess, because I know that oftentimes people think that I do, from the way I speak. And so it’s not like I’m without privilege. And it’s not like I’m without a lot of pain, and the oppressive parts of not having a degree.

Making space in unsafe places

Reflecting on circulations of power and the limits of power-sharing in research contexts and university settings more broadly, one RA noted that ‘We should not kid ourselves about the power structure being pretty pre-determined.’ When research teams intentionally lead with CBR principles and a commitment to social justice, doing so within the confines of a web of administrative and institutional structures that oppress can only go so far: ‘So, I mean, they, the team, the project did lots to accommodate situations that I was in, like, lots and lots. So it wasn’t that the people weren’t trying to accommodate. But again, like, there was this underlying structure that limited us.’

Another RA notes the tensions of trying to create inclusive and accommodating environments within larger systems of oppression, and how much of that labour relies on individual acts:

Because I feel that it’s difficult to do this type of work within the institution. And U of T, everybody was, told me before, like, ‘Oh, they’re kind of snooty in that university.’ … which, everybody kind of knows. … we also have to be mindful that we’re doing it within the university setting, which is oppressive. And we just try to, like, juggle everything. But, I think we’re working, at least we’re all mindful of each other, and we’re trying to be accommodating, which makes a difference, at least for me.

Another RA spoke of how the politics of ‘race, power dynamics, accessibility and care’ were omnipresent in the workplace, and whilst sometimes encounters were painful, there were individuals who mediated that pain with presence and feeling, by creating an ‘ease of interaction’ and room for and comfort in dissent. One RA spoke of a team member who ‘would make the space really open for disagreement, and I think as peer researchers in this institution of all institutions, at U of T, for that space to be created, it wasn’t something common.’ They note that the pains that peer RAs experienced in their work roles could have been mediated by actually making room to articulate these lived experiences, and these pains, in the space of the elite university: ‘The solution in my eyes would have been to make space for who we are, to bring those lived experiences in a real way, and talk about these communities in a workplace setting, and that wasn’t there. Obviously, this is systemic. Obviously, this was going to happen.’

The powers of administrative injustice

One of the key tensions of power that RAs spoke to was administrative injustice. We often think of building CBR-friendly research practices in our research teams, policies that guide those teams, and expectations that govern us as team members. More recently also work to inform research grant agencies on how to better do equity, diversity and inclusion in their funding praxis. But RAs identified the administrative staff as well as the policies that govern at the departmental and university level as a big hindrance to their work experience and a significant site of pain. As one RA noted, negotiating with some university staff was difficult: ‘They’re really rude. They hate us.’

Whilst CBR teams may be working towards valuing knowledges that marginalised communities create and hold, universities as elite spaces are cultivated and maintained as elite through the values of white civil society, with the expectation of respectability used as an instrument of control for those within it (Collins-White, 2019). Given this, the administration of research assumes that those working for it hold and have access to respectability and its wide-ranging likely accoutrements—bank accounts, identification, Internet access and safety. When university administration is faced with tasks like paying people who don’t have bank accounts, much of the work becomes ‘navigating the bureaucracy’, aka trying to get things done in systems that don’t expect you to be working within them.

The business-as-usual of administrative policies also affected space allocation. The pressures on faculty to bring in grant money are endless, but the university’s ability to provide designated space for their research teams is not. RAs spoke of inadequate private space for them to work. Further, RAs worked multiple jobs because ‘we can’t survive on this income alone’, thus they worked different shifts and were rarely able to work as a collective. Even if they could, office space prohibited it. RAs spoke of how their inability to work side-by-side as a collective group in private space negatively impacted the success of their work. As remote work is increasingly normalised, the assumption by university administrations may be that they can commit to providing less space and technological infrastructure, but many peer research assistants do not have access to Internet, computers, and other hardware and software necessary to do this work. Whilst universities lay claim to commit to tenets of equity diversity and inclusion, and CBR is one way that these principles are actualised in academia, then here we highlight the need to address issues of administrative injustice as one significant roadblock that peer researchers encounter when brought in to work in the elite space of the university.

Peers, power and play

Whilst research assistants for the PEERS project had many nuanced critiques of their work experiences, they also had a strong understanding of how power plays out both within and outside of elite research spaces. The opportunity for them to reflect on their experiences as peer researchers was one that they appreciated, and they made clear that the critique does not override the pleasures that also came from this work. They spoke of building relationships with others, learning and skills building: ‘But, at least here, you know, you can ask for almost anything. And they will teach you, and ah, or support you. And so, I’m doing things I didn’t think I could do.’ RAs also understood that they are coming into these peer work roles with a whole lifetime of prior experiences, and that bringing their subject/ivities this new space impacts how they experience their work/place. As one RA notes ‘even though it’s been challenging at times, it’s been also a very positive experience and I’m happy with it, so not to, not to come across as—there are triggers and things, but it’s also my own subjectivity so I’m also very aware that sometimes, I might be hyper-observant of certain things, but I take my time to reflect, and I go back to, I’m taking down some reflections at the end of the day.’

PEERS RAs wanted to make clear that just because CBR is a place where social injustices continue to play out, and is subject to the same critiques that it proposes to neutralise, this doesn’t mean that these efforts should be abandoned:

And, I am still curious, when I hear, when I did all those interviews, of all the exciting projects that they’re [peer researchers] a part of. Like, how did those projects come about? Why is it that despite all the messed-up things that are happening in the world, and all the cutbacks and whatever else, and all the changes in policies, that there are still people trying to create research that is meaningful in those ways. They’re not perfect, but they’re still trying. Even if it ends up being tokenistic, structurally or whatever. So, anyways, I felt like there’s some glimmer of hope of something … here, I felt like I could have the space to just sit there for a moment, and to dig a little bit deeper, and it was nice … And I miss it.

Instead, we should not only come to expect this critique from our peer RAs, but encourage and embrace it as valuable knowledge so that we can continue to work towards building more socially just spaces within larger sites of injustice.

Author Biographies

Jijian Voronka (she/her) is a middle age white settler service user researcher and Associate Professor at the University of Windsor, Canada. She is the current Program Coordinator for the Disability Studies Program and her work used critical disability and mad studies to interrogate structural violence.

Carole King (she/her) is a white woman in her sixties who lives in Toronto, Canada and was the mental health representative for the PEERS project. She is a passionate advocate of affordable housing. She sat on boards involved in non-profit housing, loves research and speaks about her challenges with mental health.

References