Being an expert 👩🏻🏫when you know the least.

Through the process of promotion from assistant professor to associate professor, the message that in a semiprophetic tone I have received has been: you must become an expert."🔮 The question I have had since I started this project on the crossover between coca plantations and school is: expert in what, exactly? 

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On my first visit to Cauca, I had the opportunity of listening to a community leader describe how he had worked hand in hand with others to convert coca into an input for the legal economy. In his narrative there was not only precision in the details of growing and harvesting 🌱but also political intention in the actions he described and in the way he presented the coca plant and its powers. ✊🏽 Overwhelmed by the density of the experience he shared, I wondered:

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• How much time would you need to make sense of everything Enrique was telling us? 
• How do you do it without being that investigator who arrives, floods you with questions, does a couple of workshops, and then leaves with the promise to return with analyzed data?
• And finally, how to do any of this when you also have a one-year old?

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In seeking answers under the paradigm of traditional ethnography I just hit walls. The time required was too much, and the chances of concentrating on research while caring full time for a baby separated from her dad were minimal. Unsatisfied with my answers, I understood that “I can handle everything by myself”–style ethnography was a thing of the past—at least for the next few years. So I decided to work as a team. Thanks to NAEd/Spencer funding, so far there are six of us: 

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1. A project coordinator, who knows the communities where we work, accompanies me to meetings with administrators and educators, and provides feedback on the data collection instruments.
2. A field coordinator, who combines archival work at the Ministry of Defense and Education in Colombia with data collection in Cauca and resolves logistical issues.
3. A research assistant doing archival work at the Library of Congress and the Wikileaks Public Library for Diplomacy in the United States.
4. Two ethnographers, each born in one of the fieldwork sites and graduates of the school where they collect data. One holds an undergraduate degree in political science and the other is in their seventh semester of an anthropology degree.
5. . . . and me. 

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Under the traditional format, I guess that in the résumé my position would appear as 😳“principal investigator.”😳 It is true that so far I have led the project’s design process, but in the conversations we have had about coca it is clear that the others are the experts. I can state that, so far, my expertise lies in identifying the key people who can take the research forward. Beyond this statement, this project emphasizes at every turn that the expert is not the one who knows but the one who learns.