What Am I Doing Here? Self-Reflexivity in Cross-Border Journalism Research

Abstract

In journalism research conducted in the Global South, power relationships between the researcher and the researched mirror the uneven power structures between the Western journalists and their news subjects or their non-Western colleagues working alongside them. But so far, the figure of the journalism researcher in such contexts has not been problematized to any great extent in journalism scholarship. Moreover, the journalism researcher working in such contexts borrows heavily from the methodological toolkit of ethnography. But while the cultural anthropologists who created and refined ethnographic methodology have long been interrogating the colonial and neocolonial logics that inform ethnographic methods, journalism scholars have yet to significantly engage in such a self-critical project. We take ourselves as the starting points of the self-reflexive critical debate we believe journalism researchers interested in decolonizing journalism studies must have with themselves when it comes to conducting research in spaces of asymmetric power relations within global journalism. Laid out in three first person self-reflexive narratives, our critical questions are prompted by our own geopolitical and embodied presence in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and North Korea. We then discuss the commonalities among the questions that arose from our respective positionalities. Through this grounded, self-reflexive exploration, we aim to position global journalism researchers at the center of critical inquiry.