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Kitchen table reflexivity: negotiating positionality through everyday talk
Abstract
In this article, we explore the role of self-reflexivity in the understanding of positionality in human geography to argue that self-reflexivity in and of itself does not offer researchers sufficient opportunities to question and critique their fluid, ever-changing positionalities. Drawing on the work of feminist scholars, critical race scholars, and experiences carrying out qualitative research, we argue that formal and informal conversations with colleagues and mentors affords the opportunity to deeply engage with positionalities. This article draws on concepts of ‘everyday talk’ to encourage researchers to explore their positionalities through kitchen table reflexivity – an exploration of an individual's positionality and its relationship to their research carried out through formal and informal conversations with others. We demonstrate how everyday talk with each other furthered our understandings of our fluid identities in relation to our research participants. Through these conversations, we were able to more critically interrogate our identity and not simply reduce identity to a laundry list of perceived similarities and differences between research participants and us. In conclusion, we encourage all researchers to use everyday talk as one way to complicate their positionalities and to reflect on how this process relates to the broader societal and academic environment within which they carry out their research.
... What does it mean to live in a nation that denies so many Latinas/os/x the opportunities to a good education, equal opportunity, and quality of life? What does it mean to work in institutions of higher education that disregard and ignore the knowledge learned in the home, through stories shared around the kitchen table, to the consejos [advice], and the dichos [sayings] that informed many at an early age about the power of education (Espino, 2016;Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015)? My formal training has taught me to analyze what is, to present multiple truths in our world, to ...
... Throughout my writings, I leave papelitos guardados for the reader to find, pieces of lived experience that trace my location in higher education across time and context (Latina Feminist Group, 2001). They offer a glimpse into my life as a shapeshifter, constantly navigating and negotiating tensions as a scholar and subject of inquiry, as well as the in-between spaces I occupy (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015;Ortega, 2016). They acknowledge the contradictions and complexities of my personal and professional experiences and my resistance against the ways I am constructed and "othered" in academic spaces (Boylorn, 2011;Emirbayer & Desmond, 2012;Espinoza, 1990). ...
... Uncovering how prenotions inform positionality has also been critiqued as a self-indulgent practice and a diversion from the actual research because what often becomes more comfortable and comforting is the disclosure of a litany of identities and the parsing of "insider" and "outsider" (Calafell & Moreman, 2002;Chavez, 2008;Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015). Often condensed to a few sentences in the methodology section (if, at all), it is possible that the naming of how one is similar and/or different from participants would shift the focus to the researcher, serving more as a check list rather than a practice of uncovering power (Kobayashi, 2003). ...
Positionality is an often overlooked but strategic practice for analyzing race and racism within the organizational bounds of predominantly White institutions of higher education. Positionality is critical self-reflection that uncovers the tensions and areas of strength found in relationships among the researcher, the research topic, the study participants, and the data analysis process. I argue that the researcher's practice of interrogating and articulating their personal and professional knowledge, values, beliefs, experiences, and embedded assumptions about race and racism can also be applied to a practitioner who plans to engage in dismantling systemic racial inequities in higher education. This chapter will illustrate how individuals embedded within institutions of higher education can interrogate their own positions within racist organizational contexts; attend to power dynamics as educational leaders, narrators, and subjects of inquiry; and commit to transformational practice that can address Latina/o/x educational inequities.
... There are many ways in which researchers practice reflexivity during the qualitative research cycle, and perform or communicate their reflexive processes in writing up their research (Pillow, 2003). Some scholars, however, have critiqued the relatively static practice of listing one's similarities and differences since it does not acknowledge the complexity and fluid character of positionality (Hopkins, 2007;Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015;De Koning et al., 2012;Miled, 2019;Ryan et al., 2011). Indeed, Pillow (2003) argues that reflexivity often seems an (unconscious) attempt to write towards how our insider or outsider perspectives benefit the research or what we think readers might desire to hear to justify our research positions. ...
... Over the past years, several papers advocate for collective strategies to enhance reflexivity by pointing out the value of involving other researchers in reflexive processes. These can be described as working separately together (Siltanen et al., 2008); perspective-taking (Finefter-Rosenbluh, 2017); kitchen-table reflexivity (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015); collective reflexivity (Leggatt-cook et al., 2011); collaborative reflexive analysis (Caretta, 2015); and affective registers in team research (Jakimow & Yumasdaleni, 2016). Indeed, Ryan et al. (2011) note 'even within the constraints of budget and time, it is invaluable to find some space in which to engage the community [peer] researchers in this reflexive process -for example, through brainstorming sessions or focus group discussions' (p. ...
