Dwelling with limits: the work of love in participatory research URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa143566 DOI: 10.11143/fennia.143566 Dwelling with limits: the work of love in participatory research RAINE AIAVA, NOORA PYYRY Aiava, R. & Pyyry, N. (2024) Dwelling with limits: the work of love in participatory research. Fennia 202(2) 272 – 285. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.143566 In this article, we examine some of the theoretical and methodological challenges facing Participatory Action Research (PAR), including the continued challenge of the silence of the subaltern, the re-subjugating power relations in many traditional epistemologies of research production, and the problems of representation. We attempt to address these considerations by looking beyond the relational, outlining the originary call to ethics at the heart of PAR in terms of a commitment to a sustained engagement with that which outstrips relationality, namely the radical alterity of the other. Proposing a rigorous articulation of the concept of translation as a means of meaningfully and ethically thinking with the subaltern, disenfranchised, and at-risk — including young people — in PAR, we unpack Spivak’s articulation of a hesitant love in translation that is marked by a surrendering to the call of the other, and to the work of putting oneself into a position not to ‘speak for’ but to ‘hear from’ the unknowable, and un-preemptable other. Understanding love as a doing that affects, we outline the need to consider ‘action’ in PAR in terms of practice beyond happenings, representations, and method, to acknowledge the movements and shifts in the research encounter that refuse representational knowing. We add to this by outlining the researcher’s ontological indebtedness to this alterity by re-considering our notion of translation in terms of Heidegger’s trans-position, highlighting the ‘rhizovocality’ of the research encounter as fundamentally beyond any notion of authentic voice or settled subjectivities. In highlighting the ontological dependency inherent in the research encounter, we revisit the commitment of PAR as a work of being vulnerable — of putting ourselves into play by dwelling with the foreignness of the other, and in doing so, trans-posing ourselves unto new understanding. Keywords: love, non-relationality, Participation Action Research, subaltern, translation, transposition Raine Aiava (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1562-0723), Noora Pyyry (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-3901), Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Finland. E-mail: joseph.aiava@helsinki.fi, noora.pyyry@helsinki.fi © 2024 by the author. This open access article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.143566 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1562-0723 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-3901 FENNIA 202(2) (2024) Raine Aiava & Noora Pyyry 273 Introduction: on the condition of speaking — from speaking for to hearing from “For a man, choosing to do civil service is like cutting off your balls, socially.” (Otto, age 15) He laughed as he spoke. It was a joke, of course; Or the punctuating idiom was, at least. But the point – about the pressure that young men in Finland face to satisfy the state’s mandatory conscription duties through military enlistment instead of opting for the civil service route — seemed sincere. And despite the affectual jest, I found myself in a mild state of shock, searching the 15-year-old’s face for some sense of sardonic irony — some self-aware mockery. Military service was, after all, simply not an option for him — something that a life-long condition affecting his mobility had surely prepared him for. Just earlier, he had shared that this meeting was taking place on the eve of a major operation on his legs. But there was no derision in his manner, no cynicism or rancor as the conversation shifted, as if by course, from discussions on the landscapes of contemporary film in Finland, which marked the topic of our co-researching, to Finnish masculine duty. And, it was in the face of this charged encounter, manifesting beneath the weight and uncertainty of a long road to recovery, indeed in the face of the unfathomability of these statements — was it a psychological disavowal?; a self-effacing performance of masculinity in a militarized society?; or merely the articulations of a representative, taken up for my benefit alone, rather than a self-reflective position? – that all preparation flew. What is ethical participatory research practice? When each research encounter is burgeoning with the unexpected summons to that which cannot be anticipated, how are researchers to ensure that they remain sensitive, open, and attentive to calls from the field? In the face of growing pressures — from states, institutions, funding bodies, publishers — to produce new and distinctly ‘useful’ knowledges, how do participatory researchers navigate encounters that refuse such prerogatives? Or, as in the situation described above, where dwelling with a young participant means attending to conflicts and tensions far removed from the predetermined ‘questions’ of the research project, how do researchers cultivate a practice that preserves participants dignity, acknowledges their existing ways of participating (e.g. Kallio & Häkli 2011), honors their private spaces and personal stories, and “walk[s] with them in collaborative enquiry, listening to what they want to speak about” (Gross et al. 2023, 159)? That is, how do we orientate towards a practice that aims not to speak for (co)participants, but hear from them? These are not simple questions to answer for any individual conducting participatory research and are only complicated when considering institutional responsibilities. This is something Skelton (2008) troubles in her seminal paper, Research with children and young people: exploring the tensions between ethics, competence and participation, where she reminds us