Coming to terms with ourselves in our research

Editor’s note: We find ourselves in a time of deep global crisis when reflections on research ethics take on new urgency. Language on the Move is delighted to bring to you a series of texts that aim to rethink research ethics in Applied Linguistics. The texts in this series have been authored by members of the Research Collegium of Language in Changing Society (RECLAS) at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. Their frustrations with a narrow legalistic understanding of ethics brought them together in a series of meetings and long debates in unconventional contexts, where they explored an understanding of ethics as foundational to and intertwined with all aspects of doing research. The result of these meetings and conversations is a series of “rants”, which they share here. In this fourth and final rant, Johanna Ennser-Kananen provides an overview of questions related to researcher positionality in Applied Linguistics research.

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

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When I think back to my last ethnographic study, one of the fondest memories I have is drinking tea and coffee with young women from Afghanistan in a school cafeteria. They were students at that school, working towards their basic education degrees, and had come to Finland a few years before I met them there. As the cafeteria emptied, we would often stay behind for one more cup, laugh, chat, show off the latest pictures we took on our phones, and exchange advice about workout apps and videos. When I describe, analyze, and interpret data from these conversations, who I am matters. In the women’s circle, I was an insider and outsider at the same time. I am a white, college-educated, relatively wealthy European and represent the population that too often others and mistreats them. But, like them, I am also a woman, an immigrant, a mother, and a Finnish learner – so in many ways, we could relate and they were able to trust me. My research can’t be understood unless one understands my positionality in it.

What is researcher positionality?

Researcher positionality can be defined as the position a researcher takes towards the world around them in general and vis-à-vis a particular research topic or study, its process, and participants in particular (Holmes, 2010). Both are shaped by a researcher’s identities, including social factors such as race, class, gender, sexual identity, ability, citizenship status as well as linguistic and cultural backgrounds, familial histories, personal experiences, and professional trajectories. All of these may – more or less overtly – have a bearing on the research process at every stage from the conceptualization of a study to the dissemination of findings (Holmes, 2016).

As Holmes (2010) emphasizes, a researcher’s worldview “concerns ontological assumptions …, epistemological assumptions …, and assumptions about human nature and agency” (p. 2), all of which shape how we engage in research. For instance, our research is rooted in what we believe to exist, how we know about, organize, and describe these entities, and how we understand the position of human power and its limits within a particular context. Such knowing and believing pans out in particular power dynamics that permeate the research process, e.g. between researcher and the researched, in the representation of voices in writing, and in the legitimation of knowledge (Muhammad et al., 2015). Unpacking those dynamics can increase the transparency and ethicality of our work.

(Why) Do we need this?

The notion that our identities and worldviews as researchers shape the work we do is not an uncontroversial one, especially given that much scientific work has aimed to minimize or even eliminate the researcher’s person from the research process with the goal of claiming objectivity or neutrality. Such claimed objectivity or neutrality, oftentimes conflated with the unmarked male, white, and middle-class position in scholarly work, has long been at the core of scientific quality measures, particularly when researchers have aimed to present their work as independent of the researcher, replicable beyond its original context, and thus scientifically valid. In Western religious pre-Enlightenment societies, such “research without researcher” has played an important role in establishing scientific traditions and methods, often in opposition to religious beliefs (Lin, 2015), but was also, to the detriment of qualitative research, foundational in promoting the positivist paradigm as the dominant and only legitimate one within many academic contexts. Although in some ways qualitative research is still struggling to shed this positivist yardstick, the notion that all research is shaped by researcher positionalities has in recent decades gained traction. While there may be great differences in how researchers approach their work ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically, we all make decisions, act in particular social contexts, and are shaped by what we know, believe, and strive for. As Lin (2015) puts it,

Problems emerge if we fail to recognize the inherent partial and positioned nature of every research study (and researcher) that is inevitably located in a certain sociohistorical and epistemological position. (p. 15)

