Positionality

This paper examines the complexities and ethical dilemmas faced by non-Indigenous artists and academics engaging with decolonial discourse, emphasising the importance of respecting and amplifying First Nations voices. Motivated by the need for authentic representation of Indigenous perspectives, the paper integrates insights from Wiradjuri philosophy, specifically the Yindyamarra Winhanganha (respectful thinking) framework, to propose a holistic and ethical approach for non-Indigenous engagement with decolonial practices. By analysing a case study involving the queer performance collective, The Department of Homo Affairs, the paper highlights the risks of perpetuating colonial dynamics through the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. It proposes a code of ethics for non-Indigenous artists based on Wiradjuri principles, promoting critical self-reflection, genuine collaboration, and prioritising Indigenous authority. The paper also explores the broader implications for policy and institutional change, aiming to create a more equitable and inclusive academic and artistic landscape.

This forum critically reflects on discrimination faced by early-career women international relations (IR) scholars in the Asia-Pacific region in their workplaces and beyond. By taking a self-ethnographic perspective, six contributors from five countries provide an engaging overview of difficulties they face in their everyday lives. Against the backdrop of this diverse and globalizing region, the contributors are all academic migrants in search of employment and learning opportunities within the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. They lead migratory lives by frequently crossing ideational and material boundaries to contribute to a more diverse IR knowledge base, and they encounter numerous difficulties and forms of discrimination. This forum has two aims. First, in reflecting on the contributors’ own lived experiences, it highlights the diversity of issues faced by early-career women scholars in this region. Second, it calls for novel, more inclusive forms of solidarity that appreciates...

The bifurcated treatment of the continent between two separate geographical domains, in different fields of study and politics, has deepened the divide between Africans on both sides of the imaginary Saharan border, as it betrays the historical connections which tie these regions. This gathering allows us to reimagine an African identity beyond essentialism and ethnocentrism while offering methodological approaches to remedy this intra-continental split along racial, ethnic, and religious lines. 

The aim of this gathering is to reflect on how we as Africans think about Africa and the North African narrative in the continent. This interactive symposium will include scholars and students from the continent and the African diaspora.

In this article, two white, Western female researchers reflect on the methodological, ethical, and practical dilemmas experienced while conducting social science fieldwork in Botswana for their doctoral degrees. In addition, their shared research assistant examines her role as a social and cultural interlocutor, which was essential to the researchers’ successful navigation in their various field sites. Drawing on distinct but common experiences conducting research in northern and western regions of rural Botswana, the authors reflexively consider a series of interwoven issues tied to their positionalities: the disparity in benefits and return on research investment between the researcher and research participants; the nature of commodified or transactional relations, especially in an impoverished region highly dependent on foreign tourists; the complex nature of researcher–research assistant relationships; and the contradictory dynamics of being female researchers in a patriarchal s...

This forum critically reflects on discrimination faced by early-career women international relations (IR) scholars in the Asia-Pacific region in their workplaces and beyond. By taking a self-ethnographic perspective, six contributors from five countries provide an engaging overview of difficulties they face in their everyday lives. Against the backdrop of this diverse and globalizing region, the contributors are all academic migrants in search of employment and learning opportunities within the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. They lead migratory lives by frequently crossing ideational and material boundaries to contribute to a more diverse IR knowledge base, and they encounter numerous difficulties and forms of discrimination. This forum has two aims. First, in reflecting on the contributors’ own lived experiences, it highlights the diversity of issues faced by early-career women scholars in this region. Second, it calls for novel, more inclusive forms of solidarity that appreciates...

The concept of ‘trust’ is frequently used when discussing the working relationship between deaf signers and signed language interpreters, with interpreters often claiming that trust is a prerequisite to a successful interaction. This paper presents original data from an in-depth research project which used collaborative autoethnography to gather the experiences of seven deaf academics who work regularly with British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters, who interpret between BSL and spoken English, to analyse the concept of ‘trust’ in our working relations with BSL interpreters. We found that ‘trust’ is not a useful or productive concept for our interpersonal and professional aims. Instead, we outline multiple ways in which deaf academics can assess and evaluate interpreters’ values, competencies, and performance without relying on ‘trust’. Our findings provide an important, powerful and under-explored perspective on the working relations between deaf academics and interpreters. We sugg...

"Positionality" is yet another buzzword that has infected the academic mind.  In this piece, I examine the work of a graduate student doing some fieldwork in India, and five years after doing so she wrote an article clotted with all that she thinks she knows about "positionality" and how it affected what she did. More mindless chatter from academics eager show their "specialness."  This piece by me is full of photos taken in my many travels in India.