... 59). These strategies enable researchers to, as Kohl and McCutcheon (2015) explain, tease out 'the nuanced ways in which we, similarly to all researchers, perform our identity, continuing to challenge each other on assumptions about our identity and its effect on the research process' (p. 758). ...
This paper contributes to current debates on positionality by critically discussing and comparing three researchers’ experiences doing research involving Muslims. We introduce positionality meetings to enhance reflexivity in qualitative research projects. Based on empirical evidence from our independent projects and the positionality meetings, this paper illustrates how efforts to understanding each other’s perspectives and positions, which differ in identities and biographies, challenge our accounts of self-reflexivity. Due to their deliberative character, positionality meetings reveal new and sometimes uncomfortable insights into, for instance, insider and outsider relationships and our attitudes towards religion as a research subject in a particular political context. The paper highlights several stages of the meetings to demonstrate the deliberative practice’s value throughout the collective reflexive process. Serving to an interdisciplinary audience, we encourage qualitative researchers to engage in positionality meetings. Therefore, we conclude this paper by providing recommendations on how to organise such meetings.
... Further to the above steps, personal reflection notes were maintained and referred to throughout the study and coding, to consider the researcher's original interpretation of responses and data and compare it to later conclusions drawn. Kohl and McCutcheon (2015) encourage researchers to step beyond the identity statement (e.g. "I am a white woman studying a mainly white elite of coastal flood risk managers, with a slight male bias in employees") to embrace and engage in kitchen table reflexivity. ...
... Outlining the author's reflexivity and positionality within research is commonplace in qualitative research (Bourke 2014;Kohl and McCutcheon 2015; Mason-Bish 2019) (see Section 3.3.7 for further detail), but less so in quantitative research. However, because of the overarching mixed methods, the author is conscious that highlighting their integration of reflexivity and positionality throughout this work is appropriate. ...
Coastal flooding is a major concern in England, with significant past and potential future damages. Even with climate change mitigation, the sea level will keep rising. There is a need to adapt on the coast to the changing and growing risks posed not only by a changing climate, but also a changing society. Despite the wide-held view that flood risk management (FRM) should take an integrated approach, research into coastal FRM of an interdisciplinary nature remains scarce in England. This thesis aims to address this gap, by undertaking a cross-scale analysis of national policy, organisational and household involvement in coastal FRM in England, to develop a more integrated understanding for decision-makers of the challenges facing household adapting to coastal flood risk. The thesis uses mixed methods to address three objectives: 1) evaluate synergies and challenges in national policies for managing household coastal flood risk via a StrengthWeakness-Opportunity-Threat analysis; 2) analyse the challenges and solutions in policy delivery for sub-national organisational stakeholders via thematic analysis of interviews with organisational stakeholders in the North-west and Central-south of England; and 3) characterise household motivation and participation in coastal FRM through statistical analysis of stakeholder and household surveys distributed in south Lincolnshire. This work identifies a discrepancy between policies and sub-national experiences in establishing, resourcing and sustaining long-term plans for the coast. There also remains a paucity of interactions between professions, despite the acknowledged benefits of interacting across boundaries and sectors. Sub-national organisational stakeholders could be empowered by capacity-building and financial resources to play a more effective role in the conversation, decision-making and implementation of coastal FRM. Sub-national stakeholders are ambiguous about the role of the public in FRM. This work finds that households who feel capable to act, and who are aware of local FRM, are more likely to take preparedness measures themselves. These findings contribute to establishing a more comprehensive conceptual framework for studying flood risk household action, identifying the importance of characteristics of past flood experiences, preparedness communications and responsibility perceptions. It is a critical and opportune time for policy makers to set clear goals and provide direction for the responsibility of and engagement of the public, whose role is central to any long-term adaptation. The thesis concludes that the positive trend of overcoming disciplinary boundaries in the coastal FRM governance should be accompanied by an overtopping of social barriers that limit effective sub-national stakeholder and household adaptation to coastal flood risk.
... In qualitative research, researchers are encouraged to reflect on their positionality as part of ethics in practice Bradbury-Jones, 2007;. As well as recognising one's personal characteristics or social locations, 'doing reflexivity' involves cultivating meaningful practices and processes for ongoing consideration of how the researcher influences the knowledge created (Crenshaw, 1991;Fox & Allan, 2014;Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015;Townsend & Cushion, 2020;. While reflexivity is often avoided in quantitative social research, researchers have emphasised the benefits of processes of reflexivity in the quantitative paradigm (Ryan & Golden, 2006). ...
