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Behind the Scenes of a Research and Training Collaboration: Power, Privilege, and the Hidden Transcript of Race

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Abstract

This paper examines a federally funded research and training collaboration between an Ivy League psychiatric research center and a historically Black university and medical center. This collaboration focuses on issues of psychiatric recovery and rehabilitation among African Americans. In addition, this multidisciplinary collaboration aims to build the research capacity at both institutions and to contribute to the tradition of research in culture and mental health within the medical social sciences and cultural psychiatry. This article provides a window into the complex, often messy, dynamics of a collaboration that cross cuts institutional, disciplinary, and demographic boundaries. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, we intend to illustrate how collaborative relationships unfold and are constructed through ongoing reciprocal flows of knowledge and experience. Central to this aim is a consideration of how issues of power, privilege, and the hidden transcript of race shape the nature of our research and training efforts.

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Notes

  1. The second author has been conducting focus groups and engaging in participant observation with residents of these communities since 2005. Since 2008, we have conducted this study under the auspices of the Collaboration.

  2. The reticence to speak that we have observed and have interpreted to be a response to senior faculty could, alternatively, be interpreted as a response to the presence of White outsiders (see, e.g., the discussion of Urciuoli’s (1996) distinction between “inner sphere” vs. “outer sphere” of talk in Hill (1999). However, we have observed this reticence to dissipate outside of the historically Black university context in racially diverse group interactions.

  3. We point to Crane (2010) problematizing of “opportunity”: “[In global health partnerships] inequality is both a form of suffering to be redressed and a professional, knowledge-generating opportunity to be exploited.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Community and Family Medicine, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center, Lebanon, NH, USA

    Elizabeth Carpenter-Song

  2. McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Rob Whitley

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center, Lebanon, NH, USA

    Rob Whitley

Authors
  1. Elizabeth Carpenter-Song
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  2. Rob Whitley
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Correspondence to Elizabeth Carpenter-Song.

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Carpenter-Song, E., Whitley, R. Behind the Scenes of a Research and Training Collaboration: Power, Privilege, and the Hidden Transcript of Race. Cult Med Psychiatry 37, 288–306 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-013-9311-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-013-9311-5

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