Peace and Planning

For one of my final papers this semester, I attempted to take a narrative approach to public discourse. Specifically, I was interested in how members of the public presenting testimony at a DC Council hearing on transportation policy framed their arguments. While I have very little training in narrative analysis, it was an interesting experiment – and a complementary structural analysis certainly shed light on the limitations of bureaucratic public engagement processes to navigate conflict, particularly when it gets personal.

My analysis centered on a recent Performance Oversight Hearing of the District Department of Transportation (DDOT). While I didn’t have the capacity to analyze the full hearing, I selected one panel to review (with about 10 public witnesses) because it involved a diversity of perspectives and positionalities and because the panel followed an uncommon trajectory wherein a brief heated argument erupted between two panelists.

The thematic analysis suggested epistemological trends based in the truth claims being made:

Epistemology of place: This was reflected when panelists mentioned the extent to which DDOT engaged or did not engage with people who lived in the neighborhood. Comments like, “we know because we live here” and “[the project was done] without any community input” were shared to make this claim.

Epistemology of experience: This was reflected when panelists shared their personal experiences of how transportation policy impacted them. For example, a mother who had lost her daughter to road violence relayed how a month later, she and her husband were almost hit in a crosswalk, retraumatizing them and highlighting a gap in DDOT data collection (accounting for “close calls”). Another panelist shared how his drive downtown took twice as long as usual, and how this evidenced that the changes to roads DDOT recently made were ill-advised.

Epistemology of oppression: This claim was reflected in comments that highlighted how transportation policy led to inequitable outcomes for marginalized groups. This claim category included comments such as “users have left our ADA-reliant friends and neighbors stranded in the middle of sidewalks” and “the operation of e-scooters is dangerous for the disabled, for seniors, and for the blind.”

In each of the testimonies, a claim to truth also revealed a claim to power through identity or positionality. For example, panelists appeared to frame their experiences alongside identifiers such as being a long-time homeowner, a parent, or a representative of a group of people as a signal of their credibility and authority.

The structural analysis was focused on the processes of the hearing itself using participant observation. The analysis found the public hearing process to be virtually devoid of any dialogue, which is challenging when there are no other spaces to engage with fellow residents who have alternative perspectives on transportation policy aside from snarky anonymous comment threads on news websites or tense community engagement events hosted by local agencies. Indeed, we see why this process is so insufficient when we investigate the unscripted outburst that unfolded at the end of this panel. One panelist was so compelled by disbelief and anger that they broke the protocols of a public hearing to take issue with the misinformed, disingenuous, and disrespectful testimony offered by another panelist. It is precisely this inability to engage with the narratives that are offered in public participation spaces that constrains the capacity of the public to be able to mediate itself out of conflict. Instead, every narrative is a siloed attempt at truth that goes unrecognized beyond the meaning that unknown bystanders take from whatever insufficient words we have had to hurry through in our quest for some influence over the tides of life that leave us harried and tired after we have battled the streets…and whatever “others” we have made up for ourselves as challengers to our power along the way.

While Councilmember Cheh (who presided over the proceedings explored for this study) is a shining example of bringing inquiry and humanity to otherwise staid public participation practices, she is a rare local elected official swimming against the current of our rigid democratic structures. If the incident witnessed during the public hearing is any indication, the false discourse that unfolds under the well-meaning auspices of elected officials is doing more to not only entrench tired notions of privileged people being harmed and spread misinformation by those intent on protecting their self-interests, but also to limit connections in an increasingly isolated world and miss opportunities for collective problem-solving (an unfortunate outcome given the scale and scope of the challenges we face). Moreover, it begs the question of what types of truth and power should be recognized and consulted when making decisions that will impact residents and visitors alike for decades to come. While we certainly need mechanisms to hold government accountable (particularly when business interests may have an undue influence over political decision-making) and local knowledge is a critical source of information (especially where segments of the population have been disenfranchised), we also need ways to circumvent the outcries of unfairness that plague projects meant to benefit the public good. These questions point to intriguing avenues of future study, especially areas of inquiry that leverage qualitative analysis to examine narratives imbued with identity and investigate systems steeped in cultural norms and expectations.