Week 3: Insider/Outsider?

On Sunday, April 24^th I stopped by the Randolph Street Community Gardens. A handful of people were there, quietly working on their plots. I stopped by the shed to see what Mother Dawn had left on her list of work to be done, smiled and waved at a few of the gardeners who greeted me kindly and carried on working. I spent a while collecting garbage and bringing tools and unneeded fence posts back to the shed, and while I was working I started thinking about the insider-outsider paradigm that is often associated with the study of power dynamic.

I was here as an outsider, observing and participating in an activity that (to whatever extent) has become a part of these people’s day-to-day lives. In a way, I was like the foreigners (or extranjeros) in Lumbisi, who can rent but not own dwellings in Lumbisí. But is the insider/outsider paradigm really a productive way to look at power dynamics?

My answer would have to be that I don’t know… I came to the community gardens with a prerogative- I was hoping to study the gardeners and their interactions. Maybe it was this (and not my outsider status) that isolated me from the main activity at the gardens that day, because the people working in the gardens sure didn’t seem to mind treating me as pleasantly as I’d imagine they treat each other.

The biggest thing I took away from my time spent at the Randolph Street Community Gardens was this: the study of power dynamic must reach deeper than the issue of insider/outsider dynamics. There will always be an in-group and an out-group, but to conduct truly meaningful research, we must go deeper. The divide between foreigners and registered families in Lumbisi seems to be one of the clearest distinguishing features of the population, however we cannot let this be the only dynamic we look at if we hope to conduct truly meaningful research.