S2: Ep1: Research Methods & Institutional Ethnography

This episode introduces the second season of Radium and Roses and explains the new direction that podcast will be taking for this season. Season 2 will revolve around the process of researching the subject matter of Radium and Roses. This episode contains details about the research methodology of "Institutional Ethnography," an alternative approach to sociological research. In this episode, I speak with Naomi Nichols, Canadian researcher and institutional ethnographer, about the scope and context of Radium and Roses. 

Transcript

Kelly Purtell  0:00  
Hey everyone. Welcome to season two of radium and roses.

I'm going to forego the dramatic theme music for a moment and just dive right in.

A lot has happened since I last published an episode of the podcast.

I published Episode Six of season one, the final episode on May 13 of 2020.

On May 25 2020,

George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So I want to start the season by saying that unequivocally Black Lives Matter. I stand in solidarity with my friends, colleagues and comrades who are fighting for justice and freedom from racialized state violence. I condemn the killing of innocent black people at the hands of police and other white supremacist vigilantes. I condemn the politicians who empower terrorists to commit acts of gun violence against their fellow Americans. And most importantly, I condemn institutions that continue to profit off the suffering and trauma of the people they are meant to serve.

So before I begin, I really want to say that season two is going to be really different from season one.

Particularly because season two, for now, for my own purposes, has to revolve around the work that I'm doing as a PhD student to pursue and research the subject matter of radium and roses. So I do talk later in this episode about my intended audience for the podcast and for this project at large. But for now, this season is going to be focused on research. And I just want to preface that because you might not think of yourself as someone who's interested in research or social research. But I urge you to keep listening anyways, because I think the conversation that I'm about to present to you is really interesting. It can be a little jargony at times, which I will apologize in advance for, but I'm going to try and do my best to kind of lay it all out for you all the podcast is also now on a monthly schedule. So I'll be publishing a new episode every month. And what that means is that the episodes are going to be a little longer, so buckle in.

Okay, so I'll begin by honestly admitting that I really didn't have a plan for Season One, aside from just telling a really important story.

So by the time I wrapped up season one with episode six in May of 2020, I definitely did not have a plan for season two.

The idea for season two actually didn't emerge until the fall of 2020. When I began my Ph. D program, the Ph. D program is in Writing and Rhetoric. It's a program for writing studies professional, which I am one I have studied writing and the teaching of writing since 2012. This program is largely interdisciplinary, and allows me to also continue my study of sociology and social theory, which I've studied since 2013. Specifically, what I'm interested in are social research methods are research methods for social change. So being a huge nerd for research methods that I am, I'm double dipping this semester and taking not one but two courses on research methods. And honestly, the idea for season two of radium and roses came from one of my course assignments. The assignment was to write a profile of a researcher in our field whose research we were just generally interested in. In the classes leading up to the assignment. Our Professor talked a lot about the process of identifying a problem, because problems are central to our research. Problems are how we begin to ask questions. So I started writing the researcher profile assignment. With this in mind, how did I identify this problem? The following recording is an excerpt from the introduction to that assignment. And I will say that this contains a brief summary of season one Which if you are just joining us to listen to season two will catch you up to speed and if you listen to season one, we'll just refresh your memory. So here we go. counter to many narratives about the production of a research question. This narrative does not begin with the meticulous or systematic identification of a problem. The research problem that I seek to address in my research did not require keen investigation, or interpretation or the use of a framework in order to be identified. It was not a problem that I sought out. The problem found me on June 3 of 2018. My mom called me and told me that my grandfather, her father had brain cancer. doctors had found a lemon sized tumor in the frontal left lobe of his brain. A couple months later, we came to the revelation that he remembered receiving nasal radium therapy. As a child in Baltimore City in the 1940s. nasal radium therapy entailed the insertion of radium tip rods into the nostrils, which were held in place for 10 to 12 minutes at a time. The therapy was used to treat allergies and hearing loss, both of which my grandfather had as a child,

