My face is more than me. A Nordic researcher in the South: An autoethnographic retrospective perspective

Abstract

A white person from the Global North, referred to in Kiswahili as a mzungu, can hardly conduct research anonymously, observe unnoticed or merge with staff and students in the context of African university classrooms. This article builds on the author’s six years of research at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in Tanzania, examining staff and students’ everyday practices in terms of how they are characterised by linguistic constraints. Using an autoethnographic, self-reflective and retrospective approach, the author discloses some of her experience during fieldwork as a researcher on the university campus. Through this form of qualitative research, she connects her personal experience to the discourse on the language of instruction policy and practices in higher education in Tanzania. The aim of her self-reflection is to understand the wider meanings of how cultural, political and social language practices unfold in staff and students’ daily lives. Using the concepts of insider and outsider, preconception, and theory-ladenness of observation, the author aims to depict the challenges and limits of being a researcher in a totally unfamiliar context. During her fieldwork, using a mixed-methods approach of questionnaires, interviews and participating observation, the author also kept a notebook with her. She made field notes of self-observation, reflecting on her reactions to what she encountered in the research process. While making these notes was not deliberately a part of the data collection, it was an important way of talking to herself. In retrospect, a few years after submitting her doctoral thesis, these notes have become more important to her. The purpose of this article is twofold: on the one hand, the author reveals some of her own experience as a researcher in unaccustomed surroundings, on the other hand, she uses her personal experience to describe, question and shed light on the discrepancies caused by language practices in Tanzanian higher education.