Multiple Positionalities Research Articles

Uncovering intersecting stigmas experienced by people affected by podoconiosis in Nyamasheke district, Rwanda.

Podoconiosis is a stigmatising neglected tropical condition, but the nature of podoconiosis stigma has not been fully explored. There is a growing understanding that the experience of stigma is intersectional, yet no research has been done on this matter in relation to podoconiosis. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of podoconiosis-related stigma by illustrating how multiple individuals' positionalities intersect to shape the experience of stigma due to podoconiosis. We used qualitative research to explore the experience of stigma among people affected by podoconiosis. Data were gathered using participant observation, interviews, focus group discussions and participatory methods. A total of 59 participants, including patients, local leaders, community health workers, and family members, were purposively selected to participate in this study. We identified three features in which stigma related to podoconiosis was grounded. These were bodily deformation, illness contamination and bodily weakness. The experience of stigma was shaped by the convergence of multiple individual positionalities and identities. Social positionalities and identities based on socio-economic, gender, age and illness status intersected to shape podoconiosis stigma. Our study demonstrates that the experience of stigma due to podoconiosis is intersectional, going beyond biological features of podoconiosis. The stigma experienced by affected individuals is complex, and shaped by the convergence of social structures and many individual identities such as socio-economic status, gender, disability and age. This understanding is crucial to analysing stigma related to podoconiosis, or other NTDs, and for designing interventions that address stigma that arise from biological aspects of disease and social factors simultaneously. Such holistic interventions can significantly improve the well-being of those affected by podoconiosis.

Inclusive education: Voices from elementary school principals in the United States

AbstractCurrently, schools in the United States are highly diversified and integrated. In other words, the integration of students representing multiple identities and positionalities existing in the same educational spaces is much more common. The purpose of this study was to examine elementary school principals' perspectives on inclusive education. Grounded in social constructionism, the research design was a descriptive case study positioned using qualitative methodology. The primary data sources were semi‐structured one‐on‐one Zoom interviews with four elementary school principals from the Midwestern region of the United States; and researchers' reflexive notes in order to understand how principals understand and deploy inclusion within their respective schools. Based on thematic analysis, in this paper, we constructed the following interrelated themes: (a) building discourses around inclusion from prior educational experiences; (b) culturally responsive leadership as a practice to inclusion; (c) collective feelings of safety, comfort and harmony and (d) the negotiation of privilege. These themes highlighted that the conceptualization and implementation of inclusion heavily prioritize the perspectives of professionals within schools rather than those of the individuals being included.

Outsider From Within, Insider From Without: Negotiating Researcher Positionality in Comparative Social Research

Researchers conducting fieldwork, especially in comparative social research, face the complex issue of conceptualizing and practicing positionality. How we position ourselves affects the research approach, the interpretation of the data and, therefore, the whole research process. This paper discusses my own in-between or ‘in-out-sider’ positionality during my fieldwork studying the experience of youths in social movements in Thailand and Myanmar in 2020 and 2021. Drawing on data from a visit to Thailand and interviews with 40 Myanmar and Thai youths who participated in the movements, this article documents my experience of the subtle nuances of multiple positionalities and how I navigated through the fieldwork as an in-out-sider researcher. In this comparative context, especially, I believe that my in-out-sider positionality facilitated the research process, from interviewing participants to conducting the field visit. The discussion of this contextually situated positionality challenges the typical explanations of the insider/outsider dichotomy, suggesting the need for a rethinking of certain aspects of this explanation, such as the background and experience of the researcher, and the context in which the researcher and the researched interact. This paper therefore contributes to knowledge around this subject and its application, particularly in the context of comparative social research which studies specific groups of youth activists or protestors.

STS Researchers as Technology: Multiple Positionalities as Interpretations of Participant Expectations and Agendas

Science and technology studies (STS) researchers integrated into interdisciplinary research projects learn important lessons of collaboration dynamics by analyzing the lived experience of the research participants. Previous approaches of STS researchers included laboratory studies and reimagining the collaborative process as a research method. However, previous research on interdisciplinary projects repeatedly cites recurring challenges, indicating that more sharing of this lived experience is needed. My autoethnography of an interdisciplinary project interrogates the various positionalities I embodied as research technologies. In adopting a feminist analytical approach, this paper forefronts emotional affect and interrogates technological labels of the social science researcher to understand power dynamics and interpret what is meant by “good science” across disciplines. These findings help us understand how individuals appraise interdisciplinarity, setting realistic expectations for addressing future interdisciplinary collaborations more deliberately. Lastly, I also consider the ethical considerations necessary to care for the ethnographer in interdisciplinary collaborations, as they are often caught in the crosshairs of the frustrations in collaborating.