I promptly found out the treatment was pioneered by physicians at Johns Hopkins. The treatment went on to be used nationally on an estimated 500,000 to 2 million people up until the late 1960s. Because Hopkins physicians trained other physicians to use this quote unquote, therapeutic treatment. And across the world, the manufacturing and distribution of the nasal radium applicators became a multi million dollar industry. Despite these staggering numbers, there's minimal research about the effects of the treatment. And the CDC holds that there is no malignant effect associated with the treatment. What's more, Johns Hopkins is complicit in covering up research that reveals the malignant effects of the therapy, increased risk of tumors of the head and neck. So, by the time this problem found me, I'd already taken a class called research methods for social change. I'd already been conceiving of how the work we do in the gate kept vacuum of academia can actually have an impact on the world outside. I was yearning for ways to do research that actually mattered. I went on to study feminist research methods, I became fascinated by how he could speak truth to power through research. And I found great potential for that and participatory community based research methodologies. This problem found me but I just so happened to be developing the skills and resources that would make me uniquely equipped to address it. Was I am I ready to ask the many hard questions that this research problem presents? Perhaps not? Am I ready to go head to head with Johns Hopkins University and the dark annals of its history? Absolutely not. But I am ready to dig into exploring how exactly I can use my resources as an academic researcher and scholar to do the work to create even just a small sliver of justice for the victims of yet another one of this powerful institutions transgressions. My studies now revolve around acquiring skills critical to this project, I must familiarize myself with the methodologies that will enable me to complete this work, that in the beginning steps of this endeavor, I seek to better understand the how of this project. And I think it was at this point in my writing process, that I actually realized that the process of researching the subject matter of radium and roses, is what should drive season two. And when I think about it, this is really how season one happened. Season One was driven entirely by the research that my mom and I were doing, and the story and the narrative of us doing that research. Season Two will pretty much be the same thing. But it will be a little bit different, in that it'll be centered around my work as a PhD student, which means things might get a little nerdy up in here. Because I'm studying research, I'm studying research methods. And that's sort of what this podcast has to be about for now. But I promise I'm going to try to make this as Interesting and as educational as possible, and I hope it could be a potential resource maybe for other researchers who want to do similar work. So even if you're not really interested in research methods, I would encourage you to keep listening if you have any investment in figuring out how to advance social justice, or if you're just curious to see how this story plays out.

So I'm given this assignment to write a profile of a researcher and I've assigned it would benefit me most to profile someone whose methodology wouldn't lend me some perspective on how exactly to pursue researching the subject matter of radium and roses. So that's how I found the work of Naomi Nichols. The assignment didn't require that we interview or even have a conversation with the researcher that we were profiling. But I couldn't resist an opportunity to connect with a researcher whose work I found to be very interesting and very important. Naomi Nichols is a Canadian researcher with multiple degrees in education, but she largely studied activism and specifically research methods for social change. Particularly the methodology of institutional ethnography. Institutional ethnography, or I E, is an alternative means for doing sociology for people. It allows one to study up an institution from the bottom, beginning with the perspectives of people, and how people's lives are mediated every day by the texts of an institution. It's a way of probing into and making more visible, the often unseen relationship between the individual, the social, and institutions, institutions, in this case being stable, recurring sets of behaviors organized around a collective purpose, or goal. institutions are made up of people. This includes like a church, a school, or let's say, a medical research university hospital. But institutions aren't just made up of people. They're also made up of texts, and documents, and artifacts that people design and create. This creates this set of textually mediated relations that determine the everyday lived realities of individuals who interact with these institutions. So I II can provide methods of looking at these ruling relations that texts create. In my case, I he presents much potential for looking at how the institution's complicit in the story of radium and roses actually impact the lives of the people they're supposed to benefit. So while my task was to write a profile of Naomi Nichols, I saw an opportunity to speak with her about the methodology that could potentially help me pursue research into the subject of radium and roses. So on Monday, September 14 2020, I sat down for a zoom call with Naomi Nichols. It turns out that she actually answered most of the questions I wanted to ask her in the interview for the profile in a talk that she had done the week before. So she sent me the link to that, which required me to retool all of the questions that I had written, and gear them specifically towards my research. For the sake of time, I'm just going to kind of jump into the middle of the conversation that I had with her. At this point, she hasn't listened to the podcast, she's not familiar with my research subject at all. So I do have to kind of do a little bit of explanation provide some context for her, which she'll hear and some of this audio.