... For the research encounter, we sat at the 'kitchen table' at our workplace and watched TikToks together in November 2020. Kohl and McCutcheon (2015) have discussed the material and metaphorical aspects of the kitchen table, in that it can be both a place of comfort and intimacy, as well as a space for hard conversations. We occupied dual positions as participant and researcher, an approach which 'challenges the hegemony of objectivity or the artificial distancing of self from one's research subjects' (Chang et al., 2013, p. 181). ...
From the turn of the century, social attitudes have shifted away from secrecy and anonymity in donor conception in line with broader recognition that children have a right to accurate information about their identity and family. As such, some donor-conceived people are now growing up in families who disclose and discuss donor conception openly while others are unexpectedly learning of their donor-conceived status later in life. Yet, little empirical research has explored the array of actors, processes and technologies that shape experiences of belonging for donor-conceived people. This thesis reports on exploratory research of Australian donor-conceived adults’ experiences. The project adopted an innovative interdisciplinary approach, combining methods and analytic techniques from sociology, social semiotics and media studies to explore everyday social, linguistic and digital practices. Data comprise Hansard from a public hearing of a Senate Committee Inquiry into donor conception; a national online survey with sperm donor-conceived (n=90) and egg donor-conceived (n=1) respondents over 16 years of age; and semi-structured interviews with sperm donor-conceived adults (N=28). The research is also underpinned by vignettes of personal experience to reflexively foreground my own positionality as a donor-conceived person. Findings reveal the significant role that digital technologies play in donor-conceived people’s everyday lives. Donor-conceived peers used digital platforms to exchange experiential knowledge and negotiate meanings ascribed to their collective identity, to educate (prospective) recipient parents and the general public about their perspectives, to trace family members through direct-to-consumer DNA testing, and to strategise for increased recognition in legislation. In terms of family, participants navigated complex and dynamic familial (non) relationships and the lingering consequences of anonymity. However, donor-conceived people also found strategies to help them reckon with secrecy and silence, actively responding to social conditions and challenging the institutions of medicine and the law. Indeed, donor-conceived people drew on experiential and institutional knowledges to position themselves as an authority on donor conception as people with lived expertise. I argue that belonging, for donor-conceived people, is experienced across three planes: in relation to peers, family and the State. In doing so, this thesis underscores how everyday belonging is relational and processual, and achieved through a range of momentous events, everyday encounters and humorous artefacts.
... Practicing reflexivity can provide important insights (Boyce et al., 2021;England, 1994) and help us reveal the subtle ways in which we perform our identity (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015). Reflexive practice provides us with a strategy to better understand how our positions collectively influence us and to recognise the privileges they afford us while carrying out our work. ...
... Reflexive engagement within our more-than-human research environments can assist with this, and enables us to locate our inherent biases and privileges, so as to better understand power dynamics and navigate ethical dilemmas. Moving beyond formalised communications and reflecting on the everyday talk we share with those with whom we interact can also provide further insights (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015). In parallel, we also need to cultivate and nurture this type of sharing within academia and the wider primatology profession (Brittain et al., 2020). ...
Primatological research is often associated with understanding animals and their
habitats, yet practical conservation depends entirely on human actions. This encompasses the activities of Indigenous and local people, conservationists, and NGOs
working on the ground, as well as more remote funders and policymakers. In this
paper we explore what it means to be a conservationist in the 2020s. While many
primatologists accept the benefits of more socially inclusive dimensions of research
and conservation practice, in reality there remain many challenges. We discuss the
role primatologists can play to enhance interdisciplinary working and their relationships
with communities living in and around their study sites, and examine how increased reflexivity and consideration of one’s positionality can improve primatological practice. Emphasis on education and stakeholder consultation may still echo colonial, top-down dialogues, and the need for greater emphasis on genuine knowledge-sharing among all stakeholders should be recognised. If we are sincere about this approach, we might need to redefine how we see, consider, and define conservation success. We may also have to embrace more compromises. By evaluating success in conservation we explore how reflexive engagements with our positionality and equitable knowledge-sharing contribute to fostering intrinsic motivation and building resilience.
