POSITIONALITY AND RESEARCH

The discussion of positionality in research is somewhat rare in political science (Kapiszewski, Maclean, and Read Reference Kapiszewski, Maclean and Read2015, 147). When it does happen, the conversations often are in the context of a hybrid discussion of fieldwork practicalities and outcomes, such as navigating positionality in creating relationships (Aldrich Reference Aldrich2009; Yanow Reference Yanow and Schatz2009); discussing the practicalities of life in field sites (Ortbals and Rincker Reference Ortbals and Rincker2009; Schwedler Reference Schwedler2006); and examining the ways that the identities (perceived, revealed, or misperceived) of researchers affect the data-collection process (Chavez Reference Chavez2008; Townsend-Bell Reference Townsend-Bell2009). Although political scientists have long discussed how, for example, case selection affects research outcomes, more recent discussions of identity and research have turned to the idea that who we are may indeed affect the fieldwork we do and the answers we obtain in both large-N (Adida et al. Reference Adida, Ferree, Posner and Robinson2016) and small-N (Fujii Reference Fujii and Mosley2013; Gill and Maclean Reference Gill and Maclean2002; Maclean Reference Maclean and Mosley2013) research.

Discussions of positionality often are framed in terms of insider–outsider dynamics and the extent to which a researcher’s identities became part of the research process. Some researchers clearly position themselves, and are positioned by their interlocutors, as “outsiders” to the communities that they study (Blee Reference Blee2003; Lin Reference Lin2002; Scoggins Reference Scoggins2014; Scott Reference Scott2008; Wedeen Reference Wedeen2008). In his pathbreaking ethnography of reindeer herders in Siberia, Vitebsky (Reference Vitebsky2006, 42) recounted his first trip to Yakutsk: “I appeared to be invisible…a visitor from another world.”Footnote ³ Others, by contrast, situate themselves clearly as insiders and speak to the avenues opened up by their common identities but also to the ways that it constrains their work (Brown Reference Brown2012; Chavez Reference Chavez2008). The middle ground between insider and outsider status occasionally is charted in political science, as in Cramer’s (Reference Cramer2016, 11, 39–40) discussion of her Wisconsin-based identity in The Politics of Resentment. She chronicles her own connections with the state and also the ways in which her research participants perceived her as “outside” because she is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin and lives in a metropolitan area.

POSITIONALITY AS INTERSUBJECTIVE AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The status of “insider” versus “outsider” is about the self-positioning of researchers as well as the identities assigned to them by their interlocutors. Contact-based research always involves some curation of self-presentation by researchers because it is a professional activity, often spatially removed from daily life. Because of professional constraints (e.g., IRB consent protocols), researchers often present themselves to potential interlocutors with credentials such as business cards, university affiliation, or brief biographical data. But when navigating the complexities of contact-based research, what are the ethical dilemmas posed by being able to “pass” as part of the population that the researcher has set out to study versus standing out? How does moving through the research space with the potential for blending in ethically differ from being labeled by observable characteristics as an outsider?

Blee (Reference Blee2003, 11) noted that the racial background that she shared with her interlocutors (i.e., women in racist hate groups) was a reason that she was allowed access to spaces, but she also was upfront with her participants at the outset, stating: “I made it clear that I did not share the racial convictions of these groups. I explicitly said that my views were quite opposed to theirs, that they should not hope to convert me to their views.” She was identified as a potential ingroup member; therefore, she positioned herself as ideologically outside from the outset. However, this specific research project entailed interviewing explicitly racist group members about their activities. Much research with potential insider–outsider dynamics is not so clearly ethically delimited.

Anthropologist Atreyee Sen (Reference Sen2007, 16) discussed the complexities of insider–outsider dynamics in a less ethically clear-cut project and the ways in which her hybrid status of being both insider and outsider shaped her research experience in her ethnography of women activists in Shiv Sena, a conservative Hindu Nationalist organization:

Unlike Blee, Sen was not specifically seeking out individuals to interact with on the basis of morally reprehensible behavior. Yet, she found herself interacting with people who do engage the same and observing some of this behavior firsthand.

In my own research in South Africa, I conducted work similar to Sen, in the sense that I often was interviewing people with deeply held prejudices but was not specifically defining these populations for scrutiny and with a degree of “insider” privilege. As a white woman conducting research in part in white Afrikaans communities with a conversational grasp of the language, I often was mistaken for being Afrikaans myself. The access provided by these observable similarities (e.g., skin tone) with potential research subjects in primarily white spaces allowed me to move around without flagging my researcher status; however, I often was confronted with ethical difficulties on the basis of my “passing.” Being superficially undetected shaped interactions in ways that ranged from humorous—people jokingly denying that I could be a foreigner when I identified myself as such—to unsettling—as when an older man angrily confronted me about “losing my heritage” when I made a grammatical mistake in Afrikaans in public. I acquired the nickname “die Amerikaner wat lyk soos ‘n Afrikanermeisie/the American who looks like an Afrikaner girl.”Footnote ⁴ My public presentation, especially if I did not speak, allowed me to inhabit (public) spaces without drawing attention, as I often did during my research trip: attending church services, arts festivals, and university events in Afrikaans. This assignment of identity was not only among Afrikaans people; members of other populations (e.g., Zulu speakers and Sotho speakers) in and around my research sites also positioned me similarly. This was in part because of my facility in isiZulu, which they assumed was a result of a rural Afrikaans upbringing as a farmer’s daughter.