This thesis is the first investigation of artistic mediation in verbatim theatre from a playwright’s perspective using Practice as Research (PaR). The thesis consists of a dissertation and a portfolio of work created using the verbatim methodology: i.e. based on the words of real people. The term ‘verbatim theatre’ has been much debated since its emergence in the late twentieth century with scholarly discussion focusing primarily on historical origins, data collection methods, reflexivity, ethics and authenticity; less attention has been paid to the creative methodologies of playwrights who stylise words from interviews, court transcripts and other documents and turn them into performance. As context for the creative project the dissertation situates the portfolio in the canon of British verbatim theatre and provides contextual information on the subject matter – modern slavery and human trafficking from Albania. The portfolio of creative work investigates a playwright’s practice in mediating verbatim source material for use in advocacy, addressing questions of positionality, ethics and form. The resulting creative work consists of an audio drama, a dance film, and an installation of artefacts. The portfolio is a form of social practice which, through collaboration with charities, law enforcement agencies and policy makers, makes a complex, societal issue visible. PaR has allowed dramaturgical insights which would not have been evident through a review of play texts, theatre visits and the observation of other playwrights’ processes alone. I argue that ‘verbatim’ is a data source rather than a genre and that mediation, although often undisclosed, is necessarily present in all variants of verbatim theatre. I suggest that the traditional verbatim form practised in the 1990s lacked transparency and that the innovative forms of mediation found in ‘post-verbatim’ theatre result, not in less truthful accounts, but in a more ethical approach with deeper levels of insight.

"Critical disability studies" (CDS) is an interdisciplinary field of research that examines social, political, economic, racial, gendered and historical constructions of bodily non-normativity across different geopolitical areas and scales. Despite its diverse and multiple contributions and objectives, current research in critical disability studies has been described as mainly focusing on disability issues in the Global North and as having universalizing tendencies. In this context, intersubjective perspectives and empirical data offered by ethnographic works in medical and disability anthropology and related disciplines have been either in accord or tension with the broader field of CDS. On the one hand, this review article illustrates the many ways anthropologists have adopted various research perspectives to explore bodily non-normativity outside settings in the Global North. On the other, it shows the importance of research by anthropologists working on topics related to disability, as well as their recent fruitful collaborations with CDS scholars and approaches. By exploring these epistemological and empirical entanglements, this paper concludes that deeper engagements between CDS and anthropology, as well as a more thorough focus on the ethnographic analysis of bodily non-normativity, can open new creative routes for the analysis of disability in various world contexts.

During fieldwork, anthropologists are given many names that point to their intersectional placement regarding race, class, gender, nationality, and religion. Yet, careful consideration of vernacular forms of designation reveals that such generalizing categories do not always reflect the ways in which people are named and positioned in a given context. While acknowledging the relevance of intersectionality, this paper discusses the relationship between naming and social positionality through a comparative consideration of names employed to designate Dulley in Angola and Santos in Senegal. It explores how these designators, ascribed to the researchers by their interlocutors, contextually identify their positionality. Through concrete examples, it shows how this process of emplacement can both enable and restrict one’s possibilities of action and experience.

This collection re-envisions the academic study of institutional translation and interpreting (ITI), uncovering the ways in which institutional practices have inhibited knowledge creation and encouraging stakeholders to continue to challenge the assumptions and epistemics which underpin the field.

PurposeArgued is the need for: (1) a clearer interpretation of procedural ethics guidelines; (2) the identification and development of ethical field case study models which can be incorporated into university ethics teaching; (3) an understanding of the vulnerabilities of researchers and participants as reflected in the researchers' positionality and reflexivity and (4) ethnographic monitoring as a participant-friendly and participatory ethics methodology.Design/methodology/approachThis article, drawn from the author's four-decade trajectory of collective ethnographic research, addresses the ethical challenges and dilemmas encountered by researchers when conducting ethnographic research, particularly with vulnerable migrant women and youth.FindingsThe author addresses dilemmas in field research resulting from different interpretations of ethics and emphasizes the need for researchers to be critically aware of their own vulnerabilities and those of migrants to avoid unethical...

Drawing on a critical autoethnography, this essay explores the lived experiences of a Chinese migrant researcher in Belgium and the influence of Belgium as a place of knowledge production on both the researcher and the research itself. First, it highlights the challenges of academic mobility in Europe experienced by migrant researchers in the face of the multiscalar mobility regimes, and underscores how geographic mobility intersects with social class. Second, it reveals the impact of the dual, even plural, scientific socialisation across borders on the self-refashioning and self-evaluation of researchers with migrant backgrounds. Last, the essay argues that the insider/outsider positions of researchers are not static but are constantly (re)shaped by their identities, social positions, and geographic locations – Belgium, in this case, as a place of study, residence, and knowledge production. It further emphasizes the agency of researchers in negotiating complex field relations. This essay contributes to a nuanced understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of migrant researchers in the Global North and sheds light on the role of the place of knowledge production in shaping their ways of doing research and being a researcher.