Making Political Science: Material-Aesthetic Approaches to Knowledge Production

Abstract Making represents an important practice in political science research, but the relative unfamiliarity of “making” within the discipline often pushes discussion of it to the margins. This article helps theorize the value of making in political science and questions the idea that moves away from writerly research modes undermine or otherwise erode standards of scholarship. It argues that making processes generate unique opportunities for intellectual discovery; for data collection; for analytic practices of reflexivity, associative thinking, and the adaptation of multiple positionalities; and finally, for argumentation. As such, it suggests that boundary-pushing research that incorporates hands-on praxis to make aesthetic products may in fact augment systematicity and rigor according to established disciplinary norms.

Doing Fieldwork while Parenting

Conducting fieldwork as a White woman researcher from the Global North on women’s practices of religious knowing in Benin, my work is based on multiple entwined positionalities that require critical reflection. The political categories of race, gender, age, religion, and family status at times linked, at times distanced me from my interlocutors in Benin as well as my colleagues at University of Bayreuth. This article explores the multiple ways parenting has informed my work in Benin and its institutional integration in a German Anthropology department. Using difference as a lens, I enquire how parenting, intersecting with gender, sexuality, and family normativity, has been used to undo difference during fieldwork, while exacerbating structural inequalities with reference to academic funding structures and research organization.

“Aren’t We All Complicit?”: A Commentary on Multiple Faces of Race and Language in English Language Education

This paper reviews recent work on race and language ideologies in Asia, aiming to a more complex understanding on the subject that avoids determinism and dichotomous thinking. The first part of the paper discusses current work on English language teaching in Japan, and concludes that greater emphasis on teacher agency is needed. The second part offers ethnographic vignettes of scenarios in which race plays sometimes a surprising role in shaping interactions and exclusions. These scenarios focus on the implications of the scholars’s commitement to social justice in ideological and institutional structures in which prejudice is reproduced and relayed in situations that involve multiple Asian identities and positionalities.

The Ghost and the Double: Identity, Migration, and Storytelling in Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens

Francisco Goldman’s 1992 novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, explores themes of personal and political instability through characters who move between Guatemala and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, some of the most violent years of Guatemala’s Civil War. This essay combines an analysis of literary form and content to explore the unease that characters experience as they traverse a range of national, ethnic, and racialized markers (such as, Latina/o, Guatemalan, Jewish, and indigenous), while they migrate between Guatemala and the US. I explore Roger’s (the narrator) unreliable methods of storytelling alongside characters’ conceptions of their own and each other’s multiple positionalities. I focus on the metaphorical presence of ghosts, doubles, and disabled bodies to examine the connections that the novel forges between identity, transnationality, and storytelling. Specifically, I argue that the use of ghostliness and disability as metaphor serves to explore—at times, problematically—characters’ embodied differences by rendering their otherness literal. My analysis seeks to demonstrate how the narrator’s use of storytelling evolves throughout the novel. While storytelling initially serves Roger as a deflection of his own ontological concerns, it ultimately becomes his outlet for self-reflection, reckoning, and healing. As Roger confronts the haunting presence of the recently deceased Flor–his surrogate sister, object of desire, and anchor to his existence–he begins to use storytelling to grapple with the seeming chaos and open-endedness of his transnational life.

Doctoral writing and the politics of citation use

Conventions shape scholarly writing and citations practices are one set of conventions that dominate how and what we write. Yet, many of these practices naturalize exclusion and discrimination in a way that becomes normalized and, consequently, invisible. For doctoral students, learning the conventions of citing is part of developing an identity around scholarship, research and writing. In this paper, we examine our own experiences of the politics of citations to understand our socialization processes and resistances. We use an autoethnographic narrative approach to frame this qualitative study. Our findings show how citation use abounds with the contradictions and paradoxes in our doctoral writing journeys where the pressure to succeed can compromise identity-building as ethical scholars. Each of us has many needs and multiple positionalities and resisting the naturalizing grammar of citations can be complicated. Yet, once aware of the politics of citations, one cannot go back to being unaware.

‘So what’s arts got to do with it?’: An autoethnography of navigating researcher positionality while co-creating knowledge

In this autoethnography, I share about my journey navigating multiple researcher positionalities. I commence with a reflection on how one of my positionalities as an ‘outsider-within’ influences my onto-epistemological stance and approach to the research. Through my shared case, where I am a ‘marginal intellectual’ with an intersectional researcher positionality, I highlight the complexities of negotiating power in co-creating knowledge with participants whilst navigating the insider/outsider/in-between researcher positions. I illustrate how a reflexive methodology incorporating Arts-Based processes (ABP) facilitated navigation of power dynamics in order to mitigate the ‘representation crisis’ often resulting from researcher positionalities.