I don't know if you

listened to the podcast or looked at it? No. Okay. That's fine. I just don't i don't want to, essentially my doctoral research. I, I already know. I'm studying one specific institution. There's other institutions who are complicit in the problem. But I'm studying Johns Hopkins University. Yeah. Because they're complicit in essentially covering up medical research that reveals the effects of this treatment that physicians from Johns Hopkins pioneered in the 1940s It's a nasal radium treatment, which they tested. They they pioneered the treatment by testing it on 582 Baltimore, third grade children in 1948, one of whom we suspect was my grandfather.

Naomi Nichols  15:17  
So they have a long history of doing research in poor racialized communities.

Kelly Purtell  15:24  
Yeah, and I'm from Baltimore. So I like him very sort of familiar with their legacy, I guess, in that in that community. When I was a freshman and undergrad, I had to read the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Yeah, it was creating this huge stir in the local community, but also in the larger community, you know, in terms of talking about the roles of the role of research at a research institution, which is where I went, I went to a research institution for undergrad as well. So I, I saw some potential and institutional ethnography to sort of work with this group of people to sort of Yeah, tell tell the story that no one is really speaking about this issue. No one is looking at how this institution has actually negatively affected the lives of these people. And I mean, I'm talking like 60 years later, people are having health consequences. Because this institution hasn't taken responsibility for something that happened there a long time ago. So that's what the podcast is about. But where I want to take interest in where I want to take the podcast in season two is talking less about like, here's the story, here's my personal connection to the story. But more so talking about my process of researching the story. Which is why I was hoping to speak with you a little bit about the potential of using institutional ethnography to address a public health issue specifically.

Naomi Nichols  17:07  
This is an interesting one, good, because it's one that happened that like a test actually happened in the past, but the health consequences are on going.

Kelly Purtell  17:19  
And they're increasing, actually, the chances of people having these negative health consequences, those chances increase as time goes on. So

Naomi Nichols  17:30  
that's fascinating. Well, I mean, terrible. Yeah, like a lot of things are, I feel like I'm always saying that. hazing, academically and horrific, yes,

Kelly Purtell  17:39  
social justice.

Naomi Nichols  17:42  
Because what I what I was writing down in my notes here is like, it's sociology of health and risk, and knowledge production, right? All of those things, interpolate one another to create a problem that you can't divorce one piece of it from the other, right? It's a straight up sociology of how a lot of like, the reason they won't. There's no culpability is because of how they're orienting institutional to risk, I imagine.

Kelly Purtell  18:12  
Yeah. And I was thinking about that during your talk, because I mean, you're talking about these textual relations when these kinds of like textual histories almost, and in the case of this story, that textual history just is not there. Because Johns Hopkins has positioned themselves so it's not there. Yeah. Because they have the power and the ability to position themselves that way. Which you know, that the researcher who pioneered the treatment and tested it on these children, he still has like there's a foundation in his name. He still has a bio on their website that talks him as one of the, you know, founding fathers of modern laryngology. I want to intercede here because I actually misspoke. There's actually a society in Samuel Crowe's name, not a foundation. The crow society is in the auto laryngology had a neck surgery department at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. But he does have a lengthy bio on the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine website. But it mentions nothing about him experimenting with radium, or on children. So it's like yeah, the type of power in that's at play in the narratives and the stories they're telling. For my in my field, it's medical rhetorics. So it's kind of a something I'm coming to with a new a fresh set of eyes as well, because that's my background, but

Naomi Nichols  19:45  
more going on beyond medical rhetoric. Like I think that's an interesting way and like what are the meta genres of

Unknown Speaker  19:51  
discipline that

Naomi Nichols  19:52  
allow for the nature of particular narratives, but I also think this idea of How do we account for the intentional displacement of textual realities like the always known that the winner writes history, right? Like this isn't new, but that we have to think about that proposition as evidence everywhere. And so in this case, it's in the institution's best interest to have no archival history of this or to have created even informed consent processes in relation to research ethics, Board approval processes that make this all legitimate. Even though we know in the grander scheme of it, it's not legitimate. There's all sorts of ways we construct legitimacy tactically, in ways that sublimates oppression like we that hide from you, for people, we can't see, we can't we can't hold on to the oppressive relation in our investigation, because it's hidden intentionally. And so from the point of view of a legal case or like a Human Rights Tribunal, it becomes very hard to argue that something bad happened because there's no, there's very little evidence or the evidence is exists, but it's existing. And it's been put together in a way to push culpability away.

