‘The Merged Researcher’ and ‘Emergent Subjectivity’: Complicating Reflexivity in Migration Research

Abstract

Qualitative migration researchers argue that reflexivity is an essential and integral component of qualitative studies involving particularly co-national/co-ethnic researchers conducting research on their co-national 1 /co-ethnic research informants in order to promote rigor and transparency. The primary objective of reflexivity in qualitative research is to ‘minimize personal bias’. Such a supposition, however, implicitly harbors assumptions of positivist epistemological objectivity that conceptualizes the qualitative researcher as detached from data and research informants. Drawing on secondary literature and my field research experiences, I argue that in qualitative migration research where the researcher shares social identities and experiences with research informants, the practice of reflexivity becomes antithesis to the practical realities of a co-constructed, value-laden and subjectivity-tainted research process. I coin the terms the merged researcher 2 and emergent subjectivity 3 to capture the inextricability of the researcher from the whole research process and the unfolding and becoming subjectivity of the researcher. These analytical concepts challenge conceptualizations of qualitative researchers’ subjectivities as problematic or bias prone. I argue that qualitative researchers’ decisions, assumptions, beliefs and experiences inseparably percolate into the research process and their social identities and subjectivities do not exist as pre-defined and stable formations but manifest and emerge during the research process.