In a similar vein, Hamby (2018), speaking for social scientists and particularly her field of psychology, calls for a shedding of the ”cloak of objectivity” (para 7), emphasizing that “lack of objectivity is not just a problem, it is also an opportunity”. (para 9). Acknowledging one’s positionality, she argues, can enhance a researcher’s awareness of their own biases, assumptions, and points of development, but also their (potential) contributions to the field. It can enable us to

• better understand our own biases and (expected) blind spots, so we can begin to challenge them
• better understand and reflect on our position in the research field (e.g., insider-outsider of a community), and based on this, identify ways of building more ethical and fruitful relationships with our participants, colleagues, and audience
• interpret our findings with greater confidence and greater care, and in general, increase the trustworthiness of our work

It is important to keep in mind that stating our (potential) biases does not erase them. Our intellectual reflections cannot lift us beyond our socio-material realities (e.g., who, where, when, with whom we are …) and we cannot confess-away our subjectivity or create a “neutral” place from which we operate. However, the process and statement of acknowledging our positionality can open doors to a deeper understanding of our place and purpose within our field for our participants, our audience, and ourselves.

An important question to ask is what information we include in a positionality statement and how we go about that. Having engaged in a self-reflexive process does not mean we disclose all aspects of it – this would likely be unnecessary or impossible, and in some cases inappropriate, risky, and even unethical (e.g., because participants’ anonymity/safety or the researcher’s integrity/freedom are at stake). As we make decisions about what to include in a paper that is publically or widely available, the following questions can offer guidance:

• What are my goals as a researcher, particularly in regards to the study/paper in question?
• What/who has shaped my processes of selecting (and not selecting) the research field, participants, methods, terms, data, literature, etc.?
• How are my choices tied to who I am, what I know, what I have access to, and what I believe in?
• How may my choices differ from the ones of a reader/colleague who belongs to a different social, cultural, or disciplinary group? What do they need to know about me so they can relate to my choices?

If we keep in mind that the overall purpose of a positionality statement, in the end, is to make our work more transparent, we can minimize the risk of it either becoming a merely rhetorical exercise on the one hand or a disclosure that puts us or others at risk on the other hand.

Group membership: Where do I (not) belong?

When we explicate our position toward our topic, participants, and research processes, we do so in order to get a better sense of what we know and see and what we do not know and see. This is particularly true for researchers who work with populations that they are not members of. Most typically, group membership will be dynamic, complex (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009), partial and/or situational (see Huisman, 2008: Milner, 2007), so that awareness of one’s own insider- and outsiderness, privilege and power position (Muhammad et al., 2015), is a crucial first step (although no guarantee) towards building respectful and ethical relationships. In such situations, it becomes crucial to know how to actively disrupt deficit discourses and hegemonic notions of normality and knowledge, to name only a few harmful practices that researchers from socially dominant groups will encounter and unfortunately oftentimes perpetuate.

Useful questions to ask

• Which (racial, cultural, professional, ethnic, linguistic …) groups do I belong to, and in what ways? How has that shifted or might that shift in the future?
• How do my group memberships manifest themselves? How do they relate to each other?
• What is easy for me to see/focus on because of these memberships? Where do I assume to have blind spots? What might someone else see in my field/data/literature… ?

Epistemologies: What do I (not) know?

Part of the question about one’s own researcher identities, worldview, and relationship to the topic, process, and participants is also to develop a critical understanding of what we do and do not and what we can and cannot know (Muhammad et al., 2015). Many individuals and communities have historically been excluded from academic knowledge and knowledge production, so that research and its dissemination are still dominated by male, white and middle-class norms (e.g., Ahmed, 2017; Banks, 2009; Ennser-Kananen, 2019; Scheurich & Young, 1997). Although it cannot be an individual’s responsibility to rectify this, every researcher can be explicit and honest about their own epistemological limitations and contribute to a move towards epistemic and epistemological justice (Ennser-Kananen, 2019).

