The Wire kicks ass. it's one of those shows that's so smart, you can tell yourself you're 'doing research' when plopped in front of the t.v. watching an entire season at a time. and then when season 4 came along and they introduced the storyline of an academic researcher who enters Baltimore's inner city schools with a large grant and intentions of creating a program for at-risk youth, i actually did start thinking about my own research.

Dr. David Parenti is the character who is the researcher and is stereotypically depicted as this naive white scholar who has to hire Colvin - the 'in the know' - black counterpart to help him navigate the halls of the inner city Baltimore school. the Dr. sits in the back of the class taking notes, leaving Colvin to do most of the interacting with these 'at-risk' corner kids. while Colvin is interested in making real change that will affect curriculum and the students, the Dr. is not so bummed out when the program gets cancelled because as he says in the show, 'it will make for good data' to which Colvin laughingly and incredulously replies 'so other people are going to study your study?!'

all this got me thinking about my own role as a researcher with 'youth' (they're only about 5 years younger than me on the average) and their process of making a documentary on the role of hip hop in their lives. i'm not too far off from the youth in terms of background growing up, but once in awhile my position as a representative of an educational institution gets in the way, creating skepticism at times. the youth sometimes call out how i rep McGill university as opposed to Concordia university which is seen more as the people's institution (for anglophones @ least).

i get frustrated because i feel like there is this mistrust of higher education institutions. i guess part of my frustration comes from the fact that if i was in their shoes, i'd probably mistrust myself a little bit too. building community partnerships for research takes work on both sides of the bridge and it's definitely opened my eyes up to the fact that it's not as easy as walking into a community project and asking to taken on board - there's a courting process, an appraisal process, and finally you get the ok to enter the circle, but then it's constant work to ensure you maintain trust so that they know you're on the level and not there to just get out of it some interesting data about some youth. it boggles my mind because a decade ago i would have been down the same path as these youth and because life threw some opportunities at me i'm now sitting at the other end of the table.

you enter these community partnerships because you truly want to help, you really think that your voice as a researcher can help bring these stories to others and also you may be bold enough to think that may be something you've learned in your books can help these projects out in the community. one of the people i work with, a graf artist, was surprised when he told me i wasn't the first from mcgill to approach him to talk about his work doing graffiti around the city. he  never thought that  people  at mcgill were interested  in 'things like that'. i laughed in response bc almost everything i do at mcgill is about 'things like that'. sometimes it's so clear to me that there's this huge gap between who i was and who i am now, between their world in the community and my world at mcgill. to me, the worlds are one and the same, but to some the world of research, dissertations, and transcripts are removed enough to cause some skepticism.

most days i'm pretty solid on why i'm here in this program and why i'm writing my dissertation centred around these youth. but some days there's a little voice (that pisses me off to be honest) questioning if i'm not running the same game as the Dr. in the Wire. I don't want to put out a study just so that other people can study it.  or do i?