“Grey is the new black,” proclaims every fashion alert out there this fall. Some even say it’s the “colour” of the decade. So what is it about grey that has people so charmed? Are binaries finally passé? Can grey be a more inclusive range of in-between? Or is grey (which, let’s not forget isn’t a colour, but rather a spectrum of shades between black and white) actually being reimagined as a singular new category? Another style to adhere to, another category border to police?

The cultural phenomenon of determining which “one of these things is not like the other,” can be seen in even the most simple children’s games such as “Duck, Duck, Goose”—an activity that, incidentally, has been recently repackaged by educators in Minnesota as “Duck, Duck, Grey Duck” in an effort to soften the blow of being called out for your otherness; your goose-ness. But when do efforts of political correctness that seek to complicate and nuance categories of difference become so entrenched that they too impose the same kind of rigid boundaries they seek to subvert? And why do these efforts to accommodate difference, though they may be genuine, often actually amount to little more than lip service?

In honour of this week’s dedication to glitching/deforming/mess, I’m throwing this provocation of method out to the class and the ether-web. However, it’s not a focus on the technique of the glitch, nor the technique of deforming or mess that I’m offering here. Because in a sense, we’ve been talking about taking a break from a traditional academic method all semester. Rather, it’s my aim to try to get people thinking about the methods they employ. The singularities in processes we take for granted. The content we consume. The research we produce. The forms we curate. And why, as Mark Sample writes, within the process of deforming, we often strive to reform again, constantly in search for a singular answer rather than a multiplicity of questions. Why we gravitate towards an understanding of grey as a new colour rather than an infinite spectrum of shades. What do we reproduce and dis/able when we prioritize answers and finished products over questions and the histories that inform how we got to where we are now? These end goals, though created in the name of and for more discursive methods, risk reproducing the very barriers we aim to dismantle. In forging new research paths, we must not lose sight of whose needs and approaches are being prioritized and whose are being left out. As John Law writes, “Othering is always implied in making present” (7).

My hope is that by absorbing tactics of difference we don’t simply colonize them for the already enfranchised. I’m interested in a type of method that doesn’t feel like a weekend retiree getaway of Bob Ross paint-by-numbers hobby-building for academics dabbling in a safe and comfortable skillshare, but one that looks more like an ongoing active listening project. As painstaking as these projects are, they are the absolute foundation of overcoming a duck duck grey duck-style approach to difference.

Mapping Multiplicities

 My question then is twofold: Firstly, how do we demand that institutions such as Concordia actually create better mechanisms to accommodate difference and interdisciplinary modes of working; and secondly, how do we avoid creating new research opportunities, methods, and approaches that appropriate difference for the benefit of those who already have the cultural capital, mobility, and academic language to occupy this space rather than truly opening it up for those who don’t? In a moment, I am going to offer a few simple examples to illustrate my point. But before I do so, I want to emphasize that people’s lives are always complex and messy, and converge in specific-to-them kind of ways. When centralizing the marginalized voices and methods within an institutional framework, it’s important to ground this research within a politics that understands multiplicity as it relates to the structures that disable and/or marginalize them. Here I want to draw from critical disability studies, in particular the radical model proposed by activist and writer AJ Withers. Withers imagines disability intersections as a multi-lane highway, with numerous roads meeting and crossing in complicated and chaotic ways. The most important feature of these roads and intersections is they look very different depending on your location (Disability Politics & Theory 100). There is no single map for understanding difference, and when we seek singular and definitive answers—aka the intersecting of two roads with a clearly marked sign—we risk oversimplifying.

Hierarchies of Grey: Getting Stuck in Purgatory

Say, for instance, that you’re a student registered with the Access Centre who’s been granted accommodations such as extra time on tests and exams (and let’s be clear, there aren’t all that many more accommodations available). Such an option may work for those whose courses are primarily or exclusively evaluated by testing (i.e., a one-hour exam gets recalculated to provide a student with three hours in which to complete it and, depending on their specific accommodations, a computer by which to write it). For all other evaluated coursework, however—by which I mean, anything that isn’t strictly black and white and controllable—the university’s metrics of equal opportunity fall apart. The onus, therefore, remains with the individual student to negotiate and self-advocate for extensions, alternative research output options, and approaches, without any guarantee or support of resources or tools to ensure their specific needs are respectfully addressed. When it comes down to it, the end of the semester marks the finishing line for every student, regardless of how complex and winding the path is for them to get there. For more on this topic, see the developing field of study on the concept of “crip time.”