Useful questions to ask

• Which (racial, cultural, professional, ethnic, linguistic …) context does the literature I read and cite do belong to? What are or could be the blindspots and omissions of my work? (See Piller, 2018)
• What parts of the research process will I be able to do relatively easily because of my racial, cultural, professional, ethnic or linguistic memberships? Which ones might be challenging?

Positionality statements

Positionality statements are often integrated into introductory or methodology sections of research articles or theses, but they can also consist of smaller parts scattered throughout a piece of writing. Both qualitative and quantitative researchers can and should offer a statement of this kind that enables the reader to get a better sense of their approach to the topic, the research process, their analyses, interpretations, and conclusions. While positionality statements by definition have to be individualized and personalized, I recommend the ones by Matias and Mackey (2015, pp. 33-34) and Arsenault (2018, pp. 52-55) as inspiration and models for how such statements can be realized. Once a positionality statement has been made in written or spoken form, the job of acknowledging and critically reflecting on our position continues. In the end, positionality work underlines the importance of a supportive and (self-)reflective academic community, where open dialogue and spaces to learn are valued and fostered (not just tolerated). It is on all of us to create such spaces.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Arsenault, C. (2018). How white teachers’ identity development translates to classroom interactions with minority students. Doctoral dissertation. Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology. Retrieved in March 2020 from https://uknowledge.uky.edu/edp_etds/80
Banks, J. A. (2009). Knowledge construction and the education of citizens in diverse societies. Keynote speech. Interkulturell Pedagogik, Göteborg, Sweden.
Delamont, S. (2018). Truth is not Linked to Political Virtue: Problems with Positionality. In B. Clift, J. Hatchard & J. Gore (Eds.). How Do We Belong? Researcher Positionality Within Qualitative Inquiry: Proceedings of 4th Annual Qualitative Research Symposium (pp. 1-6). University of Bath.
Dwyer, S.C., Buckle, J. L. (2009). The space between: on being an insider-outsider in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 54–63.
Ennser-Kananen, J. (2019). Knowledge is power is knowledge: Can we break the cycle of epistemic and epistemological injustice? Tiedepolitiikka, 4, 22-40.
Hamby, S. (2018). Know thyself: How to write a reflexicity statement. Psychology Today. Retrieved in March 2020 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-web-violence/201805/know-thyself-how-write-reflexivity-statement
Holmes, P. (2016). Navigating languages and interculturality in the research process: The ethics and positionality of the researcher and the researched. In M. Dasli & A. R. Díaz (Eds.). The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy (pp. 115-132). New York: Routledge.
Holmes, A.G. (2020). Researcher positionality: a consideration of its influence and place in research. A new researcher guide. Available at http://shanlaxjournals.in/journals/index.php/education/article/view/3232
Huisman, K. (2008). “Does this mean you’re not coming to visit anymore?”: An inquiry into an ethics of reciprocity and positionality in feminist ethnographic research. Sociological Inquiry, 78(3), 371-396.
Lin, A. M. Y. (2015). Researcher positionality. In F. M. Hult, & D. C. Johnson (Eds.), Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide (pp. 21-32). London: Routledge.
Matias, C. E., & Mackey, J. (2016). Breakin’ down whiteness in antiracist teaching: Introducing critical whiteness pedagogy. The Urban Review, 48(1), 32-50.
Milner IV, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational researcher, 36(7), 388-400.
Muhammad, M.; Wallerstein, N.; Sussman, A. L.;  Avila, M.; Belone, L.; Duran, B. (2015) Reflections on researcher identity and power: The impact of positionality on community based participatory research (CBPR) processes and outcomes. Critical Sociology, 41
Piller, Ingrid. 2018. Why are you not citing any African female expert? Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/why-are-you-not-citing-any-african-female-expert/
Scheurich, J. J., & Young, M. D. (1997). Coloring epistemologies: Are our research epistemologies racially biased?. Educational researcher, 26(4), 4-16.