 I want to thank you for inviting me here and giving me an opportunity to share some ideas with you and hopefully to allow us all to experience a sense of challenge in the work that we're doing and to put it within the context of this moment in history. I chose Nick's Methods Contribution to Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice because I think we are at a moment in history when these are extremely challenging and that we as researchers have the potential to contribute to finding solutions to what we call wicked problems. And so when I talk about challenging times and wicked problems, and then you see the third word over there, and optimism, you might be going, oh boy, what is she talking about? But I will talk about optimism, and I'll talk about its meaning and its potential for us as researchers to contribute to solutions. So what are challenging times? I was recently a visiting professor in Australia and Indonesia and in the newspaper they had an article called Dysfunctional Political Parties, Rampant Factionalism, Immature Politicians. And I thought, well, what country are they talking about? So the United States doesn't have a corner on the market for any of the challenging conditions that I'll be talking about. And I have worked in quite a few countries. I've worked in 85 different countries. And only by invitation for people in those countries is said we have human rights issues, and we would like you to come and work with us to help us to address those. And so I don't ever go and say, I think I know what your problem is and what the solution is, but I go upon invitation to share some of the kinds of thoughts that I'll share with you today. Looking at also then, looking at challenging times, this was also in the Washington Post, the newspaper that I read every day, because I'm from Washington DC. Countries across Southeast Asia have shown signs of increasing human rights violations or moves away from democracy. And almost on the same day, US moves backwards on human rights. So as I said, the US doesn't have a corner on the market, and we're not in a position to say, we're better than this country or that country, but this is a pervasive issue across the globe. The Amnesty International described this, the current United States president wasted little time in putting his anti-rights rhetoric of discrimination and xenophobia into action, threatening a major rollback on justice and freedom, including signing a series of repressive executive orders that threaten the human rights of millions at home and abroad. And if you're keeping up with the news, you know that most recently, this is in the form of people who are crossing the border into the United States from Mexico and even separating children from their mothers from their parents, flying the children to some other destinations, and then telling the parents that they want their children back, they have to pay $1,400 to get them back. So if I look at that as a human rights issue or as a legal issue, someone taking children and saying, you have to pay to get them back, you can decide on the language you want to use to describe that. So what I'm talking about are wicked problems. And wicked problems are those that we don't actually know or haven't agreed upon solution for. They're complex, they require interdisciplinary teams, and we're running out of time to find solutions. Now, you looked then at the last part, optimism. Well, what is our other choice? So I found this. If you can't read it, let me know. Raise your hand. A breakthrough therapy, just one step for coping with the stress we're in today. Hide in a hole. OK, what happens if we hide in the hole? We don't get anything done, right? So we look at the meaning of optimism and we see that Sandy Grant, who is a philosopher from University of Cambridge, says that succumbing to feelings of despair can produce an action. Hope is an active way of being. It keeps a possibility of a better world alive for us. So I go for optimism. Greg Easterbrook also wrote about optimism as not being complacency. It's a belief that problems can be solved. And I look around this room and I see a lot of highly intelligent, motivated people who have amazing skill sets in terms of research methodology. And I think together we can work towards solutions to these wicked problems if we make that commitment. And so, oh dear, oh dear, you know what I've done? OK, there. All right. My optimism within the context of research lies on a shift in our assumptions about the role that we play as researchers, about the philosophical framing of our work, and that if we start to think about how our research can make the contribution to solutions to wicked problems, my contention is that the use of transformative mixed methods will allow us to make progress. Now, the rest of the talk is going to be about, well, what are those? What does that mean, transformative mixed methods? And why would I say that it has a role to contribute? Because I believe that we can, through this method, strengthen the credibility of our evidence, use a critical cultural perspective so that we try to understand the experiences of those who are marginalized and most hurt by the policies that are perpetuating discrimination, including stakeholders, diverse stakeholders, and their experiences. It has an orientation towards constructive action. So sometimes I hear people say, well, my research gives voice to those whose voices haven't been heard. And I'm like, well, that's great. But what's the constructive action? What's the change that's going to occur because of hearing that voice? How do we structure our research so that it increases the potential for change? Includes attention to issues of power and strategies for