... To do so, Fritz and Meinherz (2020) propose a seminal list of empirical questions that can help us trace interwoven productive and repressive power dynamics in different research phases. Kohl and McCutcheon (2015) suggest to apply the 'kitchen table reflexivity', this is, how everyday talk and informal encounters at different research stages among researchers, but also between researchers and non-academic actors, can facilitate a thorough understanding of our shifting positionalities and build long-term trustful relationships. ...
... As members of deprived communities most often experience multiple barriers to attend participatory processes outside their living environment (e.g. Adams et al. 2020;Montesanti et al. 2016;Ward et al. 2018), face-to-face interaction through regular visits of or even temporary stays at these communities to share their everyday life is crucial (Kohl and McCutcheon 2015). Financial compensation in various forms, as already mentioned in the section thinking-with, is another effective measure to ensure inclusive participation (Bergold and Thomas 2012). ...
Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science has emerged as a viable answer to current sustainability crises with the aim to strengthen collaborative knowledge production. To expand its transformative potential, we argue that Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science needs to thoroughly engage with questions of unequal power relations and hierarchical scientific constructs. Drawing on the work of the feminist philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa, we examine a feminist ethos of care which might provide useful guidance for sustainability researchers who are interested in generating critical-emancipatory knowledge. A feminist ethos of care is constituted by three interrelated modes of knowledge production: (1) thinking-with, (2) dissenting-within and (3) thinking-for. These modes of thinking and knowing enrich knowledge co-production in Transdisci-plinary Sustainability Science by (i) embracing relational ontologies, (ii) relating to the 'other than human', (iii) cultivating caring academic cultures, (iv) taking care of non-academic research partners, (v) engaging with conflict and difference, (vi) interrogating positionalities and power relations through reflexivity, (vii) building upon marginalised knowledges via feminist standpoints and (viii) countering epistemic violence within and beyond academia. With our paper, we aim to make a specific feminist contribution to the field of Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science and emphasise its potentials to advance this field.
... For example, Pillow (2003) has proposed a 'reflexivity of discomfort' that explores: '"messy" examples, examples that may not always be successful, examples that do not seek a comfortable, transcendent end-point but leave us in the uncomfortable realities of doing engaged qualitative research' (Pillow, 2003, p. 193). Another salient approach to reflexivity is the concept of 'kitchen table reflexivity' (Kohl and McCutcheon (2015), p. 747) in which researchers create awareness of their positionality through ongoing informal conversations or 'everyday talk'. This approach was influential to this study because we explicitly sought to conduct situated analysis of #donorconceived, acknowledging our positionalities and their impacts through reflexivity. ...
... For the research encounter, we sat at the 'kitchen table' at our workplace and watched TikToks together in November 2020. Kohl and McCutcheon (2015) have discussed the material and metaphorical aspects of the kitchen table, in that it can be both a place of comfort and intimacy, as well as a space for hard conversations. We occupied dual positions as participant and researcher, an approach which 'challenges the hegemony of objectivity or the artificial distancing of self from one's research subjects' (Chang et al., 2013, p. 181). ...
There is a pressing need to facilitate sensitive conversations between people with differing or opposing views. On video-sharing app TikTok, the diverse experiences of donor-conceived people and recipient parents sit uneasily alongside each other, coalescing in hashtags like #donorconceived. This article describes a method ‘Situated Talk’ which uses TikToks to facilitate a reflexive encounter, drawing on three areas of scholarship: media ethnography and elicitation, researcher reflexivity and duoethnography/collaborative autoethnography. We describe how we, as a donor-conceived adult (Giselle) and a queer woman who would need donor sperm to have a child (Clare), employed TikToks from #donorconceived as prompts to facilitate a sensitive conversation and elicit situated insights. We explore three central insights from applying our method: (1) discomfort as a productive tension; (2) unresolved dilemmas; and (3) discovering parallels in experience. Using TikToks as stimuli, ‘Situated Talk’ contributes an innovative method for generating grounded social media insights.
... At least one virtual conversation event has already been organised by the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (2020) in the USA. Kitchen table conversations have been shown to build a deeper sense of community (Participedia, 2020b) from a place of comfort (Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015) and convenience for participants. At the same time, they have the potential to develop reflexive thinking (Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Ercan et al., 2019), which is central to challenging dominant discourses and holding those in power to account. ...