A similar point can be made when considering less cut-and-dry access considerations. Concordia could invest billions of dollars into making its physical infrastructure as accessible as possible, and arguably it should. But what if people can’t afford the tuition? Or they don’t have the support they need in dealing with the endless bureaucracy to “access” the institution (applications, student loans, immigration status issues, etc.)? Or if there isn’t enough room in affordable daycare spots nearby? Or, returning to physical accessibility, it remains the case that only three metro stations in all of Montreal have elevators? Then how much impact will this multi-billion-dollar building project serve? Or, should we say, whose needs will it serve and to what extent do this types of projects help justify the invisibilisation of more complicated access issues named above? A radical disability theory perspective insists that “the tragedy of disability is not our minds and bodies but oppression, exclusion and marginalization” (Withers, “The Radical Model” n.p.) and argues that in order to create a different way of doing things, we must be able to negotiate respect, equality, and access in a comprehensive and intersectional manner.

Many of the fields of study which theorize on the topics of marginalization and difference—gender studies, post-colonial studies, even some disability studies—privilege communication skills and language of the academy. In a quest to have the voices that these works speak of included within the institution and academic discourse, only those who speak this language or assimilate to it (i.e., have the cultural capital) can participate. As such, many of these fields generate research on marginalization performed by researchers far removed from those realities. While they prioritize the exploration of systems that marginalize people, they oftentimes fail at enabling inclusion, by again putting the onus on the individual who is marginalized to be reformed into digestible, valid academic disciplines that are considered legitimate in the long-term, not just new and trendy in the short-term.

Along those lines, I return to my initial hook—the recent trend towards grey as the so-called “colour of the decade.” I argue that it’s all fine and dandy for Rihanna to proclaim that grey is the new black, and dye her hair accordingly, but when she does so, I question how subversive such an act is. Is she really trying to turn societal anti-aging notions upside down by reclaiming a symbol of age and wisdom as a powerful thing, or is she simply appropriating that image as a trendy style, thus rendering the “out-thereness” (Law 8) no longer “outsider,” and rather an indication of “cool.” In other words, Rosa Menkman’s point that it’s not really a glitch if you’re actively trying to glitch. When pop culture brands something as “new,” chasing the trend erases its otherness and draws lines through any fuzziness or spectrum-like qualities it may have once had.

Participatory Community-Based Research

Similarly, in an academic context, there has been a trend for the past several years towards participatory community-based research practices grounded in the communities they serve. Techniques that were once considered outside of the traditional academy—such as cultural production, historically brought in as artefacts for academics to study after the fact—are being reconsidered. Participatory action research, for example, engages directly with communities, and often collaborates in or facilitates the production of such cultural works in order to learn both from the process of the collaboration as well as through disseminating finished works. These efforts to bridge the gap between community-based and traditional knowledge production are no longer tactics taken by social justice-oriented academics alone, but have become institutionalized so that funding agencies now expect researchers, regardless of their agendas, to demonstrate and justify their work’s community outputs. Funding then becomes contingent on how researchers talk about community engagement in their proposals and how much success they have forming strategic alliances with particular groups and causes, than it is about how they actually engage and impact community.

Universities are quick to boast about how many of their researchers are engaging in this trendy community-based approach, but fail to widen bureaucratic processes to effectively accommodate people from outside of the institution. Accounting departments don’t know how to deal with processing payments and reimbursements for things like art supplies, community group honoraria, compensation for those who don’t already have a Concordia employee ID number, etc. The reality is that working in less linear ways opens many researchers up to more precarious circumstances. Circumstances that only some can afford. These obstacles place the onus on the individual researchers to navigate through onerous amounts of red tape, and ultimately, the only academics who usually succeed in navigating these highly coded and opaque systems, are the already well-positioned, privileged, established scholars who can afford to do so and who have the kind of traditional academic knowledge base for justifying non-traditional research.