The reverse was true in my second field site, where I primarily was seeking to interview Zulu speakers in Durban, who almost entirely identify as Black and African. Although my Zulu language skills were more advanced and presented fewer mechanical difficulties in translation, my appearance signaled immediate outsider status in many of the spaces that I inhabited. Casual interactions were marked by the assumption of my foreignness, as when a newspaper vendor refused to sell me a newspaper in isiZulu. Despite my requesting to buy it in isiZulu and showing the vendor my money, he insisted that I could not read it. When I later told a Zulu-speaking friend about the interaction, I was met with raucous laughter, and my friend told me, “You cannot go around looking like you do and then speak like that. You broke that man’s brain!” Despite my official training and the fact that my conversational isiZulu was far superior to my Afrikaans, I was incomprehensible to this newspaper vendor—and an amusement to my friends—when I tried to work within that social space without appropriate introduction.

The quotidian nature of the insider–outsider dynamics raised ethical difficulties—inherent in much field-based research—about the nature of data, the idea of recording social dynamics, and what constitutes public behaviors (Fujii Reference Fujii2014). However, these questions are compounded because, whereas much contact-based research involves seeking out candid revelations, the position of “passing” brings in the implied or explicit sense that researchers are in accord with their research participants. The balance of being a person who engages in non-research-based socializing in the course of fieldwork versus being a recorder of social and political life is an ethical tightrope. I went to after-work hours where I was a known researcher and where racist jokes or allusions to the idea of an “inevitable race war” were made. When I went to have a haircut, there was a brief interlude of small talk largely about what I had seen in the country. The white stylist then launched into a tirade about how “the Blacks” did not value environmental conservation because they could not “think about delaying gratification,” which I “must understand” because I came from a place that was also diverse. Should these comments inform my research? During the course of interviews with white participants, there often were interjections about how pleasant it was for my research participants to let their guard down and speak honestly because I must know from where they were coming. Was this data? When I was assumed to be in accord with racist sentiments, was it my responsibility to record or to contradict? Admittedly, in the moment, I rarely engaged in direct confrontation—even in the face of the most strident prejudices—and, like Sen, I am haunted by those choices.

The converse was true in primarily Black spaces, where I spent the second half of my fieldwork speaking to Zulu-speaking South Africans and where my outsider status was flagged quickly. In this phase of my research, I had to work harder to build rapport, and the divulging of information was seemingly more intentional. There were moments of tension, as when a research participant told me that she found conversing with white people uncomfortable, even 20 years into multiracial democracy, and quietly added “like now.” This discomfort required ethical navigation and, in the moment, I simply apologized.

Such ethical conundrums also were inherent in the interview space, a place more closely regulated by bureaucratic ethical considerations. Even after informed-consent sheets had been distributed and credentials offered, there were significant differences between interviewing people who perceived me to be an “insider” versus an “outsider,” primarily on the basis of race. Within the interview space, my positionality as a white woman opened up certain opportunities but foreclosed others.Footnote ⁵ In primarily white, Afrikaans-speaking interviews, I found that I often was assumed to be in agreement with the participants and that I was taken into their sense of “we” with relative ease, in both English and Afrikaans interactions. Interjections such as “oh, you understand” are notated with some frequency in my interview transcripts of these interactions. Even when I had clearly identified myself as a foreign researcher and was actively taking notes, there was a sense in which I still had “passing” privileges. I was allowed into spaces and taken into confidences, like both Blee and Sen, that were available in part because of my racial identity. Conversely, many Black participants in interviews and in social interactions were more circumspect, occasionally openly expressing discomfort, as described previously. Was this also data? Was it my responsibility to apologize for the discomfort or to analyze it? How would my project have turned out differently had it been conducted by someone else?

I do not believe that I have firm answers to these questions, even several years after my data-collection efforts for that project concluded and it has been published as a book (Holmes Reference Holmes2020). Ultimately, little text from my fieldnotes appears in the final manuscript but they remain as background, informing my conclusions. I wish, however, that I would have had the tools to think critically about these issues before data collection for my project began.

TOWARD A POSITIONAL ETHICS

My assertions here are twofold. First, ethics training should include critical examination—and possible abandonment—of the idea of researcher neutrality in contact-based research. As a discipline, political science must engage with the idea of positionality but also move beyond the idea that such discussions are a matter of fieldwork practicalities. Positionality is an intersubjective process and one over which any individual researcher has a limited amount of control. Learning from anthropologists such as Sen, Vitebsky, and others as well as political scientists such as Wedeen, Lin, and Cramer can inform the discussion of how contact-based research is a fundamentally interpersonal enterprise. This new emphasis does not abandon the idea that central ethical principles, including protection of vulnerable populations and maintaining confidentiality, but rather seeks to examine the ways that even core ethical practices are inflected by the positionality of the researcher.

Second, in advance of contact-based research projects, researchers should reflect on how their self-presentation and potential assumed identities shape their research ethics strategies and tailor them accordingly. Identifying oneself in the research setting but also being identified by others shapes the ethical and data landscapes that a researcher navigates, as well as the types of approaches that they can take to pursue substantively ethical research. In both standing out and blending in, researchers should be reflective on how their presence and their identities (both lived and perceived) shape considerations of consent, access, trauma, and harm in their interactions with research participants. These considerations are true of all contact-based work, whether in the form of surveys, participant observation, or ethnography. There is not, of course, a single strategy that can work for all projects. I believe we can allow for the possibility that either direct confrontation in the vein of Blee or “haunting” as described by Sen, as well as other points along the spectrum, can be viable ethical practices in the face of assumed solidarities. However, central to this argument is the idea that any such strategy must be considered before research implementation, rather than implemented ad hoc, in order to conduct ethically consistent work. Not all eventualities can be planned for and not all ethical conundrums can be resolved in the implementation of contact-based research. However, I argue that in making positionality central to our discussions of ethics, we are centering the real demands of a thorough ethical sensibility in contact-based research.