that often the very ethical frameworks that should guard young people’s rights turn to work against their participation. It is, of course, laudable to safeguard vulnerable peoples from exploitation, subjugation, and the power dynamics of researchers aiming to make them an object of their research but, in some cases, strict adherence to pre-conceived outlines of ethical procedures may have adverse effects on ethical engagements and the research conducted (Skelton 2007). Skelton (2008) gives poignant examples of research with certain vulnerable groups that would be rendered unethical, or even outright forbidden, by the guidelines of ethics committees — for example, requiring permission from parental figures of gay or queer youth may have the unintended consequence of outing these youth to spaces that are unsafe for them precisely on account of their being gay, lesbian, or queer. Gross, Mashreghi and Söderman (2023), in their article Refusal — opening otherwise forms of research, follow similar concerns regarding research with historically marginalized populations, challenging the concept of ‘discovery’ and the rights of knowing granted to the Western academy by asking not only how to write about or publicly discuss certain findings but whether a refusal to do so — a form of epistemic disobedience (see also Mignolo 2009) — can open space for researchers to focus on creating communities of relationality, reciprocity, and care with (co)participants that unsettle colonial undertones of discovery. This is to say that life, in its messiness, eschews attempts to structure ethical engagement. Rather, it must be recognized that these tension spaces are the origin of ethics. To pre-empt them is, in many ways, to foreclose on calls to being ethical: it prevents all hearing by attempting to write them out in advance. We reflect with our vignette that no amount of planning or committee oversights could pre-empt this encounter, and that FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Research paper274 indeed, as we will see later, the scripting of the research proposal along with the researcher’s concern for representable findings would ultimately prevent them from rising to meet this sudden call to engage with this young person’s struggles within this spatial-temporal situation (see Brinkmann 2014; Millei & Rautio 2017). As the vignette suggests, ethical considerations in participatory research often necessitate attending to surprising situations through improvisation (Pyyry 2015). So, while the happening re-presented in the vignette above — unfolding between two teenage boys and one of the researchers during a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project that looked at how young people in Finland participate in extended landscapes through global cinema — may, at first glance, mark a rather reasonable and playful invocation of the pressures of Finnish masculinity on young men, a sensitivity to the situated complexity of relations and shifting positions (for instance, the age and relationship between these two young men, one of whom was disabled, and the evolving atmosphere among the larger, mixed gendered group of participants) greatly added to the ethical demands of this situation, as it does for any practice in participatory fieldwork (e.g., Horton & Kraftl 2006b). Towards this end, the recent growth in PAR with young people (e.g., Trell & van Hoven 2010; Valli 2021) can be viewed as a welcome development. While participation is often used indiscriminately to refer to a wide variety of practices (Cahill & Hart 2006; Cahill 2007b; Jacobs 2018), PAR commits to meaningful engagement and hands- on collaboration with those groups whose lives are being studied by emphasizing the process of working together to spark change in the lives of participating individuals and the society around them (Cahill 2007a). Through critically probing the prevailing conditions, PAR participants are collaboratively guided toward what Freire (1968/2011) termed ‘critical consciousness’, where the ‘researched’ people are enlisted as ‘co-researchers’ in a process that is flexible and open to input and changes in plans. By foregrounding the vector of ethical research not in guidelines, institutions, or oversight committees — which often do not involve the perspective of young people, let alone social sciences’ perspective (see Morrow 2008; Powell et al. 2020) — but in probing the prevailing conditions of participants lives, PAR aims to raise the critical consciousness of oppressed minorities, the disenfranchised, and the subaltern through participation. Here, we take the subaltern to also apply to young people and children, who are often locked out of prevailing power structures which govern their daily lives, representations, voice, or even mobility. However, despite the important work in developing participatory research practices and projects aimed at acknowledging and fostering young people’s agency in matters affecting them (e.g., Gallagher 2004; Trell & van Hoven 2010; Mathisen & Cele 2020), participatory research has also been criticized for putting too much weight on individual agency (Thomson 2007; Pyyry 2015; Wakeford & Rodriguez 2018), and thus unwittingly contributing to sustaining hegemonic structures by underestimating political forces, affectual attachments, and structures of power (Worsham 2001; Zembylas 2018a; Kocsis 2024). Indeed, even as practices for co-researching are becoming increasingly popular (Clark- Ibáñez 2007; Kolb 2008), Cahill (2007a) reminds us that we must remain wary of approaching ‘participation’ as a method since participation can often mask tokenism, and the illusion of consultation can ultimately work to advance dominant interests, mutating to governing tools that keep ‘people in their place’ (Hart 1997; Mohan 2001; Thomson 2007; Jacobs 2018). At root here is the problem of representation and the way these discourses nevertheless participate in a system, academic and otherwise, that concerns itself with knowledge production in terms of representational