Kelly Purtell  21:21  
And that is absolutely what they've done, essentially, to where I go from here. And this conversation with Naomi Nichols is into an explanation of Jessica or his cinci is 1997 dissertation on the after effects of NRI, which was consecutively kept from the public and then published as a 2001. Article. In the 2001. Article, the same data set, the same numbers were represented as less significant than they were in the 1997 dissertation, I, of course, went into much greater detail about this with my key informant, Stewart Farber in season one, barely, the same number of brain tumors that were significant in 1997, somehow became less significant in 2001. To reiterate, according to that 2001 study, one in every 100 people who received this treatment had a tumor of the head and neck. So the CDC estimates that 500,000 to 2 million people received this treatment, which means there can be anywhere between 5000 to 20,000 people who could develop tumors of the head and neck or who already have and have died as a consequence. So I mean, that's a significant amount of people who are going to potentially have health consequences. But further research hasn't been done, because Hopkins has essentially minimized the the potential risk associated with the treatment that was again pioneered by their physicians. So

Unknown Speaker  22:59  
Wow.

Naomi Nichols  23:00  
Yeah, lots of things that are interesting there.

Kelly Purtell  23:04  
Yeah. And I liked the concept of data justice, like there was no justice done with the data that they found, because where did it go?

Naomi Nichols  23:13  
Well, I'm thinking again, about the way that for a very long time, I mentioned something else about statistics and how we represent them to publics. In the talk, where I was in a dissertation, just in the last couple of years defense and a person said indigeneity predict school failure. And it's the same statistical information that is now used by anti black racist and anti indigenous racist activists to talk about systems failures, the same data, when you talk about it, a different way can be used can be presented to illuminate systemic injustices that produce these disproportionality ease. So it calls into question like orage suggests the importance of frame right in terms of the presentation of statistical findings, which are not neutral. They're not just stat, whether it's significant or not. in what context under what sort of theoretical framework of presentation really matters. But I wonder if that's something you'd want to look into that piece, I think, to get really clear about what was done, not just statistically, I think probably in terms of how they present the findings. So did they do a matched sample with the regular with with the population

Kelly Purtell  24:35  
at large?

So just to interrupt really quickly to answer her question. The sample was matched with another group of people from the same clinic who received other treatments but did not receive the nasal radium irradiation treatment. So then,

Naomi Nichols  24:53  
what would on its own look statistically significant doesn't? right but you need to understand precisely what went into making those claims, right? Because that's where again, you get the sociology of health risk and knowledge, all in one thing. It's not like it's just, none of us is neutral. And then this is like how we talk about health knowledge isn't just about representing an objective reality. Disease, we can think about it as representing an objective reality that we know now, that never is like when we talk about rates of COVID. And then you look at like at a population level, and then you look at Oh, actually, at the neighborhood level, it looks like this. Oh, and look, when you look at the demographics of the neighborhoods, then we learn this other thing. And actually, it starts to look like the disease is racist. Well, obviously, it's not racist. Obviously, being black doesn't make you more. It doesn't predict your COVID disability, except that in a racist society than it does, right, like you have to sort of peel back all these different layers. Anyway, are we interesting, in like, from a sociological point of view, or from an investigative point of view, to start to actually look at how the data were represented to tell those two different stories.

Kelly Purtell  26:12  
So I want to turn once again to the 1997 dissertation. It says, In this study, three malignant and four benign brain tumors were identified in the exposed group versus none in the non exposed group says that the doses to the brain for these patients ranged from six to more than 24 gray, which is a way of measuring the absorption of radiation in tissue to translate that into the radium absorbed dose or rad. That would be between 620 400 rad dose response relationship was not testable in this radium cohort because few cases were observed, and precise brand doses were not known for each irradiated individual. Now, this next sentence is really important. It says however, the evidence for radiation induction of these brain tumors cannot be ignored. Based on the observation of five confirmed cases in the exposed group versus none in the non exposed group, corrected relative risk was estimated for brain cancer, and was 30.9 with a 95% confidence interval if the for benign and three malignant brain tumors were combined. So to follow niomi Nichols advice and to look at how these findings were actually represented, in 1997, we have this sentence that's urging that we cannot ignore the relationship between the existence of these brain tumors and the high levels of radiation that these individuals were exposed to. So let's turn now to the 2001 study. Although there was an excess risk of brain tumors associated with radiation, a dose response effect could not be demonstrated because of the small number of cases. However, previous studies have shown a possible etiologic role of low dose radiation in the development of brain tumors. the finding of this study regarding risk of brain tumors is consistent with evidence from previous studies. It does not say what that previous evidence was. The previous evidence is actually two previous studies, one of a another group of irradiated children who were treated for tinea capitis. And then a group of atomic bomb survivors whose brains received significantly lower doses of radiation than children exposed to radiation with NRI. So while the 2001 study doesn't actually say what these studies found, the 1997 dissertation does. It says that in the first cohort, there was a relative risk of 3.5. Again, with a 95% confidence interval.