challenging an oppressive status quo. So these are the fundamental characteristics of transformative mixed methods. They provide the rationale for why I think we can have a role in addressing these problems. And when I talk about shifting assumptions, I'm talking within the framing of paradigms and assumptions that define paradigms within the context of social science research. These may well be quite familiar to you. Talking about the assumption of the nature of ethics or axiology, the nature of reality, ontology, the nature of knowledge, or the relation between the researcher and stakeholders, or if you put it in philosophical terms, the knower, and that which would be known, and the nature of methodology. So we're going to be examining each of these assumptions and look at how, if we shift to a transformative lens, it might allow us to ask different kinds of questions, collect different kinds of data, and engage differently with our stakeholder groups. The role of the researcher, I think, also requires a shift. There was a session called Change Agents, Advancing the Global SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, by ensuring the right to evaluation by all. And one of the presenters asked this question, is research transformational for democratic purposes, or managerial and or political affirmation masked as objective, independent, and credible? And I think we can play with the tension between transformational and objective, independent, credible, because I don't think that they're necessarily completely separate. But to think of ourselves in the role of change agent, what would that mean? So shifting to a transformative stance means that we start by designing studies that recognize the interconnectedness of all of us, living and non-living, from the past, in the present, and in the future. How would we design our research differently if we are cognizant of that interconnectedness of all of us, cognizant of what has come before us, what is here with us now, and in the future? This idea came to me from African researchers. They have a work called Ubuntu. And this is what it means, is that we're all connected, living and non-living, past, present, and future. Then what does that mean in terms of how we design our studies? Designing studies that address the linkage between different types of justice. And if you can go back and recall the first slide, the title is Social Economic and Environmental Justice. Using transformative mixed methods to bring to visibility the values that are driving societal decisions. Because I think we haven't paid enough attention to that. And that many times, the decisions about what kind of interventions are being used are value-driven and not data-driven. And so what's our responsibility as researchers to make those values visible? And designing studies that lead to transformative action. These are the three types of justice that I talked about, social, economic, and environmental. And I will give you an example from Indonesia, where I was working with people whose concerns were the disenfranchisement of youth who had moved away from the rural areas, were in the urban areas, who didn't have access to good living conditions, were living at a high level of poverty, and didn't have access to employment. So you have social, economic, environmental comes in. Because now you have a mass of people living in an urban area, and there's people are leaving the rural areas. And so what would the solution look like that would have a combination of these kinds of justice? This is what the Indonesians were working on. And so they started working with farmers in the rural areas and asking them, how can we go about gathering data that's going to allow you to have opportunities for the youth here in their home places? What requires economic development? Because if there's no jobs, they're going to leave. And so they're talking about how do we have that, how to end forming coalitions of farmers, farmers' wives, the youth, to figure out how they can come up with solutions that address these forms of justice. Because one form of justice, one economic development, for example, that ignores social and environmental justice, is not really what we're looking for. And so this slide actually is talking about the nature of wicked problems and seeing that this is not a complete list, but it's a list of many of the issues that have arisen in the communities where I work, issues related to poverty and inequality, employment, trafficking, drugs, violence of different kinds, domestic, terrorism, crime, health care, education and housing, refugees, immigrants, indigenous women and girls, persons with disabilities in death, climate change, ocean waterways, air land and disasters. All of these issues are arising and there's a desire to see how we can work as researchers to create solutions to these kinds of wicked problems. When I talk about transformation, what am I talking about? Well, if you read in the middle of the slide, this is depends on who you ask. I would say that there's a synergy that goes on in terms of the researcher themselves and their personal transformation in working towards transformation at the societal, economic and environmental levels. So if you're intrigued by that idea, I just had an article come out in the Journal of Transformative Research. It's an open access journal. It's actually based here in the UK where I explore that synergy between the personal and the societal level of transformation. Now, here's a real brief encapsulation of what I'm talking about in the context of assumptions that guide our work and putting a transformative lens on axiology, ontology, epistemology and methodology that axiologically, the ethics, the values start with