evidence of the participants’ lives’ (Thrift 2019). This kind of re-investment in a tradition of representation as knowing — where only that which is visible matters, and only that which matter is made visible — can reproduce rather than challenge unequal power relations (Cooke & Kothari 2001; Kesby 2005; Smith et al. 2021). Foregrounding participants as agential co-researchers, and even understanding the research agenda itself as guiding participants to critical consciousness (Freire 1968/2011), does not sufficiently remove it from representational practices (Zembylas 2018a; Ramírez-March & Montenegro 2021), as it is often structured by the professional researcher’s guiding questions, methods, in situ interpretations, and expected results, and is further informed by commitments to the re-presentation of research ‘results’ as epistemologically useful to funding bodies, publications, and research institutions (Kindon et al. 2009). Thus, beyond the constraining armature of institutional practices, which may foreclose genuine collaboration with the individuals whose lives are being studied, a re- FENNIA 202(2) (2024) Raine Aiava & Noora Pyyry 275 investment in the traditional epistemologies of representation and prepositional knowledge may also preempt and malign participatory encounters in advance (Nutton et al. 2019). This follows Spivak’s famous formulation of the ‘subaltern’ in the discourse of the West. For Spivak (1988), intellectuals function as agents of a system of representation that dialectically reproduces the subaltern by reproducing the same power relations they seek to dismantle and thereby eventually silencing the subaltern once again. Indeed, Spivak’s polemical assertion that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ is a report on the condition of the intellectual (Cherniavsky 2011; Lloyd 2014). Her interests lie in exposing the violence by which the subaltern’s silence is enforced by hegemonic forces, including the tools of representation, of which academia and scientific discourse is a foundational source, arguing for the incommensurability between the terms of the investigator’s analytics and the subaltern as the ‘object’ of investigation (Spivak 1988; Zembylas 2018b). This condition of the intellectual is explored more recently by Rose (2016), who, building on previous arguments of the (im)possibility of representing the other (Said 1979; Derrida 1982/2007; Spivak 1996), argues that representational imperatives in research are haunted by the condition of correspondence, which often pre-figures (and re-figures) the other such that they become the means by which the structure of the world is re- affirmed, and its order re-instated. This is an indictment that, following the post-structuralist and postcolonial ‘turns’, PAR researchers have themselves continually sought to theorize and account for (e.g. Skelton 2001; Pain & Francis 2004; Kindon et al. 2009; Askins 2018). These critiques acknowledge that rather than empowering or facilitating the challenge to the power dynamics within which participants find themselves, participatory approaches may risk reinforcing existing hierarchical power relations through, for instance, the production of participants as subjects ‘requiring’ research/development, the retention of researchers’ control and position while presenting them as benevolent arbiters of ‘neutral’ processes, or the romanticization of local knowledge as produced by participatory processes (Cahill 2007a; Denscombe 2024). Or, as already outlined, by shoe-horning participatory research projects into pre-existing models governing the ethical dimension of scientific inquiries that treat ethics as a universal checklist rather than always already context-dependent and relationally constructed. Indeed, it is a question that lies at the very heart of PAR: if the key consideration of participatory research should be the making of space for new ways of knowing-with, through encounters that cannot easily be situated, anticipated, or intended, how do we avoid re-presenting, and thus re-subjugating, the participants in PAR? Is it true that, as de Jong and Mascat (2016, 720) point out, “there is no way to escape the fate of ‘ventriloquizing’ and speaking for the subalterns while attempting to represent/relocate or simply address them”? Can PAR facilitate a fundamental turn from the trappings of representation? And, if so, how do we orientate such a practice? This paper aims to add to this already robust discourse by reconceptualizing the geographies of the participatory research encounter beyond representation, as a doing (action) and undergoing that orientates and affects research encounters. Following Cahill’s warning that tokenism and mis- representation in participatory research may be especially attendant “where participation is presented as a set of techniques rather than as a political commitment” (2007a, 299; emphasis added), this paper looks to unpack the orientation that underpins such a commitment by turning to Spivak’s articulation of translation as a labor of love. We argue that the originary call to ethics at the heart of PAR is put into play by a certain relation to the radical alterity of the other, which Spivak calls love, and that this love must be understood in terms of action. Here, action too is re-evaluated beyond representations: rather than treating action as certain doings that are always subjected to and by representational logics, we unpack love as an undergoing that is also a doing — that is, as a commitment to re- orientation, and a reaching that affects. We go on to outline the researcher’s ontological indebtedness to this other by re-considering our notion of translation in terms of Heidegger’s trans-position, highlighting the ‘rhizovocality’ (Jackson 2014) of the research encounter as fundamentally beyond any notion of authentic voice or settled subjectivities. Our aim here is to reaffirm PAR’s feminist and radical spirit, outlining an ethics of care (e.g., Valli 2021) and commitment to others that enables