Finding Shelter in the Storm

This paper presents the case study of a 100+ year old school of social work recently shaken by acts of racial aggression targeted toward our Black/African American community. Following campus incidents that received national attention, minority social work students urged faculty to organize action to voice values of equity and justice, and to provide an intentional safe space within our school. In response, a volunteer faculty committee dedicated themselves to the group’s formation and implementation of the Undoing Racism Principles from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB, n.d.), beginning internally and expanding outward. Representing multiple identities and positionalities of power, committee members use these principles to process our privilege. We reflect on our journeys with racism as social work educators and as individuals who are, and have been, influenced by internalized historical and contemporary racism. Guided by Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire 1970/ 2002) and Critical Race Theory (Sulé, 2020), the praxis of reflecting in-and-on our work has evolved (Schön, 1983, 1987). Authors share their personal experiences, professional impacts, and efforts to implement anti-racist pedagogy. Contextual implications for schools of social work that aim to become anti-racist within their implicit and explicit curricula are provided by this case study.

The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures

ABSTRACT This article offers a reflection on the authors’ curation of (Dousos and Ieropoulos) and participation in (de Senna and Pfützenreuter) The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures, a performance festival that took place at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2018. Dousos and Ieropoulos present their thoughts around the need to curate such an event in the first place, discussing the context within which they operate, the Athenian art scene, while making the case that ambiguity as a political and poetical tool must not be surrendered to the right. De Senna and Pfützenreuter discuss their experiences in creating and performing right-wing personas that blur the lines between what is real and what is performed; engaging in strategies of overidentification, they initiate a discussion around the ethics and role of critical artistic practice in response to contemporary right-wing radicalisation and aesthetics. Mirroring the curatorially experimental nature of the festival, the contributors speak from multiple positionalities. As such, the structure and tone of the article attempt a destabilisation of the form of a conventional academic paper, avoiding an overall, singular summing-up of the positions presented, and allowing for shifts in register.

A scholarly roundtable part II Bérénice Reynaud: ‘The love of cinema is also the love of encountering people’

ABSTRACT A roundtable discussion organized by the JCC’s two guest co-editors, Timmy Chih-Ting Chen and Belinda Qian He, took place between early December 2020 and January 2021. Scholars from a variety of backgrounds and co-founders of two remarkable cinephilic organizations/groups (Deep Focus and DIRECT UBE) in the Chinese-speaking world were invited to share their experiences and ideas about cinema and cinephilia. The roundtable started with a virtual gathering via zoom, which initially took a roundtable form. Ten participants from six time zones continued the conversation through contributing to a Google document. The shared file afforded each participant the opportunity to partake at their own convenience, thereby enabling the roundtable to develop organically during two months. The online format thus shaped a timely attempt to experiment with the notion of roundtable during the pandemic. Divided into two parts, the roundtable revolved around how participants discussed their multiple identities, positionalities, and border-crossing experiences about cinema. Among them, Bérénice Reynaud stands out as a special guest who shared and reflected on her personal experiences as a non-Chinese and non-Chinesespeaking scholar, curator, and cinephile who has developed close connections with Chineselanguage cinemas. As the second part of the roundtable, Bérénice Reynaud’s autobiographical account is shown below.

Reflexive collaboration: Building pluri-ethnographic partnerships in an Ecuadorian bank

This article illustrates the value of reflexive dialogue regarding foundational assumptions about ontologies of culture and cultural change, as well as regarding key methodological and epistemological tensions at critical junctures in the research process, in a collaborative ethnographic study undertaken by Ecuador’s largest banking institution in partnership with a team of university anthropologists. While acknowledging the importance of ethnographic positionality and the complexity of organizational interests in business anthropology, the case highlights the role and power of consciously positioned reflexivity and dialogue to overcome tensions, build trust, and ultimately reach cultural insights that are products of an inclusive and pluri-ethnographic approach as opposed to a more hierarchical, or “othering,” para-ethnographic perspective. The case demonstrates how this approach requires attention not only to divergences and convergences between academic anthropologists and corporate culture workers but also to multiple positionalities within organizations themselves that inflect understandings of cultural ontologies and ethnographic epistemologies.