cultural respect, the promotion of social, environmental and economic justice and human rights, addressing inequities, reciprocity. What are we giving back to the communities when we take data from them? Resilience. What are the strengths in the communities in which we work? Ensuring that we recognize the knowledge, expertise and strengths of the members of that community. Interconnectedness and relationships. Building appropriate, strong relationships with various constituencies as a part of the design of our research. Ontologically, we're talking about multifaceted realities. There are many different opinions about what is real. There are consequences to accepting one version of reality over another. And so interrogating where did the versions of reality come from? What are the consequences of accepting one version of reality over another? And that knowledge is historically situated. I am going to give you some examples of different versions of reality very shortly. But I wanted to kind of give you the overview of the meaning of these assumptions before we got into the specifics. So we'll revisit that. Epistemologically, having an interactive relationship, building trust, and you'll see there also coalition building. To me, this is an underutilized part of our role as researchers. We do research, we publish it, and we think it might make a difference. If somebody reads it and uses it, but what if we consciously said, let's find out who we need to engage with and build those coalitions as part of the design of the research so that we increase the probability that our research will be used. Methodologically, the use of the transformative lens, dialogic, so great deal of interaction, being culturally responsive, using mixed methods, and working towards policy change. As an integrated part of the design, so not just hoping maybe the policy will change, but how do I integrate that into my design? All right, so when I'm talking about axiology and I'm talking about this cultural respect and building relationships, much of this has come to me from the indigenous communities that I work with. As I mentioned before, the idea of interconnectedness, the idea of understanding our location from the past, present, and future all came through my work with indigenous communities. So where does that leave us in terms of methodology, the transformative axiological assumption? I would say that it leads us to one, building relationships, and two, not making assumptions about what we understand about the context in which we are working, so that we ask ourselves, who are the major stakeholder groups and what do I think I know about the cultural norms and beliefs of these groups? That's that kind of self-reflection, critical self-reflection, before you enter a research context. How could I use mixed methods to then identify the cultural norms and beliefs that are operating in the community? How do I identify those dimensions of diversity that are associated with discrimination and oppression and associated with power structures? How do I take into account the expertise, knowledge, and strengths of the community in order to provide that platform for authentic engagement between the researcher and the community? Much of my work began with the deaf community. I was a professor at Gallaudet University, University for Deaf people. It's the only one of its kind. And when I first went there, I thought, I know so much about research, I'm going to be able to teach it really well. And then I found out that the way I was teaching it wasn't actually resonating with the students. And so I spent a lot of time working with them to figure out what research meant to them and how it could be done in a way that would be seen as valuable. So their initial position was that researchers have inaccurately described their community, that they've done not very much to improve their conditions in life and that the researchers would leave with publications but things had not changed in the way they were educated or in their opportunities for employment and so forth. And so what they would tell me is, Donna, you know, you're not deaf yet. And so you don't know this experience. The only way you can work effectively in our community is if there's a recognition of the knowledge, experience and strengths that we bring from having been deaf and you bring your knowledge about research and then we can work together if we have a respectful relationship and recognize each other's strengths. So that I think is something that came home to me in many communities now are putting out statements, terms of reference for working in their communities, that say, you know, you don't just come in and do the research here. These are the terms of reference under which we would agree to have you come into our community. All right, moving on to the ontological, oh dear. Okay, ontological assumption. What we're talking about are the recognition of different versions of reality, that all versions of reality are not equal, that they come from different positions of privilege and that might be based on social, political, cultural, economic, ethnic, a lot of different positionalities, interrogating those versions of reality, identifying those that sustain an oppressive status quo and making visible versions of reality that have the potential to further human rights. So what kind of example would we talk about here? Again, going back to Indonesia, the mining and palm oil production has led to a great deal of land being used for these purposes. And if you look down the, let's see, that would be your left side. You'll see the version of reality from the perspective of the indigenous people in Indonesia saying it violates our land rights, it increases pollution, it