the (always) partial translation of knowledges among power-differentiated communities beyond representations. We conclude by reaffirming the unstable and transgressive world-building forces in participatory FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Research paper276 research encounters, and call for researchers to dwell in the vulnerability that they put into play by reconfiguring the role of research and embracing a methodological slowness (Horton & Kraftl 2006a). Encountering limits: the non-relationality of the other in translation “I must speak in a language that is not my own because that will be more just…” (Derrida 1992, 4) In the following, we attempt to think the ‘action’ in PAR through the lens of translation, aiming to theorize the ethical horizons of a participatory research beyond representation. In this way, we seek to distance ourselves from (re)conceiving the other in terms of knowledge, foregrounding instead the happenstance that shapes the research encounter as an ethical call to attend to that which is fundamentally non-relational, namely the radical alterity of the other — as that which cannot be taken into relation, cannot be taken account of, intended, or rendered but nevertheless sets in motion the relational (Harrison 2007). Thus, with our vignette, the aim is not to represent any specific somethings, but to dwell with and foreground the burgeoning geographical encounter as a summons. To do this, we begin by aligning ourselves with post-structuralist and decolonialist theories that disrupt traditional research prerogatives by reminding the Western scholar that not only must they be aware of the inability to know the other but that the relation between the writer and her object — the condition of the researcher — is necessarily unequal: that the “academic is unavoidably situated in a relation of ontological dependence” (Rose 2016, 143). In his 2007 article, ‘Can the subaltern be heard?’: Political theory, translation, representation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Maggio proposes that a possible solution to the Spivakian puzzle of representation and its epistemological and ontological implications is the notion of ‘translation’, understood in the broadest sense (see also Zembylas 2018b). Maggio (2007, 434) argues that while we must remain aware of the fundamental inaccessibility of the other, this inaccessibility could be overcome by an attempt “to ‘translate’ the other, rather than seeking an imaginary ‘knowledge’”. Here, translation is marked less by a desire to ‘know’ than to ‘understand’. It is, according to Benjamin, a “coming to terms with” the foreignness in communication, where one cannot signify the ‘original’, rather only ever echo it (1968, 75). The key here is that in translation, one is always keenly aware that they are not offering a work that is equivalent with the ‘original’ — that one is ‘translating’ without an ability to accurately signify the other. The aim of translation certainly remains to capture and convey something of the original, but, crucially, it is not trying to ‘represent’ the original. Spivak agrees with Benjamin, that translation is not a sign but a mark, a shadow that could never signify the original (Spivak 2005). In her essay The politics of translation (1993), she opens the rhetoricity of language to emphasize how every act of communication is a risky fraying which somehow scrambles together yet contains the always present menace that something might simply not be meaningful — something covered over, patched together and contained by the rhetorical system of language. Her focus on rhetoric — as pointing to the “possibility of randomness, of contingency as such, dissemination, the falling apart of language, the possibility that things might not always be semiotically organized” (ibid., 187) — reminds us that translation cannot merely be a matter of synonym, syntax, and local color but takes a different kind of effort: attentive translation, according to Spivak, emerges from an act of surrender. It is an act of ‘love’ in which the translator yields to the site of the encounter in pursuit of the rhetorical edge of language. It involves soliciting communication to show the limits of its language — the silence of the absolute fraying of language that it attempts, in its peculiar manner, to overcome or embrace (ibid, 183). In this way, the hesitant love of the translator attends to the space beyond the empire of the meaning-ful, “so that we do not misread the stories we claim to be telling” (Zhang 2022, 102). It is important to recognize that the hesitant love being mobilized here, the love in participatory research, is not a love of connection, communion, or fusion, but rather rooted in the impossibility of these things (see Derrida 2007). It is a love anchored in a certain exposure to the radical alterity of the other (Wylie 2009), a recognition that the other, in their otherness, resists being drawn into and subsumed by relation even as it is incessantly proximal to the relational (Harrison 2007). Love here FENNIA 202(2) (2024) Raine Aiava & Noora Pyyry 277 then describes an originary wounding that, far from signifying a coming to ‘know’ the other, entails a constitutive limit: an irrevocable distance, separation, or rupture. But more than merely signifying the unbridgeable distance between us, here love must be understood in terms of action — Spivack’s (1993) act of surrender. It entails a certain comportment towards the impossibility of knowing: a being-held-towards-another. Love is a relation to non-relationality (e.g. Harrison 2007). In the face of failure, love nevertheless entails reaching: A holding-oneself-towards that which cannot be taken account of. Not merely an exposure to the radical other, but an openness to that exposure. Translation foregrounds exposure. It is premised on the idea of discriminating on the basis of the speaker rather than the terms set by one’s own language, history, and idioms. Thus, Spivak (1993) argues that the work of translation