The following is an excerpt of a reflection essay that Rachel Mehl wrote about her work on the Migrant Mothers Project. From October 2011 to May 2012, Rachel supported the MMP as a Community Outreach Coordinator and Research Assistant, while completing her M.Ed in Adult Education and Community Development at OISE, University of Toronto. Rachel recently moved to New York City, where she will be teaching in the NY City Public Schools District and working on her MA in TESOL at Hunter College.
I started working for the Migrant Mothers Project (MMP) in September of 2011 as the Community Outreach Coordinator. I spent my first weeks with the project learning about the project’s history and goals. I noticed that the MMP sought to straddle multiple spheres of actors and actions in the realm of Anti Violence Against Women (AVAW) work and migrant justice / settlement work. These spheres of actors and actions usually overlap and intersect, but also often contradict one another. For example, individuals involved in some way with the MMP included women who were leftist activists, community organizers, service providers in the settlement sector and AVAW sector, and academics. While many of these actors might not agree on the root problems or the best tactics or strategies, the MMP sought to maneuver around or diminish barriers to using its research to facilitate dialogue and reflection among them. An example of using MMP research to facilitate dialogue is the Solidarity Group and the community dinner, both discussed below.
Although I had some prior experience conducting, transcribing, and coding on academic research projects, my experience with the MMP provided me with my first experience of a good chunk of the entire process of a large research project. I gained invaluable insight into the process of the ethics review, recruitment of participants, collaboration with multiple actors, informed consent, conducting interviews, literature review, transcription and translation, sharing research resources with marginalized individuals, and managing funding restrictions while planning a multi-tiered long term project while engaging in reflective practice. One overall challenge for me was balancing my background in community organizing and activism, in which my own politics of resistance play an explicit part, with community outreach and conducting interviews with research participants, in which my role is to facilitate nonjudgmental and open-ended space for any and all stories, experiences, opinions, and insights expressed. However, the skills involved actually overlap nicely. I think as an organizer, my goals are largely similar – to facilitate space for stories, theorizing from experience, analysis, and recommendations from directly affected people.
Reflecting on the relationship between justice work and academic research, I feel lucky to have participated in an academic research project with such a clear vision of justice and accountability to the community being researched. Although this doesn’t mean that we performed that vision of justice and accountability successfully 100% of the time, I feel that we kept it in mind and intentionally reflected on it as a team, being willing to make changes when necessary. I am grateful for that as well.
~ Rachel Mehl