increases destruction of the coral reef, we lose agricultural land, we lose forests, we have less water security, we decrease well-being, it increases the gap between the rich and the poor. And on the other side, we see, and this was a quotation from their newspaper, their premiere in 2017, said we should continue with these policies because it creates jobs, energy, economic growth, and profit. So those are versions of reality, same activity, indigenous people's version of reality, powerful economic interests. And so if we look at those and say, well, what are the appropriate interventions with the mind towards social economic and environmental justice, it gives us a position to make visible the values and the perceptions of reality that are driving decisions. In the United States, we currently have politicians who are cutting social support for people with disabilities and those living in poverty, and this is their rationale. It will motivate them to have a life of dignity, increase their psychological well-being, weed out fraud and abuse, and save taxpayers money. The research on the other side, another version of reality, says, the majority of people on welfare are children, seniors, people with disabilities and adults with low paying jobs. Our house, our secretary for housing and urban development says raising rents would force low income tenants to become more self-sufficient. The plan represents our attempt to give poor people a way out of poverty. They're going to triple the rents for the poor people. What will that do when we have people who are in extremely low paying positions that most of their income will now go towards housing? It's another version of reality. If you look from people who are living in poverty versus someone who's in a powerful political position. So those are the kinds of versions of reality that I hope our research can make visible. They represent different value positions, but they also represent different uses of research. And so I would ask us all to consider this challenge to use mixed methods to identify support and include diverse participants so that you can reveal those different versions of reality, including their basis in privilege and power in order to contribute to change in understanding what is real. Okay, moving on to epistemology. Talking about mixed methods and our relationships that we have in the research process, what we value as knowledge would require us to have that kind of interactive link between researchers and participants, acknowledging that knowledge is socially and historically located. When someone came to the Gallaudet University campus and said we want to do research on deaf people because we just think that language is so cool. It just looks so neat when you guys are going like that. The deaf people look at them and go, do you know the history of oppression that we've experienced? From hearing people who in the 1800s said the best way to educate us is orally, taking away access to a visual language, you probably didn't know what I said because lip reading is incredibly difficult. But if I was saying that a visual language is accessible for deaf people, then if you knew sign language, you would know exactly what I said. And so being denied access to your language has to be something that's acknowledged as part of the history of relationships between hearing people and deaf people. This explicit acknowledgement of power inequities, development of trusty relationships, and building effective coalitions. Okay, let me go back and just revisit that knowledge is socially and historically located for just a moment. The picture with the red is actually a very, very large hair comb. It's as large as a human being. And it's a piece of art. It's called black birding. And this is made from the history of women from Australia who were taken away on pearl ships. They just disappeared and became slaves on pearl ships. And that practice became known as black birding. On the other side is an indigenous woman from Tasmania. Her name was Chuganini. And according to the history books, she worked in the governor's office for many years. And then she was settled in a plantation in Tasmania. But if you look at it from her perspective, her father was killed, her mother was killed, the man she was supposed to marry was killed, her brother and sister were killed by the colonizer. She was enslaved by the governor, worked there for many years, and then was imprisoned in Tasmania. So who gets to tell the story? Whose version of history are we going to pay attention to? It's very important for us. This is another example of building coalitions. And this is taken from Papua New Guinea's mining when the Soweto government signed a contract with the mining company because of economic growth, job creation, and taxes paid to Indonesia. The indigenous people said you're destroying our land, you're destroying our waters. They protested, they went out on strike. They built coalitions by going to the United Nations and saying there's a declaration of rights of indigenous people. There's norms on responsibilities of transnational corporations. And they were able then to form coalitions in the form of tribal councils. And then with the UN Working Group, they worked with the Australian Council for Overseas Aid. They established an office. They were able to get the mining company to establish a trust fund and granted them land rights and shares in the mine. Not a hundred percent perfect solution, but a demonstration of coalition building when you're facing powerful interests. Okay, before I move on to that because I wanted to, let's see, make sure I get what I want. Okay, so we're revisiting the Transfer and Mix Methods epistemological assumptions only because