Discovery and Inquiry Pathways to Navigating the Handbook of Failure (Fraser, Gertrude and Thompson, Claire Holman, in The Routledge International Handbook of Failure, forthcoming, November 2022): excerpt

Abstract

Our aim in this afterword is to take the position of an informed reader in the social sciences who seeks as we did to discover points of entry into critical failure studies as developed within the Routledge International Handbook of Failure. Because the book ranges across disciplines and subject matter, we find that the introduction provides an ample overview of the chapters and the goals of the work.  We have chosen to ask the question: how might a reader navigate this volume and approach its many theories, definitions, and perspectives?  To accomplish this, we offer a brief view of two current projects, distinct in their foci, which served as points of entry to this body of work.  First, a project on failure narratives among women in the academy, and second, a project which revolves around the coronavirus pandemic and vaccine hesitancy across six nations. In so doing, we hope to show how particular chapters provide surprises, insights, and theoretical frameworks that inform and deepen our understanding of this nascent and rich inquiry into the nature of failure and how it is problematized and challenged. 

Introduction

This afterword is being written at a time when catastrophic failure seems to be at our doorstep. Just one week ago, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine with overwhelming military force.  At the same time, we continue to face the effects of the global coronavirus pandemic, which stands at over 444,000,000 cases and over 6,000,000 deaths world-wide. The United Nations recently announced that climate disaster looms even closer than we feared, and that our window of opportunity to save the earth and ourselves is closing rapidly.  Some among us continue to question the existence of climate change.  Many of us feel a sense of worlds unmaking, of the untethering, and an accompanying lack of trust in our capacity to address basic issues.  There is in fact a loss of human consensus and common agreements, the failure of systems large and small. We are writing as an academic at a research university and as a consultant to nonprofits. We are relatively privileged female identified persons who have the benefits of secure housing, reliable electric and water infrastructure, with children who have had the best education our society has to offer. We have not had to suffer the incalculable losses of war or devastating natural disasters. Still, it still seems necessary to situate our anxieties about catastrophic failure as a precursor to our reflections on this important work.  

As we teeter on the brink of some sort of civilization failure, we seek to understand the phenomena in which we are so deeply immersed. Within this volume, the chapter authors offer many ways to engage with the concept of failure. While at first these varied approaches can seem overwhelming, instead in reading, we found a sense of possibility, of options from which one can begin to make sense of failure in all its varied aspects and that leads us far beyond any singular notion of failure. The chapter authors point out a lack of critical frameworks in the existing literature. This volume provides a kind of taxonomy, a way into organizing these different approaches in relationship to one another. Whether we view failure as a moment of rupture or of invention, any reader might ask, what of this voluminous and fascinating material might prove useful for my own set of questions about failure? As an example, we offer here a brief recounting of our own encounter with the subject through the lens of intersections between gender, career, and organizational life as experienced by academic women in science and engineering.  Finally, we outline our current research on failure as related to the coronavirus pandemic and vaccine hesitancy.  We hope to use these projects as examples of how a curious reader might discover salient approaches among the many excellent chapters and perspectives in the handbook and relate them to their intellectual projects. 

Our journey into failure studies began with oral life history.  Fraser, an anthropologist at the University of Virginia, served as principal investigator for UVA's $3.1MM National Science Foundation ADVANCE program. She and Holman Thompson, a consultant researcher, became intrigued when, in coding the oral histories of STEM faculty collected during the project, numerous complex failure narratives surfaced. (We should mention that the women studied were highly successful, ranked professors at a major research university). This finding led us to examine how failure took such a central place in the narratives: One woman described failing her doctoral exam three times; another described the shock of having her department’s endorsement of promotion overturned at a higher level; another decided to learn how to be more extroverted after she surmised that, despite stellar research performance in industry, her failure to progress must have been due to her lack of emotional intelligence.  Many described institutional failure. For example, women faculty were tasked with the major portion of departmental advising and service, while male colleagues preserved their time for research and publishing, the main metrics used to determine raises and promotion. Many of the women also described institutional failures reflected in androcentric cultures which disincentivized child-rearing and breast-feeding and incentivized women to delay or forgo family life. An orientation to failure as an essential scientific value also surfaced. A few our participants described how they taught their graduate students to embrace failure as a necessary dimension of their learning to be scientists.

Our study of coronavirus vaccine hesitancy looks across cultures at the contexts and settings in which the vaccine is viewed with skepticism. The term we prefer to use for this phenomenon is vaccine hesitancy, but other terms in the literature include vaccine refusal, vaccine dissent, vaccine skepticism, vaccine non-compliance, and vaccine opposition.  This subject matter, like the oral histories, is replete with images of breakdown, policy failure, and individual suffering, inequalities of access, and failure to arrive at basic consensus about what constitutes knowledge and truth. Our goal is to use semi-structured interviews with our interlocutors to elicit their complex perspectives on vaccine hesitancy, what it is called, how it is conceptualized. We hope that in the telling they will explain the phenomenon’s features and point us toward the range of knowledge, experiences, practices, and attitudes associated with vaccine hesitancy. The lens of failure seems to be a powerful one through which to view and interrogate their responses. For this project, which is just beginning, the ideas in the handbook inspired us to ask questions about failure that we had not previously considered.