Reflections on Eve Tuck’s Open Letter

Eve Tuck’s Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities struck a chord with me.

As a former research coordinator, most of the research projects I worked with were damage-centered. I’ve seen researchers probe the pain of participants while neglecting to probe their joy. I’ve acted as an intermediary between participants who ask, “how will this benefit me?” and researchers who answer, “We hope it will create policy change, and for the impact to trickle down to you”. And nearly every time, I saw researchers leave with their data, and never follow-up with participants.

In addition to these reflections on research, the reading fostered a deep and uncomfortable meditation on how I have used my own traumatic lived experiences as currency in the damage-centered economy of opportunity.

As a young man, I understood the power that my lived experiences had on my capacity to procure opportunity. I grew disturbingly comfortable with performing my victimhood to gatekeepers of opportunity because I knew that, in their minds, my victimhood was proportional to my worthiness of opportunity. This was the norm for years, and as a result, I realized that the only times I thought or spoke about my lived experiences was during these performances to gatekeepers. So, in my early twenties, when opportunities were procured and the dust settled, I finally stopped wielding my lived experience as a tool for survival, and began to think and speak about it sincerely. What I realized is that I hadn’t actually processed any of it, and only then did I begin to heal–which was, in itself, a highly tempestuous process. Healing is a process that takes time, and I felt a sense of dull rage at all the things that kept me from starting this process sooner.

What I am trying to say is that these experiences are a testament to what Eve Tuck is saying. Specifically, damage-centered research, and the assessments of need that stem from it, are not only inconducive to healing and progress, but full of harm.

I am thinking about my research interests differently now, and I’m looking forward to reflecting more on that in my next blog entry.