What's The Use of Crying?

What rights do scholars have to their own emotions as they conduct research on issues that directly impact their lives? And how do unscripted emotional exchanges function within critical disaster studies? These questions are ripe for further discussion given our situatedness within the COVID-19 global pandemic. All studies of the novel coronavirus in the coming decades will be conducted by survivors of this shared trauma, whether they involve witness testimonies or not.

Like many scholars attempting to stay connected with research communities from home during the pandemic, I have attended several remote conferences, some of which addressed the theme of conducting research in times of catastrophe. At one virtual meeting, I was surprised to hear a speaker discourage listeners from having overly emotional reactions when working in critical disaster studies. The suggestion was that if you're crying while working, perhaps you aren't ready for the labor of trauma and tragedy.

This advice has caused me to reflect on some of the tears that have been shed in the masslistening project I direct, "Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane" (www.mimariapr.org), as a means of beginning to think through the role of emotional connectivity between researchers, collaborators, and subjects in disaster-based projects, particularly when all parties are participants in the same collective trauma. This is an especially pertinent line of inquiry given that we are all now partners in a global crisis.

Take, for example, an occurrence that happened approximately two months after Category 5 Hurricane María decimated Puerto Rico. A young woman entered my morning class about twenty minutes late. The other students directed her attention to a long table stretched out against the far wall of the room covered in a smorgasbord of oddities that I was able to pull together from the mostly barren grocery store shelves. Black beans with onions, chilies, canned oranges, and chopped Spam sat in a bowl next to a bright orange calabaza pie with a crust made from stale saltines.

I was eating with a small group of students in the back of the room, so I could clearly see her eyes widen as she registered the array of cobbled-together foods arranged on my old blue tablecloth. For a second, I thought that she'd say something funny or even cutting, but instead, her legs folded underneath her until she was down on her knees, clutching her books to her chest as she wept loudly.

My unusual brunch was the most food she'd seen since her home was destroyed by the hurricane, almost two months earlier. Feeling lucky to be able to sleep on a friend's couch, she hadn't wanted to trouble anyone about food. So each week, she just bought what she could afford: one box of Ritz crackers.

Her visceral reaction to the meal conveyed the urgency of her situation and allowed me to attend to her previously unstated material needs from that day forward. Beyond these physical necessities, however, this experience, and others similar to it, ultimately led to the inception of the "Mi María" project as a space for students and community members to share their stories as a means of resituating themselves: not as disempowered peoples but as active agents guiding their life narratives and their lives.

Months later, as I began collecting oral histories for this project, I interviewed a teacher who described the experience of walking several miles with her husband from their destroyed home in Aguadilla to her sisterin-law's house in the neighboring town of Aguada. She paused from telling me about walking past overturned cars that had been caught up and tossed aside in a flash flood to ask, "How do you describe the smell of decaying bodies?"

And suddenly, I was not the interviewer and she was not the subject of my interview. We were two survivors together in our shared grief. When our eyes met, hers were not the first to overflow. My tears fell, and only then did she cry.

I have discussed previously one of the functions of publicly disseminated disaster narratives...