lies in preparation. The work of love in the surrender of translation, then, is the preparations of “becoming intimate with the sphere of the other”, of attuning not just to the language, but also the silence of the speaker, to their presuppositions (Zhang 2022, 9). It is to dwell with the other — with “the histories of their language, the history of their moment, the history of the language-in-and-as-translation (Spivak 1993, 186). Thus, Spivak’s translator requires an abiding disposition “toward the (im)possible effort of moving toward the imagination of the ‘quite other,’ or radical forms of alterity whose contours cannot be yet fully known’” (Jazeel 2014, 94). This means that the work of love in translation is a dwelling-with the non-relationality of the other who outstrips me, as a constitutive limit. This dwelling-with is risky because it allows the other to genuinely affect us. It is abiding the impossibility of knowing yet working to prepare oneself such that one may ‘hear from’ the other. This includes, according to Devadas and Nicholls (2002), declaring the subaltern silent — which is the initial stride toward an ‘unsilencing’ of the subaltern. The emphasis, in translation, on the rhetoricity of language — of those many elements beyond strict language-in-thought that allow us to make sense of things, for instance, gestures, pauses, ticks, and affectual bursts — that subverts the transferability of content across bodies of meaning and permits fraying, “holds the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay” (Spivak 1993, 181). Bearing in mind this relation towards the (im)possibility in translation — as one of surrender to the call of the other, of dwelling-with their presuppositions, and preparing in advance so as to be able to hear from them — that characterizes the work of translation, Maggio (2007) has proposed applying this broadened understanding to the articulation of qualitative research practices that work to ‘translate’ the culture of the subaltern. This means, while foregrounding understanding, empathy, and patience over ‘knowing’, signifying, or representing, translating the: constant process of producing meanings of and from the subaltern experience — a process inherently political, because it is involved in the (re)distribution of various forms of social power (Zembylas 2018b, 119). This also echoes recent theorizations of the role of empathy within ethnographic research, where, for instance, Pedwell (2014), similarly outlines empathy in terms of translation, as involving: multiple and ongoing processes of linguistic, cultural, temporal, affective negotiation, attunement and blurring which… are engaged in the imaginative production of new affective languages, rhythms and relations (132). Understanding translation as “moving between and across textual, cultural and affective assemblages” (ibid., 147), she argues that empathy as translation — like Spivak’s hesitant love — works less to achieve an accurate or faithful affective equivalence between the privileged empathizer and the less privileged empathized, “than it does to revise, redirect, or create openings for different ways of affecting and being affected to emerge, and for a sense of affective solidarity to take shape” (Zembylas 2018a, 414). This means committing to displacing, fundamentally, traditional models of ‘speaking for’ or ‘giving voice’ by utilizing experience “not to reveal meanings with essential truths but to expose ideological contradictions” (Jackson 2014, 706). It is a commitment that is similarly outlined by Haraway’s figuration of a feminist approach for qualitative researchers, where feminist interviewers strike up “non-innocent conversations” in which they “give up mastery but keep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while that [they] will be hoodwinked” (1991, 593–594). The imperative here is the implementation of research practices that are “attentive to the multiple and complex configurations of subalternity without being deceived that there are any essentialist features of the subaltern” FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Research paper278 (Zembylas 2018b, 119) — of listening for texture and subtlety within the reticent, unstable, excessive, transgressive, and irruptive in the research encounter. Reconceptualizing ‘action’ within PAR in non- representational terms means attuning to the atmospheric, affectual, and processual movements that escape categorization and characterization but nevertheless work to affect and change the geographies of the research encounter. This means cultivating a practice that works to move “away from the trigger-happy itch to quickly analyse, distill, generalise and categorise, and just slow down, to wait and see what happens” (Horton & Kraftl 2006a, 274). If the aim of participatory action research is to substantiate an epistemological shift in how we do research — in not only what counts as knowledge but what work the production of knowledge is being put towards — as well as in how we relate to our participants, then it is not merely enough to employ the cyclical process of action and reflection (Kindon et al. 2009) with participants enlisted as co- researchers. These practices need to be couched in a theoretical approach that remains sensitive to the rhetoricity of language, that concerns itself with ‘hearing from’ the productive edges of language, the affectual gestures of tension-spaces and the silences that shirk any linguistic affordances. Thinking PAR through translation is a means of researching-with the Spivakian puzzle — of bearing its conditioning limits onward into our research as a necessary impossibility. Commitment to this orientation, this focus on the “relative dimensions and intensities of the spoken and the unspoken” (Maggio 2007, 433), can better equip PAR researchers to maintain the self-reflexive appreciation of the necessarily situated, limited, improvable, contestable, and in-process perspective that marks its theoretical framework and which is required to avoid