Last December CGO student Allie Sasek posted an article to our Facebook page asking if we could get Dr. Brian Barber to be a guest with the group. Dr. Barber is an professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Conflict, also at UT-Knoxville. The original article that caught Allie’s attention was about his work in Cairo with youth involved in the Arab Spring. His work focuses on how involvement in political organizations influences the development of youth, particularly in circumstances of trauma and conflict. His previous projects in Gaza and Bosnia had allowed him to focus specifically on outwardly violent contexts and the role of and influences on adolescent development. He has traveled to Cairo several times since the beginning of the Arab Spring to follow developments there with several youth involved in the demonstrations that took place, and continue to take place, in that city.

We were able to Skype with Dr. Barber during CGO class time and ask him about his research trajectories and the center he founded, and we were able to focus more explicitly on how he positions himself as a researcher with people who are intimately involved in violent protests. This was a way for us to examine the ethics of a researcher in the field, how a researcher works with youth and how academics deal with the emotion and violence they are confronted with in the course of their research. Dr. Barber was incredibly thoughtful in his responses, showing some of the real-world issues that researchers, who are generally assumed to be impartial observers, must navigate in these contexts.

Whitney Logue asks a question of Dr Barber during our Skype conversation