Such a system leaves behind the inherent messiness that a true commitment to community-based research would entail. So while participatory research aims to bridge the gap between the ivory tower and everyone else, when we look beyond buzzwords and university branding that tells us that Concordia is a “community-based university,” we can soon discover all the pre-existing processes that were created in order to protect a privileged few and exclude most others who remain on the margins.

Creative Methods, Research Creation, and Practice-Led Research

And finally, this issue extends into the methods we use, for example creative-driven research method models, such as Research Creation (R-C). Do they practice what they preach? These frameworks presuppose diversity of methods, practices, and theories. But, while R-C is positioned at this threshold between converging cross-sections of approaches, I want to suggest that it is in theory and sometimes practice as opposed to fact that methods such as R-C succeed in fulfilling these claims.I am interested in the gaps. The moving goal posts of barriers. The fuzzy and logistically annoying grey zones.

And within these grey zones, we need mechanisms to investigate how these converging methods draw from rich traditions in community practices. And how nontraditional and more entrenched traditional scholarly modes of knowledge production are integrated into creative disciplines and vice versa. How can converging fields share and understand each other? And how can we negotiate, value, and effectively honour these histories in a respectful way within new types of research?

By drawing on Critical Disability Theory to facilitate an exploration of practice-driven, creatively inclusive research modals, I am interested in efforts that seek to complicate and nuance categories of difference and yet respect them at the same time. How can we genuinely value non-normative / marginal modalities to help render visible Research Creation’s privileged methods, and how are those working within this structure enabled and disabled?  How can we foster a culture of sharing and learning across difference?

Perhaps we need to learn to tease at practices which re-enforce academic metrics that are not allied with a multi-modal mandate? By exploring organizational gate-keeping and maintenance of well-established institutional traditions at work within micro and macro levels of R-C activities, can we dismantle practices that reinforce and maintain the long-standing logics and systems that privilege traditional (thus marginalizing non-traditional) academic exchange? I encourage a questioning of R-C’s claims—of inclusion, of diversity in methods, practices, and theories—in order to highlight the gaps where marginal modes fall through the cracks. More importantly, I am concerned with how those who work within and support the R-C structure can practice what we preach; better foster engagement; build a more laterally distributed and less singular culture across a myriad of changing modalities.

Research Horizons: In Closing…

I’m interested in the practice of deforming. But I suspect that, in order to do this deforming, we would need to listen more. And better understand our mobility and listening assumptions. Call into question what processes leave others behind and, if this is a reproduction of an assimilation for singularity. Or, as Law puts it, “the assumption … that while we may live in multiple social worlds, we live in a single natural or material reality” (5). Deforming in order to reform (Sample). Another simple game of duck duck goose. Or better yet, duck duck grey duck. I’m asking us to think about grey in all of its multiplicity and fuzziness. Grey zones. Less as a category to move through and more of one to live in, creating mechanisms to live within them instead of out of them. Like a tide chart. Where we look to better understand the currents (trends) and forces (privileges) involved.

So, from within our discourse of glitching, of functioning outside the norm, of mess, of deforming — we must not forget to constantly question what are we valuing, and where on the map we’re looking from. And if it is an academic paradigm, normative or not, interrogate processes striving for end points, and instead work towards aligning the values we seek to employ in our projects with the methods we use to actualize them, rather than protecting the grandfathered-in productivity-driven frameworks that reinforce existing power. In ignoring the fuzziness, the mess, the glitches of our own non-normative processes, who are we enabling, who are we listening to, and who’s left behind?

Works Cited

Clare, Eli. Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 2009. Print.

Law, John. “Making a Mess with Method.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2003

Menkman, Rosa. “Glitch Studies Manifesto.” Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. 336-47.

Sample, Mark. “Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities.” Sample Reality May 2, 2012. http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/

Withers, AJ. “The Radical Model.” If I Can’t Dance, Is It Still My Revolution? n.p. n.d. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. http://still.my.revolution.tao.ca/radical

Withers, AJ. Disability Politics & Theory. Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2012. Print.