Reading the Self in Retrospect
Afina Nafisah Jasmine, MA Comparative Literature
On a regular day last summer, I was participating in a project that required me to research relevant academic papers. I had been working on this project for several months and continuously helped the team collect secondary research as we slowly inched towards publishing an article. On this regular day, I came across an academic paper of relevance that mentioned individuals with eerily familiar names. Typically, this would be considered a normal occurrence; the more you read on a single specific topic, the more you recognise the names involved.
As I was sifting through the findings to see if I would keep or discard this paper, my eyes skimmed across a participant’s quote with a familiar cadence. Out of curiosity, I stopped skimming and paused to read the whole chunk of text, as well as the findings derived from it. At first, I was amused by the naivete of the participant. The topic she discusses is an area I am personally and intellectually very familiar with, and what she said presented a burgeoning interest, but nothing complex yet. As I kept reading, however, things started to seem off. The tone of voice was beginning to seem a little too familiar.
I looked at the quote again; I looked through the context of the study again; I looked at the year the data was collected, and the age and demographic information of the participants, and I remembered—to my absolute horror— that I was the person being quoted. I was the mystery participant, and I no longer saw things the same way.
I did the quick maths in my head— ever made easier by the fact that the study logged my age from when I was interviewed. Six years had now passed between the time I was interviewed and the time I read my own words reflected back to me. In that time, I graduated university, I worked two jobs, and I applied for postgraduate study. One of my best friends got married, had a kid, and had another kid. I pivoted what I wanted to do for my Master’s a good number of times. I thought I would be in Vancouver or somewhere up north of England, but I wound up in London instead. A good deal had changed, which was perhaps why I didn’t recognise myself at first glance. It was only during the double-take that I registered that I said those words.
It was jarring to see myself from a different time staring back at me. All the more jarring that I had to consider whether or not I would include this research in my pile of secondary readings.
Research is a slow process. A researcher can come up with an idea at one point in time, and it can take years until that idea forms into a full project plan, with a vision for the methodology and the proposed hypothesis. At some point, the idea is then turned into a proposal to submit to a research ethics committee. Before the project is green-lit, edit requests are sent back, questions are asked and answered, amendments have to be made to the proposal, and further primary and secondary research is done to enhance the substance of the research project. Between the ethics application and data collection, several more life and world events have unfolded. The data collection itself takes some time. It is collected, turned into analysis, and turned into a manuscript to send to academic journals. A lot of time passes. The academic paper waits to be read by journal editors; it gets rejected because it isn’t the right fit; the paper is sent elsewhere; the academic paper hits limbo because there is no one to peer review the work. More time passes. The paper is reviewed and needs further revisions; it is improved and sent back. The paper hits limbo again because there is no one to peer review the work. Round and around we go. Finally, the paper is ready to be published. It will be published next season.
For a field of work that generally hinges on its timeliness and relevance, research takes remarkably long to be completed. This is by design because good research has to go through several ethical hoops. Ethical research files the proper forms, cites its sources properly, goes through multiple rounds of critique and edits, and is submitted to reputable journals. When a paper is finally published, there is often the question, ‘So is this still relevant?’
When I read my words back to myself that summer, I was confronted with the question: Do I still use this paper for my current project because it is directly relevant? Or do I omit it because I strongly disagree with what I once said and know its conclusion is built on a somewhat shaky ground now? The simplest and uncomplicated answer to this is: yes, just include it, because it isn’t up to you to morally judge the answers of some random participant you, theoretically, don’t know. But what happens when you do know? What is the ethical line?
In ensuring the research and published work is ethically compliant, a paper’s relevance inevitably receives some collateral damage. Research itself slips when it attempts to illustrate a present moment because it is never exactly present. It is always somehow temporally removed. The later a work gets published, the more rigorous the work of gatekeeping is on it (in most cases), and the more detached it becomes from what it seeks to present.
Still, the dilemma is this, and it especially applies to humanistic research: between synthesising the data collected into analysis and the publishing of the paper, participants can go from one to a wholly different point in their lives. This is especially true of research that involves young people. When I was younger, I often participated in research because–in an almost ironic twist–as an aspiring researcher, I was keenly aware of how hard it was to get participants, and I sympathised. I had never fully considered the consequences of my participation until I saw, in the flesh, a version of myself I no longer claim.
Within research, how do we accommodate the various temporalities at play? Research and the self clearly move at different speeds, mostly with disregard for one another. Academia comforts itself via the fact that researcher reflexivity is now widely practised; a social researcher will always acknowledge that their set of data was produced at a specific place and time, under a specific set of conditions. But this reflexivity is solely tied to the author; there is technically no need for the paper to retcon what it says, so long as that answer is reached ethically.
And so, what are the limits of the ethics of research? The hazard of working with humans is that they are malleable and constantly changing. This seems like an inevitability. While these moments may seem minute, what does it mean when something you didn’t think too much of continues to wield production power outside of your control? While I did not end up using the paper, what are the consequences for the researchers who did use this one paper to further inform their research? I fear we have yet to reach a conclusive answer.
