ABSTRACT
One of the hallmarks of socially engaged research is responsibility toward both one’s subjects and the rigor of one’s discipline. The researcher must advocate for reform in the name of those who have no voice, while at the same time fulfilling the requirements of trustworthiness/validity. The book Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS by Patti Lather and Chris Smithies balances these concerns in order to (a) allow the world to hear the voices of women from different classes, races, and economic backgrounds all dealing with the daily trials and tribulations of living with HIV/AIDS and to (b) trouble the very idea of ethnographic representation from within the discourse of ethnography. This chapter concerns Lather’s follow-up to Troubling the Angels, the enigmatic text titled Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science. Getting Lost is a studious suspension of research from within research - a kind of prolonged hesitation or pause. What is unique and important is that Getting Lost offers a moment of studious inoperativity wherein the researcher as studier can live within a threshold condition that is neither outside research nor inside the research protocol. Instead of being lost, Lather emphasizes getting lost as a state betwixt and between, of pushing forward toward resolution while also perpetually withdrawing from such resolution, of constantly feeling the power to find solutions while also perpetually witnessing such solutions fade into the background as new problems arise, of learning from and wrestling with a learning that un-learns itself in its learning. In this sense, to get lost in the remnants of research is to feel the shift in the educational logic of research from learning from one’s experiences (in order to be an advocate or militant researcher) to studying in the ruins of this experience. Indeed, it is precisely what was not learned - the ambiguously assessed outcomes that seem to render the dichotomy “success” versus “failure” inoperative - from Troubling the Angels that opens up a space and time for the ruins/runes of research to be irresponsibly studied.