I wanted to emphasize this building of coalitions because sometimes we think if I had just more rigorous data, it would be persuasive. And so my argument is that it takes a lot more than just more rigorous data. It takes this kind of coalition building because here's the words of the President of the United States about our crisis and undocumented immigrants. Oh, I always hear that that population's safer than the people that live in our country. You've heard that, fellas, right? You've heard that? I hear it. I hear it so much and I say, is that possible? The answer is it's not. It's not true. You hear it's like they're better people than we have than our citizens. It's not true. But if you look at a study just completed in 2018 by Leighton Miller, they say, we combine newly developed estimates of the unauthorized population with multiple data sources to capture the criminal, socioeconomic, and demographic context of all 50 states in Washington DC from 1990 to 2014 to provide the first longitudinal analysis of the macro-level relationship between undocumented immigration and violence. Sounds pretty impressive as far as the research. The results from fixed effects regression models reveal that undocumented immigration does not increase violence, rather the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative. And so if you have people in powerful positions who are saying, fellas, it doesn't sound right so it's not right and there's rigorous research that says the opposite, then how are we going to get our message across for change? And that's why I'm arguing even more for the building of coalitions as a part of our designs. Okay, so moving on to the methodological assumption and I'm gonna give you a quick example overall that reflects all of these assumptions and how it would be applied. The development of a culturally responsive cyclical approach the engagement with a variety of diverse stakeholders, the conduct of contextual analysis, historical and political context, the development of interventions that are culturally responsive and facilitating use of the research findings for social transformation and implications for policy. So when we talk about contextual analysis, history and politics, we might be thinking, oh, all of this is very current. If we look at laws to devastate labor unions, rewrite tax cuts, undo environmental protection, privatize public resources, including education, require police action against undocumented immigrants. Sounds pretty current, but in 1954, the United States passed a law saying that you have to integrate your schools. White and black children can go to school together and the response from the state of Virginia was no, because our taxpayers should not have to support schools where we disagree that black and white children should go to school together. So they actually closed their public schools for five years and in the private education sector, they did not have to abide by the integration laws. So we are in troubling times right now. It's not entirely new. There have always been people who have pushed for the marginalization and the deregulation and so forth. In building coalitions, again, this is when leaders dismiss research, denial of climate change research, dismissal of research on immigration, saying the immigrants are threats to our citizens, looking at this fixed effects regression model, saying undocumented immigration doesn't cause violence. So what that brings me to is this model for transformative mixed methods and what you'll see here are six temporal phases of a research study. The first being to build relationships. Who do we need to include? Review literature, have individual and group consultation and develop working strategies. So who do we need to include in the research process and how do we work appropriately with different constituencies, different stakeholder groups? Conducting a contextual analysis. The methods that I have listed here are not the only methods you can use in contextual analysis. They're methods that I've seen used or used myself that gave me a better understanding of what was going on through focus group surveys, extant data, literature, GIS mapping to help identify what are those value positions and what kinds of interventions might be responsive in a way that would address these wicked problems. Piloting the intervention, having a very data rich, qualitative and quantitative data collection, observations, interviews, maybe photo voice, focus group surveys, pre and post data collection and team meetings. Team meetings to me are one of the most crucial data collection methods when we're trying to pilot something and understand how it's working, who it's working for and where the strengths and weaknesses are. And if we can come up with something from that pilot intervention and it might take more than one, we might find that some interventions are working for some people, not for other people to move then to the implementation phase where we do collect similar data as in the pilot. We add a lot more process evaluation in terms of implementation and collecting data on unexpected outcomes. Are some good things happening here that we didn't anticipate? Are some not so good things happening here that we hadn't anticipated? But keeping an eye and a consciousness that just because we've identified these variables that we say are the outcome variables, maybe there's other things that are going on. So including that in our design, determining the effectiveness, post data collection can be through all of the same kinds of data collection methods, can be surveys and tests, artwork, poetry, photos, mapping, and then examining the quality of the relationships that we formulated in the first phase because