Gentrifying the Brazilian city? Convergences and divergences in urban studies

There is a growing number of processes in Brazilian cities that have been identified as gentrification. However, the classic definition of gentrification as a process of transformation of existing urban housing stocks by new homeowners with a higher socio-economic profile poses challenges to understand recent empirical data coming from Brazil and the Global South more generally. Instead of dismissing them as deviant cases, this paper challenges the Northern empirical foundations of gentrification theory and calls for a new methodological approach to both classic and new cases that take into consideration its contextualization. This new framework for gentrification research is based on necessary dimensions that identify the production of gentrifiable space as the initial condition to the process of socioeconomic change with displacement in which built-environment upgrades constitute one of its most visible feature. These dimensions are present in each and every case, bounding the concept and operationalizing research, while local mediating forces make gentrification context-specific. Therefore, urban studies on gentrification. Should understand and explore the nature of these differences, in a return to in-depth studies and empirical research, opening spaces for decentering positions and building theory from multiple positionalities.

Theoretical Pluralism in Transcultural Research: Chinese People Constructing Selves in the UK

This paper argues for a consideration of theoretical pluralism when conducting social science research in globalized and transcultural contexts via reflecting on a qualitative study which was designed to explore the ways in which second-generation Chinese young individuals were constructing selves in UK contexts. Narrative case studies were compiled and analyses conducted with a pluralist orientation integrating (Western) social constructionism and elements of (Chinese) Confucian philosophy and ultimately Taoist orientations. The multiple and dynamic positionalities demonstrated by the research participants prompted us to review many aspects of our research, which demanded sensitivity in respect of the following key areas –cultural complexity of research context, methodology and methods, epistemology and ontology, reflection and reflexivity, the criteria appropriate for conducting transcultural research, and the pluralist theoretical framework which enabled the development of potentially transformative representations of individuals in shifting contemporary global contexts.

Tricksters, cyborgs, and the musalsal: media movement and infrastructure gaps in Arab television

ABSTRACT For decades, Egyptian cultural production has adapted the story of Raya and Sakina, the nation's first women to receive the death penalty for murder. In 2017, their story crossed borders as Warde Shamia, a Syrian musalsal, or Arabic-language television drama serial. This project discusses the story's movement across nations and mediums, exploring the way that it illuminates the precarious nature of cultural production in post 2011 Syria. In a space where production is often appropriated by competing nationalist discourses, the invocation of these women as tricksters evades and destabilizes nationalist appropriations. By turning to the way that content is driven forward by polarizing regional forces, this analysis takes seriously the productive nature of media processes in shaping content. It offers that the move from nationally broadcasted programing to regionally broadcasted satellite programing mirrors the transformation of national uprisings into proxy wars, reflecting a loss of sovereignty over nationalist articulations. It examines the trickster's role in occupying multiple positionalities, working to dismantle appropriative narratives of cultural production as always-already identifiable with a dominant nationalist discourse. Rather than asking how Syrian drama reflects reality, this paper examines how this adaptation reflects the conditions for producing that reality.

Trust, courage and silence: carving out decolonial spaces in higher education through student–staff partnerships

ABSTRACT On 20 March 2019, the Decolonise UoK, formerly Decolonise UKC conference took place at the University of Kent (W Ahmed and others, Decolonising the Curriculum Project Manifesto: Through the Kaleidoscope (2019) <https://decoloniseukc.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/decolonising-the-curriculum-manifesto-final-2.pdf). Out of this came its manifesto to the university with recommendations in three key areas (ibid). The end goal of this student–staff collaboration was not intended to be a strategic intervention to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) work within universities although the body of knowledge (the manifesto and the Decolonise UoK Collective book, Towards Decolonising the University: A Kaleidoscope for Empowered Action (Counterpress 2020)) is open access for everyone to read and implement. We explore this process of self-empowerment through the concepts of (re-)existence/resistance from decolonial studies in combination with the black feminist critical race theory (CRT) methods of counter-narrating. We discuss the detail of racialised life both as part of surviving and through resisting institutional racism and its affective impact upon us. We argue that the necessary conditions that made it possible to do the work of self-empowerment from our intersectional and multiple positionalities across the student–staff continuum within the neoliberal university have been trust, courage and silence.