In the group of a bomb survivors, there was a relative risk of 1.5. So in 1997, yeah, is comparing relative risks of 3.5 and 1.5, to the relative risk that she calculated for the group of people who were exposed with NRI and that relative risk again was 30.9. So 1.5 to 3.5 versus 30.9. And again, Yeah wrote in 1997, that the evidence cannot be ignored. Yet, in 2001, she says the finding of this study regarding risk of brain tumors is consistent with evidence from previous studies. But in 1997, it seemed that it wasn't consistent. In fact, the inconsistency was something that couldn't be ignored. So, if the dominant story of the 2001 article is in the excess risk of these brain tumors as it was in the 1997 dissertation, what was it?

to

hammer that point home, I will just read these last two sentences of the 2001 article. However, the results of follow up of this population with nasopharyngeal exposure suggests the hypothesis that exposure of hormone regulating organs to radiation and a period of prior to puberty may result in a low risk of breast uterus, ovary and prostate cancers in later years. further studies to evaluate the hormonal profiles in irradiated and non aerated persons would advance our understanding of the mechanism of hormone induced cancers. So here, they're kind of making it sound like NRI was actually a good thing for people, which is, of course, a very strategic way of representing the history of this treatment, which is, of course, part of Johns Hopkins legacy. So this is some very, very intentional positioning on their part, as Nichols might say, it's a very intentional way of sublimating oppression, it's a way of covering up oppression, through a process of knowledge production, through the production of a text.

Naomi Nichols  32:02  
One, I think one of the things I was really one of the things I studied along the way was how what kinds of knowledge claims work in different changing making content. So I think at one point soon, you should sort of figure out who your audiences and I don't mean your scholarly audience. I mean, who are you trying to convince that there is a problem or who you're trying to educate about a problem because statisticians would tear you upside down or at the expression tear you apart for saying the data were manipulated, they would say, No, like, these are all like statistically approved or whatever, like, mechanisms for making knowledge claims, and to really to think if they're if your audience is government, if your audience has public health in government, then you need to talk about how you need to just it's the same thing, but you're going to switch genres right? rhetorical genres, you're going to talk about knowledge claims and how knowledge gets produced. And not use words like manipulate because they will tweak right and tick them off. But if you are working with activists you can write so you think me know, this place, this juncture like who are you? Who are you trying to target with your story?

Kelly Purtell  33:24  
Yeah, well, what I actually I have thought a little bit about that. And I would, I would like to see and this is a really ambitious goal. But what I would like to see is, is I would like to produce a manuscript for a book that is, like, accessible to the public. Because the only time that Hopkins has had any semblance of kind of accountability was after Rebecca Skloot published the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Yeah, and the entire world was talking about that story. And so I would love to be able to tell this story in a way that is like publicly accessible. And I see the potential specifically of like ethnographic methods, yeah, in in doing that kind of work. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts about using IE specifically, to create this kind of more public facing body of knowledge or story that is accessible in that way that like, will persuade people to care even?