reproducing the very inequalities they seek to challenge (Facca & Kinsella 2021). Let us return, for the moment, to the anecdote that opened this paper, and the surprising fervor with which our young participant seemed to endorse the harsh judgement of men who fail to offer military commitment to their country. There were, of course, likely a great many factors that contributed to my stunned response to this encounter. Being an American male emigrant, my relationship to both the military and patriotism (even the invocation of this term seems likely to evidence something of our differing perspectives) is nothing short of antagonistic. Indeed, a life of poverty, along with my status as a minority, has borne witness to the funneling of many of my family and friends into military enlistment, which has too often been seen as the only available means of upward mobility or quality of life improvement. But then too, there is my position as ‘able-bodied’, and my awareness of the potential implications of the coming surgery for this young man’s mobility — both of which inevitably affected my reception of the statement. Whatever the reasons, this encounter threw me off balance. It failed to settle into any ready-made interpretive routes or courses of action. Rather, it just hung there, suspended, before me, as if waiting, asking. And as I reflect now on this moment of hesitation, I find my thoughts turning to Spivak’s (1993, 193–94) provocative question regarding the change of mother-tongue power-knowledge between an immigrant mother and daughter: “when the daughter talks reproductive rights and the mother talks protecting honor, is this the birth or death of translation?”. What I felt, in that moment, was no less an issue of translation. Not of language perhaps, but of the silences between: of our worlds apart, and of the work that was being demanded of me. Not by a previously mapped out research design, and certainly not by established institutional ethics standards, but by the encounter itself: a call to surrender, to prepare, to dwell-with. It is a summons that has only grown louder, and more insistent as the moment, now passed, has taken on the hue of regret: Unsure how and whether to press the issue and anxious to satisfy increasing academic pressures to produce useful and actionable knowledges, I was all too willing, in that moment, to steer the conversation back to the ‘subject’ of our research proper, namely, a pallid discussion of movie-going. FENNIA 202(2) (2024) Raine Aiava & Noora Pyyry 279 Translation as trans-posing: becoming by way of the other “Let’s face it. We are undone by each other.” (Butler 2006, 23) When, in a research encounter, does the weight of ‘research’ become overbearing? If I am to attend to the call of this moment — to allow the rushed, too-loud speech and flushed cheeks to mingle with the silent and downcast gaze of a nearby companion; to sense the affectual forces that press against critical reflexes; to follow performative utterances and irrupting threads — then how I must quiet the roar of my research agenda! And in so doing, put myself into play. For Spivak, the call to surrender in translation is not about transforming the text or communication into something legible to an imagined reader or interested institution, but to transform oneself in the approach. The translator must be able to “discriminate on the terrain of the original” (Spivak 1993, 197; see also Chambers 1997). This means not only preparing such that one can begin to ‘hear from’ the other, but also attending to the staging of language as the production site of agency. Spivak’s concern then is not language alone, but rather the spatialized transgressing “where the self loses its boundaries” (Spivak 1993, 180). This is, as Rose (2016) reminds us, the very source of anthropological thought. Reflective subjectivity is constituted through our engagement with others and, he suggests, the stories they tell. His claim is that “the happenstance that shapes the ethnographic encounter is its greatest asset” (ibid., 133): that thinking emerges from the crashing encounter of different, precarious ontological systems. It is “from the wreckage of our engagements with difference” that becoming-otherwise through thought is initiated (ibid., 138). This means that our thinking is derived from others, and, importantly, the other is the means by which we think. Others give us not simply the right but the ontological aptitude to speak. Though, importantly, when speaking of the other, of voice and subjectivity, it remains paramount to unsettle any tendency towards homogeneity or binary constructions of vocality (Facca & Kinsella 2021). Rather, we must remember that in their becoming, vocalizations are not reaching for a more full, complete coherent status but are, in their multiplicity and contingency, in a process of becoming as they interlink, intensify, and deterritorizalize. Thus, we highlight the rhizovocality of the research encounter as: the irruptive, disruptive, yet interconnected nature of positioned voices (including the researcher’s) that are discursively formed and that are historically and socially determined – irrupting from discursive pressures within/against/outside the research process (Jackson 2014, 707; emphasis original). This recognition of the porous and hybrid subjectivities that emerge from our encounters with others is thematized in various human geographers’ work as well as important feminist texts (e.g., Rose 1993; Nagar & Ali 2003; Bondi 2003, 2007; Gibson-Graham 2006; Pratt 2010; Nagar 2013; Askins 2018). Butler (2006), for instance, famously stresses both the importance and limitations of relationality and the ways we are both undone by our relations to others, but also how we are done, remade by others. This risky exposure is similarly placed at the core of theories of empathy, where empathic understanding is conceived of as always hazardous because it involves being open and thus susceptible to others, making us aware of our vulnerabilities and limits (Pedwell 