Postcolonial power relations have shaped my research process and the research relations between members of the Comorian diaspora in Marseille and me, a white, female, Austrian PhD student. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, I reflect on the various mechanisms of whiteness which shaped my research and the question of how researching and writing on postcolonial diaspora from a white positionality became an (im)possible project for me. I engage with this question through fictionalised scenes (Visweswaran), based on encounters which marked a shift in the research process, often failures or situations which reflected a negotiation of power relations. I discuss the role of intersectional, that is racialised, gendered and generational relations shaping research relations using three scenes, namely a conversation with a Franco-Comorian social worker, an encounter with a younger Franco-Comorian woman during a madjlisse (religious event) and a meeting with a representative of a Franco-Comorian association. The focus lies on processes of marking whiteness, negotiations of Othering and moments and practices of (dis)identifications pertaining to research participants and me while conducting ethnographic research in a postcolonial context.

Zusammenfassung Die Kirchenmitgliedschaftsuntersuchungen (KMU) sind die wohl wichtigsten religionssoziologischen Studien für die evangelische (und seit der sechsten KMU auch für die katholische) Kirche in Deutschland. Die aktuelle KMU VI (Erhebungsjahr 2022) nimmt im Vergleich zur Vorgängerstudie aus 2012 das kirchliche Bildungshandeln verstärkt in den Blick. Zentrale Ergebnisse werden vorgestellt: Der Religionsunterricht in seiner konfessionell getrennten Organisationsform hat nur noch einen geringen Rückhalt in der Bevölkerung. Die Arbeit der kirchlichen Kindertagesstätten führt bei den meisten Eltern nicht zu einer Einstellungsänderung gegenüber der Kirche. Bei der religiösen Sozialisation spielen die erstmals abgefragten gemeindepädagogischen Angebote, insbesondere die Konfirmation, eine wichtige Rolle. Der Artikel schließt mit möglichen Konsequenzen für Religions- und Gemeindepädagogik, Kirche und Gesellschaft.

In this reflection paper, which stems from my PhD project and explores the gender arrangements and subjective experiences of female breadwinning couples (FBCs) in Pakistan, I delve into the distinctive challenges faced by a male researcher conducting gender research in a patriarchal cultural context. Drawing from both in-person and online fieldwork experiences, which began during the pre-pandemic period and extended through the pandemic into the post-pandemic era, this article unveils the layered intricacies posed by entrenched gender norms, societal expectations and the dynamics of a male researcher probing gendered issue. These challenges were further intensified in online mediums of interviewing, presenting obstacles from participant hesitations surrounding online privacy to inconsistent Internet connectivity and continuous disruptions. This paper also underscores the fluidity and multifaceted nature of the researcher's positionality, navigating interplays of gender, age, and cultural perceptions. My dual role, both an insider (by virtue of my cultural connection to the fieldwork area) and an outsider (owing to my affiliation with a Western academic institution), added layers of complexity to the fieldwork experiences. By juxtaposing in-person and online encounters, a rich tapestry unfolds, depicting both intersecting and unique challenges inherent to each mode of interviewing. Contributions of this reflection paper are multifold, which not only offers valuable insights for future researchers venturing into similar sociocultural contexts but also highlights the nuanced experiences of male-led gender research in predominantly patriarchal settings. The paper also contributes to the discourse on the fluidity of insider-outsider roles, reflexivity, and the methodological resilience and adaptability needed while conducting gender-focused fieldwork within specific cultural contexts.

BackgroundMany engineering education researchers acknowledge that their positionality impacts their research. Practices for reporting positionality vary widely and rarely incorporate a nuanced discussion of the impact of demographic identities on research. Researchers holding marginalized or relatively hidden identities must navigate additional layers regarding transparency of their positionality.PurposeWe identify ways in which positionality impacts research, with a particular emphasis on demographic identity dimensions. We note that whether identities are relatively marginalized, privileged, hidden, or apparent in a research context creates complexities for conceptualizing, practicing, and disclosing one's positionality.MethodIn a collaborative inquiry informed by autoethnography, we assemble positionality reflections of current engineering education researchers to demonstrate the primary ways in which positionality impacts research.ResultsWe find that positionality impacts si...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global production networks and challenged the resilience of regional economies to external shocks. The tourism sector was severely affected by the travel bans imposed, as were regions characterised by tourism development, such as Zambezi in northern Namibia. Nonetheless, with the support of the national government, conservancies, as local governance institutions, partly maintained the distribution of value from tourism throughout the pandemic and strengthened agriculture-tourism linkages to achieve long-term transformation. These findings suggest that local institutions are able to create regional resilience through their capacity to drive adaptation and adaptability in a diversified regional economy.