Naomi Nichols  34:22  
Yeah, I think that was the hope initially with it, and even last, that it would be persuasive for a public but that you could find useful bits of information for activists and organizers to tactically deploy in their activism and organizing. And so I think that that potential is still there, because you can sort of illuminate Oh, it's actually the problem is in this re presentation of the findings, and this is how they were able to go from significant to not significant. And if you want to use this as your lever for your activism here, here you go. So it's that like very specific drawing Smith talks about sort of like a scientific account of, of how institutions are organized so that activists know exactly where to put all their effort. I think sometimes it can be that all that level of detail, that level of detailed scientific analysis is not really engaging to public, like, in general, right. And so sometimes if you're thinking about like engaging a wide public of varying literacy levels and varying degrees of academic interest, you know, that might not be the approach to take. What I would suggest, though is ethnography can be really useful that way, because you can bring people narratively into the lives of the people that that you're writing about. And and then you can use footnotes judiciously. If with those other details that get at the more general piece, like here are the stats of, you know, that substantiate this as a major issue. Here's the textual analysis that shows like, where and policy people's rights were displaced. And so yeah, I think in terms of engaging in a public conversation, ethnography can be really useful. I think, institutional ethnography could be, I've never seen it, right be really useful. Because it tends to, as I said, get a bit too specific, like a bit too detail. That said, if you're thinking of a less like, you know, a mom and dad, like every kind of public audience, the book I wrote, based on my dissertation research, youth work, it was slim. And it was picked up and read as a book club book by the Ministry for children's services in the province where I was working and where, where the research was relevant. And it made me so happy because it meant with that was really in my head, my imagined audience was people who had power, but were working in the institutions that the book was about. And so you know, you again, it's like thinking about who your audiences and where you want to target the change that you want to see. Really, that should be part of what you're thinking about right now, in terms of in terms of your approach to putting a dissertation together, like, many? Wow, yeah, increasingly, students in the social sciences are being, it's being recommended that they write the three manuscripts so that they have more publications when they graduate in light of the crazy academic job market. But that might not be the best approach for you, if you're trying to create this compelling narrative that, you know, compels people to care. Mm hmm. Hard to do that in an article format. I think articles are the worst.

Kelly Purtell  37:44  
So I asked Naomi Nichols, specifically about how to balance the expectations of being an academic with my desire to tell this story in a more public facing way, feel the answer for you. And that's really

Naomi Nichols  37:56  
depressing. And so you're gonna work twice as hard. I think that is true. Like if you're going to I hate to say this, if you care about actually reaching a public audience, you have to produce very different materials than you do to get an academic job. And right now, as you can decide not to get an academic job, but if you want to do both things, you just have to do two amounts,

Kelly Purtell  38:19  
you have to do both.

Naomi Nichols  38:20  
Yeah, which is I had a major burnout, like it was, you know, also consider the gender distribution of domestic labor and all of the other things and a life.

Kelly Purtell  38:30  
It's a lot, it's a lot of work. But I think, if you go back to your values, here, she's referring to one of my original interview questions, which I never asked her about how our values influence the research and the work that we do,

Naomi Nichols  38:47  
then it might, it might suggest to you that it's worth it, and that you can work at this frenzied pace until you get tenure. The problem is that now takes a very long time, because it's hard to get the job in the first place. But if you can sort of have that be your limit, and then be the scholar you. You want to be and you want to mentor students to be in a three year different way. I mean, that's been my aspiration Anyway, once you get tenure,

Kelly Purtell  39:13  
yeah, I mean, I think that academia is where I would like to go career wise, like I would love to do research and yeah, support students in their research. But yeah, I definitely realized that it's a lot. It's a lot of work. And it's a lot to, to kind of think about especially Yeah, that's what's required, I think, is to really intentionally plan and to be yet to ask myself these questions. I really appreciate you talking with me and kind of talking me through some of those questions because it is hard to think about the scope of a project like this, and that's why I started the podcast Honestly, it was because I was like I need to start kind of wrapping my head around it because I discovered all of this in 2018 and was Trying to finish my master's degree during that time. And it was just kind of weighing on me, you know, it's like this huge issue of 500,000 to 2 million people irradiated not knowing that they're at risk for cancer. And I'm like one of two or three people who's like, aware, apparently, it was a lot. But like now, yeah, I was trying to wrap my head around like, Okay, well, how can I actually tell this story? How can I actually get people to care and make them aware? So that was kind of my first foray into doing that. But yeah, now I need to take like a step back and look at the larger picture, and the sort of more longitudinal aspects of the project. So

Naomi Nichols  40:42  
there's a pace and like, if you're an indigenous scholar and thinking about indigenous methodologies, were you always asking yourself, like, Who are my people? Which is basically, to whom am I accountable? And to whom is this research accountable? Which is a different question than who is my audience, because often your audience is not the people you're accountable to is the people you're trying to

Unknown Speaker  41:03  
influence.