2014). In this section we turn to Heidegger’s distinct interpretation of the translational act to further explicate the originary call of this co- emergence, highlighting the spatiality within his articulation as particularly suited to reconceptualizing the geographies of the participatory research encounter as well as the register at which we might reconceptualize the action within PAR. For Heidegger, as for Spivak, translation is not a matter of greater approximation of content exchange between words or across languages. Such an act could only ever conceal the different worlds informed by and informing the speech-acts themselves (Heidegger 1973; Rose 2012). Indeed, Heidegger argues for a more spatial consideration of the translational act. For him, the trans- (über-) in translate suggests a movement, a crossing over. Thus, to translate (Übersetzung) is to trans-pose — to traverse, from one point to another (Minca 2014). It is the journey between two spaces or fields (Heidegger 1992, 16). In this way, the act of translating amounts to moving the reader from one field or zone of experience to another, from my own to an altogether other, more strange field of experience — a “setting-over onto the shore of the other” (Ireland 2011, 259). While this examination of translation FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Research paper280 is taken up in his later work, especially in his famous, and unusual, translation of the Greek word aletheia as ‘unconcealment’ instead of the more generally accepted translation ‘truth’ (Heidegger 2002), this notion of trans-position is already visible in Being and Time (1962), where das man ‘understands’ by way of projecting himself over to a certain field or clearing. For Heidegger, this trans- position in understanding is fundamental: we only understand when the things that are to be understood have already trans-posed themselves to another truth, clarity or even obscurity (Heidegger 1992, 18). It is, as Rose (2016) reminds us, only when we approach language as an opening to the other, only when we acknowledge the other’s call as imminent to the very act of thinking itself, that we accept that the thoughts we speak and the words with which we speak them do not originate from within, but constitute a response. That the multiplicity of the ‘own’ and the other(s)’ field or horizon is constituent of every act of thinking, understanding, or learning (Minca 2014). Accordingly, it is our exposure to the other that allows us to speak — there is no voice before this exposure. Indeed, according to Heidegger, “Man is always on the way to the ‘other’ and only through such a journey does man have access to that what he or she calls ‘self’, or ‘own’” (Minca 2014, 170). Thus, he stresses the temporal-spatial movement involved in translation as the journey by which the ‘own’ and the ‘other’ begin to emerge as differentiating parts, intimately connected (Heidegger 1992). For Heidegger, true translation is not correspondence, but “the enabling of a foreign entity by letting it be born in my own element” (Minca 2014, 173, emphasis in original). By this process, I get constituted as a ‘field’ that can let the foreign be foreign. In translation as trans-position, the ‘other’ becomes mine own ‘other’, engendering a sense of ‘ownness’ from the abyss of non-relationality (Ireland 2011, 267). Though we must pause here to recall and reassert the “necessary impossibility” of translation (Spivak 2005, 105), and reaffirm Spivak’s emphasis on the rhetoricity of language, since it is precisely in the failure to mean equivocally that trans-position emerges: “the inclination to recognize and name ourself as an ‘I’,” Rose (2021, 275) tells us, “is founded in responding to the silence that settles (that must settle) between us”. It is through this dimension of translation — translation as trans-position — that we can be said to become-with our research, or even to approach any sense of understanding (recalling that, through the hesitant love of surrendering, this understanding must remain beyond the trappings of merely ‘knowing’). In the rhizomatic voices put into play by the research process, collaboration unfolds (Facca & Kinsella 2021). However, this collaboration is always one of irremediable inequality, regardless of the strategies that the PAR researcher might employ towards their mitigation. This inequality reflects the ontological dependence of the researcher, hinted at in the intro. It precedes relations of power because we rely on the other, as Rose reminds us: “it is not simply our capacity for authorship that is held in their hands, but our capacity to be a subject” (Rose 2016, 143). What we must recognize, as participatory researchers, is that in the very ambition to give voice to the other, there is a movement of self-realization — an establishment of oneself as the voice that gives. And in the (too commonplace) transfiguration of the other from someone that gives to someone that needs (representation, voice, intervention, etc.), we risk losing sight of how the capacity to be responsible is itself given by others. Although we might be acutely aware of our obligation to young people, for instance, we run the risk of conceiving that obligation in relation to our own capacities (our ability to engage, reflect, empower, and choose) as adult researchers, rather than in relation to our vulnerability (our reliance on others and the stories they tell) (ibid.). Thus, we work, not to give voice to — that is, not to re-present the units of voice — but to sense-with the rich texture of vocality and the dimensions of voice including the non- innocence of our own vocalizations (Jackson 2014, 706). Returning once again to our vignette, and to the rhizomatic vocalities of that encounter — to absences and presencings, to the affect and atmospheres, to the flights and advenings, the rhetoricity, the representations — that are remaindered by the narrativization of this event, we cannot help but wonder: to what degree are we subsuming this encounter to