... Kitchen table conversations have been shown to build a deeper sense of community (Participedia, 2020b) from a place of comfort (Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015) and convenience for participants. At the same time, they have the potential to develop reflexive thinking (Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Ercan et al., 2019), which is central to challenging dominant discourses and holding those in power to account. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a systemic view of democracy can provide insights into the myriad ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic affects democracies worldwide. This enables the authors to offer practical suggestions for strengthening democracy through meaningful participation in the spaces where deficits are most apparent.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use the systems approach that has emerged from the deliberative and participatory democracy literature in recent years to map out the impacts of COVID-19. In this paper, the authors set out this approach as an agenda for future, more comprehensive research.
Findings
The authors’ preliminary overview suggests that democratic spaces are reconfigured during COVID-19, with participatory spaces shrinking, overlapping and invading each other. Based on the systemic overview, the authors suggest participatory interventions to address particular points of weakness such as accountability.
Originality/value
Taking a systemic approach to analysing COVID-19’s impacts on democracy enables the authors to understand the pressure points where democratic values and participation are under strain and where citizens’ participation is essential not only for strengthening democracy but also addressing the public health challenge of COVID-19.
... Feminist scholars increasingly recognize the importance of reflexivity as a collective and interactive practice, though few have discussed specific approaches for reflexive practice in research and other academic collaborations (for exceptions see Davies et al., 2004;Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Long et al., 2020). Most accounts of the collective practice of reflexivity include individuals who seek out other researchers for social support or discuss their largely separate research experiences (e.g., Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Mauthner and Doucet, 2003). ...
... Feminist scholars increasingly recognize the importance of reflexivity as a collective and interactive practice, though few have discussed specific approaches for reflexive practice in research and other academic collaborations (for exceptions see Davies et al., 2004;Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Long et al., 2020). Most accounts of the collective practice of reflexivity include individuals who seek out other researchers for social support or discuss their largely separate research experiences (e.g., Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Mauthner and Doucet, 2003). Those who have discussed it in the context of teambased research highlight the need to further interrogate the practices of this particular 'mode of knowledge production' (Mauthner and Doucet, 2008: 972). ...
Reflexivity is considered a hallmark of qualitative research. With the continued growth in team-based research, more attention is needed to what it means to practice reflexivity within the context of these research collaborations. In this article, we draw upon scholarship on reflexivity and our own experiences to develop what we term ‘collaborative feminist reflexivity’ (CFR). CFR represents a form of reflexivity that is distinctly collaborative in how it is enacted, grounded in feminist epistemological and ethical commitments, holistically engaged throughout the research process, and multifaceted, involving multiple formal and informal practices. In critically analyzing our own reflexive practices in the context of an interdisciplinary, multi-method study on hashtag activism related to domestic violence, we seek to identify specific practices for research teams as well as interrogate the potentials and limitations of these practices for enacting feminist reflexivity.
... Much of this emerges from organisational styles and funding regimes that require people to adopt leadership positions that come with accountability and management responsibilities, as well as tendencies within the media, publishing and awards industry that require leaders and spokespeople who can represent wider social groups. Ultimately, this creates a wider sense of inclusion/exclusion (Holloway 2002;Kohl and McCutcheon 2015) and fragments the wider relations that connect social groupings. It separates (active) leaders from (passive) beneficiaries, which damages processes of cocreation and collective action (Pain 2015). ...
... It is also about challenging the broader taken for granted binaries and categorises that shape our world which, for example, divides human from the non-human world, areas of poverty from those of prosperity, the domestic and the work sphere, or inner city from central areas. Only when we confront the structural mechanisms that divides us, can we work towards looser and more transformative social change personas (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010;Eisenstein 2013;Gibson-Graham 2014;Kohl and McCutcheon 2015). ...
In this paper, we highlight emergent trends that we have observed from direct participation in civil society organisations, and importantly the potential they have to enact transformative social change. Specifically, drawing on in-depth participation with two community organisations in Leeds in the North of England, we highlight the limits of traditional personas of the social entrepreneur and social activist and tendencies that sit between and beyond them that are more hybrid and messy, but ultimately more disruptive and productive. Through our fieldwork, we identified four aspects to this: 1.) purposeful value-rationality and attempts to explicitly foreground values in the everyday; 2.) relations as co-constructed and interdependent; 3.) the cyclical and transformative nature of practices; and, 4.) the role of storytelling in narrating and supporting alternative future visions. Ultimately, at the heart of the dysfunction of both social entrepreneur and social activist personas is an absence of conscious acknowledgements of how our work is motivated by what we love, and what we feel a loss for; what we have become disconnected from, and what we urgently need to reconnect with beyond individualised notions of social change. We contend that acknowledging these and incorporating them into our social change work can nurture more transformative values, practices, identities and narratives.
