Could the Professionals Stop Stepping on the Wounds?

INS200: Introduction to Indigenous Truth and Resilience
Everything Matters- Could the Professionals Stop Stepping on the Wounds?
Mimmy Hsu
1003162613
What is damage? The term damage refers to harm that has the potential to impair the value or the usefulness of something; and it can either be physical or emotional in which case it results to broken hearts and spirits. People can inflict damage to themselves or it can be done by other people and it can end up hurting us from the inside. But ordinarily, people become obsessed with it until they cannot stop thinking or talking about it. It is also important to note that there is always someone to blame behind every damage caused to an individual or a group of people. According to the paper, most of the researches done about oppressed groups have almost always been about damage. These types of studies may involve issues such as effects of bullying on abnormal high school students, studies about the impact of segregation on black youth, and it can also focus on framing research studies such that they focus on some wrongdoing and how it impacts an individual or a group of people for the worse. This paper examines the problems with the damage-centered narratives in education and research involving indigenous communities.
In Tuck’s article “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities”, she pleads with the native communities not to allow the researchers to occupy and seize their spaces until research studies are conducted in a manner that is mutually beneficial and that focuses on the desire rather than the damage. Research done on indigenous communities by social researchers have a long history of portraying people from these communities in a monolithic damaged way (Tuck, 2009). Besides that, she proposes that developing and employing desire as a framework which is used in capturing the complexity of the human experience. The desired structure has the ability to encompass damage without being driven by it. It is also keynoting that desire also enables people to comprehend the means through which people generate oppressive systems while at the same time diligently resisting them.
Theory of change is a clear methodology that is applied in designing research projects, planning and evaluating the impact of the research. As expected, the theory of change maps the link between the activities of the research and the intended results while evaluating the various circumstantial factors that may influence the outcomes. Later on, Tuck explains that the theory of change can indeed affect how a project unfolds, what people see and the intended audience that the project is designed for. But most importantly, the theory of change plays a major role in operationalizing the ethical stance of the research project. The data that was considered was what comprises of the evidence and how the research findings are discovered. Therefore, because of these findings, these evidences help in recognizing what findings of the research are made public and what is not.
Furthermore, Tuck explains how damage-centered research is a “flawed theory of change”. She emphasizes that these kinds of researches are often used in holding resources for people from marginalized communities,...