African women migration researchers and the question of reflexivity

Abstract

Reflexivity has received a lot of attention in recent years, but there is little on how to initiate reflexivity amongst those who are not familiar with it. This paper explores how to initiate reflexivity work and what difference it can make to the initiates in how we research and what we write about, and how this work can be done collaboratively between women in different locales. It breaks new ground by drawing on duo-reflexivity between three African women migration researchers reflecting on their role in collaborative research. In doing so, it unravels the complexities of insider-outsider status in global-North/South research and shows the importance of intersectional reflexivity, which addresses gender, social class, nationality, research setting, and discipline as we researched migration and inclusive growth in Africa. The paper unpacks gender as a category and how we approach it, how we experience it as part of our daily researching lives, and as a research topic in Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria. Furthermore, we throw a global South perspective on taken for granted categories such as income to show how reflexivity is important when researching migrants and non-migrants for a global audience. The paper ends with some thoughts on our experience of undertaking this reflexivity exercise. We offer this as an invitation to researchers, especially those from the global South, who may also be new to reflexivity.