by Anuradha Ganapathy, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester
“Development” as a concept and field of study is far from being free of its colonial, patriarchal, and hierarchical legacies. In this context, questions of who researches and who is being researched need to be constantly examined and scrutinised. For many of us in development studies who undertake fieldwork as part of our research, these are not abstract questions of a technical nature. They form the substance of the research process – starting from the nature of questions that are asked, through data collection, analysis and writing, to how findings are received. They require us to pay attention to our own positionalities, i.e., markers of our identity – be it gender, class, race, and geography – and address how they affect our views of the field, and how the field reacts to our presence – a process we have come to understand as reflexivity.
As someone in the middle of fieldwork, and arguably in the thick of these issues, I have sought out critical accounts of reflexivity and positionality as a way of deepening my engagement with my research. During this course however, I have been troubled by a particular tradition of reflexivity that dominates the field – i.e., a confessional account of “privilege”, typically (but not always) produced by Global North based researchers conducting fieldwork in locations of the Global South. While such accounts surface and confront some of the deep-seated power inequalities embedded in the hierarchies of knowledge production and potentially produce new insights for research, as others have observed, they also risk (even if inadvertently) re-asserting the researcher’s own criticality or expert status, often leaving the underlying power relations untouched, or even sidelining research subjects altogether. They resemble what Gani and Khan (2024) refer to as the “performance” of reflexivity, i.e., a phenomenon where “publicly acknowledging privilege paradoxically acts as a means of centring whiteness through the narcissistic gaze and an assertion of legitimacy”.
Following others who have critiqued this form of reflexivity, I ask – does this confessional performance of reflexivity become a way of insulating ourselves from the responsibility of demanding more fundamental structural shifts in how knowledge is constructed and valued in academia? Are there other ways to hold ourselves accountable to the politics of representation and knowledge construction?
Perform or perish? Reflexivity and its discontents in academia
Reflexivity as a methodological tool started to take on a significant role with the “interpretive turn” in the social sciences, i.e, when the objectivity of research was brought into question and issues of power in research relations began to gain legitimacy. To be reflexive is to be critically conscious through personal accounting of how one’s identity (across, for example, gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality), position, and interests influence all stages of the research process. Embracing reflexivity in research then, was not only a rejection of the notion of objective or neutral knowledge, but also an attempt to explore and expose the politics of representation and confront the power relations that inevitably shape knowledge production processes.
In the context of development studies, these debates initially manifested as “insider / outsider dichotomies”, referring to the researcher’s membership status in the group or community being researched. However, there is now a growing appreciation that the “insiderness” or “outsiderness” of researchers is not fixed and frozen, but rather fluid and context-dependent, or somewhere “in-between”. Reflexivity continues to be seen as an important tool to bridge the “distance” between the researcher and the researched and is often a normative requirement of development research.
Early critiques of reflexivity stemmed from the positivist tradition, which denounced it as an “academic fad” in the face of a “crisis of representation”. Some have pointed to the thin line between reflexive candour and unwitting self-absorption, and the risks thereof of it being constituted as an act of navel gazing. Arguably though, for many critical scholars, the issue is not reflexivity itself, but the ways in which reflexivity has been instrumentalized through its performative function, which warrants critical scrutiny.
For example, Gani and Khan (2021) suggest that the practice of positionality declarations carry with them perceptions and stigmas of inferior status and intellectual inequalities that stem from colonial and racist inheritances. They contend that the utterance and advertising of one’s racial markers as a privilege offers critical legitimacy to researchers by asserting their authority over the knowledge construction process, while also affording them a redemption of guilt. Pillow (2010) argues that reflexivity all too often is paralysed by the comfort of disclosure, reducing itself to self-serving exercises of confession, catharsis, or cure for the researcher, rather than doing the work of critically interrogating power, ethics, and representation in qualitative research.
Furthermore, this centring of the researcher and their identities in reflexivity has resulted in the neglect of its material and institutional aspects. Negar and Geigar (2007) note that while researchers may be well attuned to the dilemmas of field work, writing about these has been largely a post-field work, post-analysis exercise, in which the researcher critically reflects on the difficulties (and power differentials) pertaining to social relationships, reciprocities and responsibilities encountered in the field. While this allows researchers to problematise notions of bias and objectivity, it does not necessarily create spaces for critical reflection on the factors influencing the research processes, its relevance to those we are politically committed to, and the mutual benefits and enrichment possible. Post-facto reflexivity, as Enloe (2016) suggests, is usually reflexivity “after” the harms have been done.
From performativity to materiality: Reflexivity reimagined
How then do we break out of this impasse? How can we use reflexivity, not to distract from or displace, but to confront structural and epistemic violences embedded in knowledge production? Gani and Khan (2024) suggest that rather than rush to make confessional accounts of positionality, we must carefully consider our complicity, resist the temptation of performance, and follow it up by action in the form of material and intellectual reparations.
Relatedly, Jimenez et al., (2021) narrate the instance of allowing the indigenous community member to take the researcher’s place at a conference as a way of counteracting the Western hegemonic influences that she felt overshadowed her role in the research. Ultimately, actions like these (or any other) also necessitate openness to rethinking dominant structures and standards of academia and academic productivity. For instance, why do we privilege certain academic outputs (i.e., ‘sole-authored’ research papers), while relegating others the realm of ‘extracurricular’ intellectual production that fall outside the sphere of certified university scholarship?
Nagar and Ali (2003) provide a powerful critique of these structures and practices, arguing that the abstract discussion of subalternity, representation and positionality might have been fashionable to the peer reviewers of the journal Nagar submitted her academic paper to, but they made her analysis distant and inaccessible to her research collaborators and participants. These arguments are not to render reflexivity and positionality as either irrelevant or unnecessary, but to in fact argue for the opposite – i.e., to also legitimise what is considered valuable and useful by collaborators from the field as academic scholarship, and consider how action-based political practices can reshape positionality and reflexivity More fundamentally, it could also mean asking questions of why certain locations are “forever fields” – is it a field because it conforms to the idea of “local” as dictated by development frameworks, or is it a field because funding and visa regimes render it more accessible to researchers, North and South included?
Put another way, there is no doubt that we must be continually open to interrogating our capacities to enter a research context, identify key informants, establish connections and collaborations, gather and analyse data, and produce and disseminate knowledge. Indeed, in researching a world marred by growing economic, geopolitical, ecological inequalities, reflexivity is not just a methodological necessity but also a moral obligation to foster greater accountability towards the processes and the participants of our research.
Additionally, as Abdelnour & Abu Moghli (2021) highlight, the possibility that research might sometimes exacerbate vulnerabilities becomes even more pressing today, as many undertake research in contexts of wars, violence and conflict. Reflexivity here becomes central to identifying, mediating and redressing possible harms from research. These then, are also the precise reasons we need to consider more seriously, some of the critiques of “performative” reflexivity highlighted above. In examining the relevance of our critical reflexive stances and methodologies to the communities that participate in our research or those who we collaborate with, we may be able to untether reflexivity from its specific instrumentalised forms of self-disclosure and positionality statements and begin to ground it in a more material politics for social change.
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