Towards unraveling insider/outsider binary: A migrant researcher received as a welcome guest insider among South African research participants

Abstract

Dominant theoretical debates on researcher positionalities are framed in terms of mutually exclusive insider/outsider binary where insider researchers are assumed to share social identities such as nationality or ethnicity with research participants, while outsider researchers are viewed as those who do not share such social identities with participants. Drawing on my fieldwork as a migrant researcher with Coloured South Africans, this paper contributes to debates on insider/outsider positionalities in migration research and qualitative studies more generally. Despite my foreign origin and not sharing nationality, language, ethnicity, culture, racial identity and lived experiences with participants, I was received and embraced by Coloured South Africans as a welcome guest insider. By proposing an analytical concept which I term welcome guest insider, I argue that contrary to dichotomous conceptualizations of insider/outsider positionalities, my positionality was situationally and contextually constructed. This paper proposes that the insider/outsider binary is simplistic and too rigid to capture contextual constructions of insider/outsider positionalities emerging within the fieldwork context. Researchers in the field of qualitative studies and particularly migration studies can adopt and apply the analytical concept of welcome guest insider to conceptually frame perceived researcher positionalities who are warmly received and embraced by their research participants even though they do not share social identities such as nationality, race, ethnicity or lived experiences.