this is key to getting our research done in a way that's going to be seen as valid by the constituencies that we work with and key to making sure that we have in place those kinds of coalitions that will allow us to communicate our results as a way of trying to solve these wicked problems. And then including in the research design a phase for the use of the findings for transformative purposes to change policy, to refine the intervention and to expand and improve on our relationships. Okay, so what did this look like? It's been applied in a couple of different contexts, one in which I was invited to Korea and they said that they had this report from climate change that their industrial areas were causing great damage and that they were looking for a way to have research contribute to transformation. So I said, well, what do you mean by transformation? In Korea and they said, well, it means to live in harmony with nature and with each other, to have economic sustainability and to control the research process. So having energy and pollution doesn't match well with harmony, having polarization and gaps doesn't work well towards human dignity. The technological ecosystem, industry and unemployment, what they really want is improved quality of life and economic development. So this is what they told me, this is what we're working towards. This is a picture of their eco-industrial park and the conditions under which people were living. They had collected data on the economic impact, the environmental impact and the social impact. It was all done quantitatively post hoc and what they were looking for is how can we work together with government, with universities, with people in the industrial parks to create that balance, that harmony of social, economic and environmental justice. And so this was the beginning design that we worked out together in the first phase identifying those stakeholders. Who do we need to include building the necessary relationships, analyzing documents and also using quantitative data at that first phase to identify what's available already in terms of data for demographics and environmental data. The next phase was with qualitative interviews, focus groups, town meetings and quantitatively establishing baseline for pollutants and health status. Moving to the third phase, qualitatively developing interventions based on that stakeholder input from phase two and then having quantitative, qualitative data collected for pilot testing, the interventions and the data collection methods themselves. Moving over to phase four, quantitative process of assessment of implementation giving pretests, qualitative observing and intervening stakeholders and groups during the intervention and then in the final phase doing post-test measures, qualitatively doing interviews, observations and engaging with policy makers. So this was an implementation of the transformative model within the context of Korea who had explicitly asked for a design that would help them find harmony in the form of social, economic and environmental justice. So my conclusions, oh good, perfect. The world is facing challenges that are complex and without solution in the form of climate change, violence, poverty, lack of access to health and education services, social and economic inequality and migration. In order to address policies related to these wicked problems, researchers need to address power inequities, violations of human rights and impediments to social justice and strategize for action in the form of policies and behaviors. Given the complex nature of wicked problems, future challenges for mixed methods researchers include how to bring multidisciplinary teams together to share their expertise in respectful ways. This is not a new problem, but it is one that continues to challenge researchers and warrants continued attention by our community. I contend that mixed methods has the potential to contribute to finding solutions to wicked problems because it stimulates new kinds of questions, involves the use of innovations and methodology needed to address complexity. Future challenges include how to methodologically, technically and creatively bring mixed methods in finding solutions to wicked problems in terms of the researcher's role as they advocate for social justice, engage with policymakers and those in political power and build respectful relationships with all state curlers, including members of marginalized communities. These questions are highly important to the United States and Europe and other countries around the globe. The United States government established the Commission on Evidence-Based Policy just in 2017 that focuses only on the use of extant quantitative data sharing. So it's a step, but it's not a large leap. It's a step in the right direction. The European Union, as you well know, also expressed interest in seeing evidence of the effects of research that they funded over the last few decades. They funded the impact EV, they're evaluating the impact and outcomes of European research. So it's both the United States and Europe who are in need of developing strategies to improve the way policies are evaluated so that they're based on evidence and lead to the desired goals. So my final words are, a stance like this takes courage that I believe mixed methods has the potential to help with our contributions by capturing complexity, addressing social justice and ethics, that we benefit by having teams of researchers and building coalitions, and that we include in that capacity building with the stakeholders that we work with so that when we leave the context as researchers, there's a trained group of people with a passion for the issues who are equipped to carry on that work. Finished.