"She's our spy": power and positionality in studying Lithuanian teacher communities
ENIn 2010, I travelled to Lithuania to undertake dissertation feasibility research on Lithuanian Holocaust education. During this time, I was granted permission to observe the teacher training programs of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation regimes in Lithuania (herein the Commission). The Commission had emerged out of NATO and EU accession guidelines that required more comprehensive Holocaust education in Lithuania before they were able to join western organizations. As the only scholar to ever study Commission educational programs since their inception in 2003, gaining permission was essential to my research design. However, when I started my research the following year, I quickly realized that permission was not the same thing as participation. Though I spoke the language, was married to a Lithuanian, and dutifully passed out my IRB information sheets extolling the significance of teacher participation, gaining access to teaching communities was much harder than originally anticipated. While challenges in rapport building are common in ethnographic inquiries, conducting comprehensive social science research in countries with a history of mass surveillance demands particular sensitivity to community relationships. [...] Cautioned by many that anthropology purists would criticize my direct involvement in Lithuania, I knowingly made the decision to work alongside teachers to promote Holocaust education as part of my research. To be sure, the “boundaries” of my roles as an educational anthropologist were blurred.However, I argue that to produce effective research in post-Soviet states, this blurring of roles should not be seen as an effect of ethnographic research, but an integral part of the research design. Although this may sound like the promotion of Participant Action Research (PAR), a method that often puts community involvement ahead of data collection, this is not a call to see this particular form of research as the singular paradigm for post Soviet studies. Instead, this chapter argues that by shifting positions, one can better interrogate how ascribed roles can influence the use of certain methods in studies of post-socialist educational reforms. To this end, this chapter discusses how the history of Soviet society and post-Soviet reforms challenged me to reconsider the ways in which anthropological research was understood in a post-Soviet educational setting. By situating myself within multiple roles, I was able to view the post-Soviet experience differently and expand my study to include a multi-sited ethnographic account of transnational policy processes. In so doing, western assumptions about the purpose of education, which are rarely examined in post-socialist education research, became an integral part of the study. This approach helped to expand prior research frameworks that viewed educational obstacles in post-socialist settings as representative of local deficiency, rather than productive contestations over cultural values. As a result, this chapter suggests the need to better problematize positionality in post-socialist research. [Extract, p. 15-16].