our analytic framework, and putting it to work for us? The thought can be crippling. Especially when working with the subaltern. But, as Jackson (2014, 706) reminds us in her defense of the rhizomatic proliferation of partial voices: “recognizing failure from the start is not paralysis”. So then, let us start with failure! Because without risking ourselves, there will be no space for dwelling with others. Let us then foreground the impossibility of ‘giving an account of’, move it to the front, and open research to sensing-with (Pyyry 2015) those FENNIA 202(2) (2024) Raine Aiava & Noora Pyyry 281 “encounters, events, and happenstance that allowed a certain trajectory of thought to transpire” (Rose 2016, 138). I have revisited this encounter often. So often, in fact, that I can no longer be sure about the way it unfolded or my thoughts at the time. I can only know that I am haunted by it. And that, in the unexpectedness of the situation — of the candor with which these young people took up the imposing realities of a looming war (Russia had just invaded Ukraine a few months prior), of the manifest silence of the disability issue — I felt lost. I felt implicated. I felt heavy in my role as researcher, and as adult — suddenly vulnerable in this break. I didn’t know how to reply, how to engage, how to follow the thread or sit with the lines of power, identity, and responsibility brought forward. Too quickly the conversation returned to smoother trajectories and pre-considered routes — to the safety of familiar research-power relations. But the encounter, and my failure to dwell with it, has stuck with me, has continued to poke and prod and beset me: a summons to attend to the field of the other, to dwell in vulnerability, to be put into play by failure, and the messiness of research encounters. A call to do better. Conclusion: being-held towards the non-relational In this article, we have attempted to re-articulate an ethos for PAR beyond the trappings of representation and knowledge production that often ends up reproducing the inequalities and hierarchies it seeks to challenge. Acknowledging the important work put into developing participatory methods — such as participatory dissemination (Valli 2021), collaborative political activism (Pain 2003; Pratt & Kirby 2015), or solidarity action research (Chatterton et al. 2007) — that highlight the relations of power put into play by research conducted with vulnerable peoples and aims to answer this call by gearing research outputs toward influencing social change together with their collaborators, we outline, by dwelling with our own failures, how a re-configuration of research in terms of a theory of translation can help geographers sustain an ethics of engagement that foregrounds the radical alterity of the subaltern without re-subjugating it through processes of representation. As adult researchers, we often discuss our responsibility in conducting fieldwork with young people, or the disenfranchised and underrepresented, but put less emphasis on our own vulnerability and the need to risk ourselves in the encounters. Here, translation can be understood in terms of this vulnerability: It has been doubly articulated as a surrender to the call of the other that remains beyond relationality — as the radical alterity that cannot be taken into relation, intended, or situated — and a trans-posing that enables the foreignness of the other by letting it be born in my own element and in doing so re- constituting myself in new understanding. In this way, this work has been about practice (action) instead of method. Through translation, we unpack the political commitment of PAR, situating an engagement with the encounter that looks beyond language-in-thought to the rhetoricity of language, where the subaltern shirks the language that is not their own through gestures, silences, gasps, and affectual enunciations. It is in the silences which speak that make present the unknown world of the inextricable other, imposing on us, and obliging us. To hear such fissures means cultivating a practice that slows down and commits to dwelling with the other in what Spivak calls an act of ‘love’ — where the researcher yields to the call of alterity, trans-posing oneself into the field of the other. Treating love as a doing, as an act-ion and practice defined in terms of a relation to the non-relational — that is, a comportment to the alterity of the other that refuses — allows us to meaningfully re-conceptualize the ethical stakes of PAR not just in terms of relations but also non-relations, as that which cannot be captured, pointed to, but nevertheless affects us. The nature of this comportment, this yielding to the scene of the encounter, is a being-held towards; a dwelling-with the impossibility of knowing the other and yet a commitment to the unending work that would make hearing from them possible, regardless of reciprocity or correspondence. One cannot compose the other, cannot intend them or write them completely, and we are constituted in this impossibility. Here, love is the dwelling-with this impossibility through the work of preparation, through attending to the responsibility of staying with the trouble (Haraway 2016), of reaching for that which must remain out of reach. Love as Action in PAR. It is: FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Research paper282 to be haunted and to write from that location, to take on the condition of what you study. [It] is not a methodology or a consciousness that you can simply adopt or adapt as a set or rule or an identity; it produces its own insights and blindnesses. Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located (Gordon 1997, 22). Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the young co-researchers whose contributions inspired this work and whose generosity continues to affect and challenge us. We’d also like to thank the two reviewers and dedicated editor for their helpful comments and insightful criticisms. 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