Naomi Nichols  41:04  
But I think to be aware of both of those pieces is super important. And then the concept of standpoint, institutional ethnography, I think was supposed to be about who are my people like? To whom is this research accountable? And then thinking about your activism in relation to your scholarship being and who is the audience for the research findings? I mean, there was might be questions to continually ask yourself to also make sure you're not drifting, because I find that you can get pulled

into the

sort of knowledge frames and cares of the people you're trying to influence and to go back to, but who is this research for? Right? Make sure that you don't lose sight of that. Because otherwise, it's often like such if you're trying to influence a dominant institution, it's dominant for a reason, like it pulls you in. Yeah, and the next thing, you know, you've like been caught up in the frame of the institution itself.

Kelly Purtell  42:03  
Right. So who were my people, to whom am I accountable and doing this work? I'm accountable to victims of nasal pharyngeal radium irradiation. That includes those who were radiated repeatedly as children, and are now seeing the health effects. And those whose family members have already passed from the health effects of the treatment, such as my own. What I'm actually coming to terms with and looking back on this conversation with Naomi Nichols is that telling the story means telling the story of the creation of knowledge, and the power that institutions have in the process of creating it.

Naomi Nichols  42:48  
Like you can just see that these remain pressing issues ever how those claims are represented and, and held on to and legitimated even after people question them like that, I mean, these are all I think, it's also like, remains fascinating, technical, fascinating. But I think more like the urgency of research that's focusing on knowledge claims is even more important now, at this moment, where we are living in what we describe as like a knowledge economy or an evidence based, you know, society or whatever reason, just this moment of, like, extraordinary polarization, where people are, like, you know, making vastly unprovable knowledge claims and social media, like a media that people pick up a bag, you know, and qq and on, you know, like this written word moment where knowledge matters more than it ever has. Mm hmm.

Kelly Purtell  43:47  
Yeah. And I think I think it's important to cast a critical perspective on specifically on on the institutions that we trust to make these claims. And, yeah, and how can we, what methodologies can we use to sort of intervene in that process? without falling

Naomi Nichols  44:08  
victim to the like, anything go with q anon kind of existence? And so it does, yes. Right. Like, so we're in between this? Well, just because you're john hopkins, everything you say must be true. And without problem, too. You're just a random group of guys that are like, you know, the problem is the capital of sex offenders, right? Like, somewhere between extreme

Kelly Purtell  44:31  
should be yes. Yeah. And I'm hoping that somewhere, in my experience, as an academic and in the skills that I've developed, I can tell the story and do it some justice. Yeah. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me even just in this kind of freeform way. I do really appreciate it. Yeah. And I would love to stay in touch, you know, throughout my career, because I really do want to continue to study these methods. to like, you know, familiarize myself with them not just for this project, but for other projects I'm interested in because I am really interested in like community based pedagogies as well. So

Naomi Nichols  45:12  
what I'm thinking about you have something and you have an investigative journalism journalist, and that's something that always CUNY TV. Yeah. He was that spirit of finding things out. And so I think that, you know, that's

also worth

keeping that flame alive in your academic work. I shall

Kelly Purtell  45:31  
try. Keeping the flame alive would have fanned the flames over here. So yeah. Well, thank you again, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your week, too. Yeah, have a good day.

Naomi Nichols  45:45  
Okay, take care, Kelly. Bye. Bye, bye.

Kelly Purtell  45:49  
So looking back on my conversation with Naomi Nichols, it becomes clear that I have pretty. Looking back on my conversation with Naomi Nichols, it becomes clear that I may have two separate tasks cut out for me. One is doing the work of being an academic that will enable me to research and tell the story. And the other is doing the work of actually telling this story in a public facing way. those tasks may be two separate things, but I think they share many, many intersections. My life now revolves around these intersections, and I hope to explore them more hear on the podcast in the coming months. tune in to next month's episode to hear more about living at the intersections of academia and the public social world.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of radio roses. As always, the theme music for this episode is the song mama said my cat Clyde

Transcribed by https://otter.ai