This article discusses the fieldwork methodological problems of trust-building. Hoping to be included as an insider by the informants, the researcher attempted to employ the most similar accent with the transnational undocumented Lao labourers along the Thai-Lao border on various occasions. Adopting the theoretical framework of ethnography, positionality, and trust-building, the researcher conducted a number of research fieldworks along the Thai-Lao border in Ubon Ratchathani and Champassak from 2019 to 2023. Taking great effort to employ the most similar Lao accent with the informants when collecting data, the researcher expected that trust would be enhanced and they would be included as an insider by the informants. In contrast, the informants were suspicious about the researcher. This article argues that a researcher should spend sufficient time in the field rather than trying to change their accent, despite it being similar to the informants’. Trust will therefore be enhanced. Throughout the research conducted from 2019 to 2023, document analysis, participant observation, and interview methods were employed. The methodological problems with trust-building were found when the data was collected using participant observations and interviews because the

In this article we discuss the lived, embodied experience of home-making in relation to identity and belonging through the example of a service-learning project conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic in a higher education setting in London, UK. We also explore the notion of belonging-not-belonging as a cultural, material and embodied construct, inspired by critical pedagogy. We draw on posthumanism, new materialism, intercultural studies, (auto-)ethnography and creative practice research as possible lines of flight in deconstructing the dichotomy between home and a ‘foreign’ territory-other-than-home that sits at the core of intercultural discourses. We present this project as a possible alternative discourse to (un)do more traditional considerations of home-making as a much more complex construct; in the encounter with new territories, humans and other-than-human artefacts, objects, machines and landscapes, we argue that home-making is a continuous, never-finished process that move...

This article is an autoethnographic reflection on the research processes of two qualitative studies I engaged in on Kenya's South coast, individually, and in collaboration with a colleague. Its focus is on the on-site research dynamics and positionalities that shaped the collaborative study, which I compare to those of my earlier individually conducted study. A distinctive feature of the collaborative study's on-site research process was the inclusion of "Mapema"-a former participant of my individual study-as an interviewer, and the "participatory research" label that was spontaneously assigned to the study. From the unique perspective of someone who already had research relations and research experience in the region, as well as personal ties to the country, I particularly look at how the on-site research process was shaped through changing positionalities, constant morphing and a need to adjust to discomforts that arose during the on-site interactions. The article contributes to current debates on what goes into qualifying and naming a research project participatory and the place of positionality and reflexivity in research, more so when the research context is characterized by significant social inequality and cultural diversity. autoethnography; positionality; reflexivity; individual and collaborative on-site research processes; fieldwork; participatory research; Kenya

Critical epistemologies and methodologies have over time challenged the static and mono-dimensional approaches to fieldwork, allowing researchers to contemplate and conduct their research in spaces of in-betweenness. Despite this important shift, the essentialist idea that both 'the field' and 'home' in a fieldwork setting must be actual places persists. In this article, we challenge the conceptualization and operationalization of 'home' not only as the juxtaposition to 'the field', but also as the embodiment of a place in a specific temporality. We argue that the postulation of 'home' as a constant disregards the non-predetermined and unpredictable nature of fieldwork relationships that are often complicated by implicit and explicit power dynamics, especially in places researchers identify as 'home'. We demonstrate that unequal power relations, especially (1) between the Global North and Global South, (2) between majority and minoritized groups, (3) among genders, and (4) between elites and non-elites, require us to envisage 'the field' and 'home' in relative terms. We propose the reconceptualization of fieldwork place as a hybridized space that conjoins 'the field' and 'home' as 'field-home', particularly at a time when research mobility is restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, we extend the literature on issues related to power, positionality and reflexivity in qualitative research, and provide practical insights for those preparing for fieldwork.

This report on the Shigar microcosm aimed at an improved knowledge base and an enhanced understanding and interpretation of development processes and transformations in high mountain oases. Shigar is a prime example for the quest of increasing our knowledge. Visitors to the region very often bypass Shigar on route to their quest for high peaks of the Karakoram which abound in the upper valley. Previous research efforts go back to colonial times when linguists and historians tried to gain a comprehensive knowledge of the culture and living conditions in the remote corners of the mountain belt. After independence scattered research projects were randomly executed. One of the more prominent efforts was the joint Pak-German Research Project "Culture Area Karakoram" in the early 1990s. During the multi-disciplinary programme sponsored by the German Research Council (DFG) Shigar became one of the target areas for a number of researchers. The nexus of research and implementation ...