Researching to Transgress and Transform

In the face of historical trauma, how can critical consciousness develop? Can radical researcher empathy, its experience and expression, play a transformative role in research encounters? These questions guide reflections on dialogues with residents of Tivoli Gardens, an inner city community in Kingston, Jamaica in which 76 people were killed by the state in May 2010. Three researchers are collaborating to witness survivors’ stories of trauma in order to create a public art installation to memorialize loved ones lost and break historical silences thereby catalyzing conscientization (the process through which social and political realities become understood through critical consciousness, Freire, 1970). Taylor’s (1997) concept of percepticide - as the annihilation of the perception and understanding of atrocities - is proposed to account for ways in which participants, and others, simultaneously know but do not acknowledge the meaning of the violence. Freire’s (1987) idea of liberatory education - as a praxis that critically challenges psychic colonization (Oliver, 2004) - is extended to research practices with emancipatory aims. This chapter also explores the psychological conditions under which people living in death saturated environments begin to perceive the social structures that permit mass murder. It proposes a form of inquiry that transgresses social science research norms by accompanying research participants as they critically analyze the world in which they live. Transgression emerges in the presence of a form of witnessing elaborated upon by Oliver (2001). Based on participant insights it becomes possible to imagine researchers of collective trauma as agents of transformative, liberative and healing praxes.