Recognizing research participants’ fluid positionalities in (post-)conflict zones

This article re-conceptualizes the highly ambivalent relationships between researchers and research participants in conflict zones, with a focus on recognizing respondents’ multiple and fluid positionalities. Standardized and dominant approaches to qualitative research are largely based on essentialist and infantilized portrayals of research participants and neo-colonial assumptions regarding the research relationship: informants are presumed to be inevitably vulnerable and in need of external protection, while the researcher is positioned as the omnipresent expert in control of the research process. In reality, however, research participants rarely exclusively occupy the ‘oppressed victimhood’ axis of identity and frequently take on active roles in the research and data collection process in a myriad of ways. I elucidate how especially in (post-)conflict zones, research participants frequently re-shape power dynamics by exercising agency over the researcher and the research process. While previous studies have considered how informants’ agency can shape processes of knowledge production, in this article I expand this focus by examining how key-informants can, and frequently do, facilitate the researchers’ safety and security. I specifically draw on personal experiences of empirical research in Northern Uganda. I demonstrate how in a particular moment of post-conflict insecurity – while being trapped in-between the exchange of gunfire between the Ugandan police and an armed group – one of my key-informants ensured my physical protection and safety, thereby exercising power over me and the research relationship. The key-informants in this context thus occupied multiple positionalities – ranging from informant to protector, evidencing that research relationships are never static but rather contextual, shift and fluctuate. Such ambivalent and fluid power dynamics are more reflective of the lived realities of qualitative research and can influence the research process by positioning researchers and research participants on more equal terms.

Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson

Reviewed by: Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson Alexa Woloshyn (bio) Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson University of Minnesota Press, 2020 Hungry Listening is a disciplinary reckoning. The book argues that settlers listen to Indigenous music and sounds through settler colonial musical logics. This book has two primary audiences: Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Some of the moments directed to Indigenous readers are open to non-Indigenous readers like myself to witness and learn. Others contain unexplained knowledge or exist in spaces where I am not invited. Robinson also directly asks non-Indigenous readers to name and reject settler logics of listening, composing, performing, and writing. Robinson hopes for transformative intersectional work between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. He models this intersectional work in Hungry Listening by drawing on multiple disciplines and speaking to multiple positionalities. The book title is a concept developed by Robinson, which he explains in the introduction. It is an English translation of two Halq'eméylem words: (1) shxwelítemelh ("the adjective for settler or white person's methods/things" [p. 2]), which is based on the word Stó:lō people (xwélmexw) used for starving White settlers in the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush; and (2) xwélalà:m (listening). Robinson also provides an overview of his critique of "inclusionary music" and "inclusionary performance" as musical contexts in which Indigenous content is mined for aesthetic interest and "fit"—or assimilated—into [End Page 119] Euro-American classical compositions and performances. Robinson offers an alternative model, "Indigenous + art music," which rejects assimilation and embraces incommensurability. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of a "tin ear," which reflects the settler listener's ability to perceive only Western ontologies of music. Thus, a "hungry listener" not only desires to consume but also to fit Indigenous content into something knowable and recognizable. Throughout the chapter, Robinson illustrates Indigenous and settler logics of listening. He argues for an unsettling of listening that embraces multisensory, flexible, non-teleological listening and does not appropriate Indigenous ways of listening. Read the introduction and chapter 1 before reading any subsequent chapters, including assigning any later chapters to students. Chapter 2 models an intersectional citational practice that emphasizes decolonial alliances among Indigenous, Black, Asian, Latinx, settler, and LBGTQ2 scholars. Robinson discusses examples of "performance writing," which he praises for challenging "the unmarked normatively of listening through explicitly marking listening positionality" (p. 81). This chapter challenges music scholars to explore sensory and affective writing approaches that can engage more deeply with our listening experiences. Robinson revisits some familiar musicology texts, asking us to embrace their nonnormative possibilities instead of merely citing them within normative structures. In chapter 3, Robinson positions his examples—colonial and contemporary—within a four-model taxonomy: integration, nation-to-nation music trading and reciprocal presentation, a combination of the first two, and coexistence without integration. This taxonomy will help analyze case studies beyond those included in Hungry Listening. Robinson presents case studies by non-Indigenous composers, in which Indigenous music and stories are forced awkwardly and violently into Western musical structures. In contrast, Mohawk composer Dawn Avery's piece "Sarabande" demonstrates "a sharpness of difference" (p. 143). Chapter 4 explains how the histories of Indigenous song collection enabled and justified Canadian composers' extraction of Indigenous songs as a resource to create so-called Canadian music. Robinson directs much of this chapter to Indigenous readers with the hopes that they together can find "different means by which [they] . . . might address this misuse of our songs" (p. 151). The chapter ends with a pointed critique of settler imaginings of the Inuit dogsled through an extensive event score for Alexina Louie's Take the Dog Sled. Chapter 5 critiques what Robinson calls "inclusionary performances" for trying to evoke feelings of reconciliation rather than take substantive actions toward nonrepresentational reconciliation. Robinson underlines what is at stake when settler audiences embrace [End Page 120] these feelings of reconciliation and do not push deeper: "For settler audience members, it may be a much easier task to embrace the mystery of Indigenous stories and aesthetics than to play a leading role in the eradication of another kind of mystery...