Necessary But Not Sufficient

Above, a water pump provided by UNHCR.

Taking a step back from the moment-by-moment chronicle of my research trip (which I fear may start to sound like a travel blog), I wanted to reflect a bit on the paradox of research in general, and of communication research in particular. In those settings that are now somewhat euphemistically called “low resource” – countries so poor that the governments cannot provide even the most basic services, places where malnourishment remains a bigger problem than obesity – I found it very difficult to remain convinced of the importance of my research goals.

In the face of extreme deprivation, when confronted by the lack of the most basic material resources, I found myself wondering, “Why don’t I just work on meeting this immediate need?” In other words, what’s the point of doing research on something as abstract as communication, when there are much less abstract things I could be doing with my time and energy? Research is necessarily retrospective – you can only study something once it has happened – and looking backwards began to feel much less important than looking forwards.

Posing this question probably reveals exactly how new to this type of research I am. I know, I know, many of my readers are now thinking, “You’ll get over it. We all go through this.” Quite true. I will get over it. But I do think it’s a worthwhile process to go through, and I don’t want to just skip over it.

This line of thinking also led me to question the need for, or importance of both the practice of “communication” and research on the subject. The fact that I have chosen to study a process called “communication” does not mean that I think “communication” can solve every problem. But I do think there are a great many problems that won’t get solved without it. Just making a film on a topic, or raising awareness, or performing “outreach” won’t make underlying structural problems go away, or change much in the material world at all. And researching those efforts won’t solve any immediate material need. It might not even solve those problems that are related to a process called “communication.” At least, not at once.

Likewise, simply providing human beings with “information” (in scare quotes here to indicate that this is itself a contested term) does not often lead directly to behavior change by those same human beings. Smoking is one good example: my fourth grade science teacher’s presentation of a piece of smoker’s lung tissue to my class was definitely enough to persuade me never to smoke, but I also already hated the smell of cigarettes. For several of my classmates, that vivid piece of empirical evidence was not sufficient to persuade them not to smoke, and by the time we all reached high school they were clustered in the bathrooms at every class break, puffing away. Clearly, some other motivation was at work here.

Studying the process of communication about disease prevention and environmental conservation in villages where the only treatment for a child burned in a cooking fire comes from my own emergency first aid kit may seem excessively abstract. Many people will ask, “Wouldn’t it be better to just give them clean water/medical supplies/a health clinic?” Sure, I would reply. But then what? What if you didn’t give them what they actually needed, but instead what you thought they needed? How would you find out what local needs actually were? For me, that is the point in the system where communication questions arise, and where I would like to begin working.