... They show how 'thinking about feminist peace allows us to pause and go beyond "postconflict" imaginations of peace and instead to consider how we might undo the violence around us'. 28 Feminists, in particular Black feminists, have used conversation as a qualitative methodology and to centre the labour and thinking that is considered to occur at the margins, or outside the public/ political realm. 29 This work highlights conversation and 'everyday talk' as a source and site of labour, politics and activism, as well as a process of care such as through 'checking in' as a means of solidarity. 30 Black feminists have also drawn out the kitchen table as a gendered and raced space, a place of conversation between women, and as a space in which political and scholarly organizing occurs at the margins of the privileges of academic positions and presses. ...
... Relationships and trust are essential to creating "safe spaces" for people to be, in the literal environmental sense, as well as in the emotional, spiritual, and cultural senses. 83,84 In contexts where relationships and trust are an implicit part of the organizational culture and program, it stands that women and their children will not only feel safer, but will also be witness to and can be authentically mentored in developing healthier relationships with themselves and others. Some practitioners and researchers argue that there are three relationships to tend to when mothers who use(d) substances during and after pregnancy seek substance use treatment/support: (1) the mother, (2) the child(ren), and (3) the mother-child(ren) dyad. ...
Alcohol is legalized and used for a variety of reasons, including socially or as self-medication for trauma in the absence of accessible and safe supports. Trauma-informed approaches can help address the root causes of alcohol use, as well as the stigma around women's alcohol use during pregnancy. However, it is unclear how these approaches are used in contexts where pregnant and/or parenting women access care. Our objective was to synthesize existing literature and identify promising trauma-informed approaches to working with pregnant and/or parenting women who use alcohol. A multidisciplinary team of scholars with complementary expertise worked collaboratively to conduct a rigorous scoping review. All screening, extraction, and analysis was independently conducted by at least two authors before any differences were discussed and resolved through team consensus. The Joanna Briggs Institute method was used to map existing evidence from peer-reviewed articles found in PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Social Work Abstracts, and Web of Science. Data were extracted to describe study demographics, articulate trauma-informed principles in practice, and gather practice recommendations. Thirty-six studies, mostly from the United States and Canada, were included for analysis. Studies reported on findings of trauma-informed practice in different models of care, including live-in treatment centers, case coordination/management, integrated and wraparound supports, and outreach-for pregnant women, mothers, or both. We report on how the following four principles of trauma-informed practices were applied and articulated in the included studies: (1) trauma awareness; (2) safety and trustworthiness; (3) choice, collaboration, and connection; and (4) strengths-based approach and skill building. This review advances and highlights the importance of understanding trauma and applying trauma-informed practice and principles to better support women who use alcohol to reduce the risk of alcohol-exposed pregnancies. Relationships and trust are central to trauma-informed care. Moreover, when applying trauma-informed practices with pregnant and parenting women who use alcohol, we must consider the unique stigma attached to alcohol use.
... Assuming a heterophenomenological stance allows us to treat narratives as stories that make sense of the world, and to take subjects "seriously" 7 . Considering the ontopological position and heterophenomenological condition of narrating migration and (in)mobility phenomena is a recognition of dialectics of identity as common denominators in the process of "seeing and describing" (social) reality (Kohl and McCutcheon, 2014). The explicit recognition of differentiationthe differences in "structural other-ness" that shape identity politics (Braidotti, 2006) -allows migration discourse to highlight the heterogeneity of the plights of migrants and pry away from normalization and naturalisation discourses that "hover" above the migration field. ...
This proceeding is taken from my paper presented at the “Measuring Migration: How? When? Why?” Conference, University of Oxford, 9 June 2022, online.
Abstract
International migration analysis frequently addresses mobility phenomena through state-centric macrolevel descriptions. This "top down" approach is helpful to portray general patterns and highlight structural issues that contribute to mobility, but often omits "the figure of the migrant". Feminist phenomenology demonstrates the importance of articulating "the body" as social constructions of expressions of biopolitical relations that structure ontological positioning in the world. Heeding to the plea to de-migranticize migration analysis, I argue that it is imperative to redress international migration analysis "through the body" by reframing migrancy through feminist phenomenology and reflexivity. Through rhizomatic thinking, illustrated with narratives on the Mexico-United States borderlands, I propose a re-conceptualization of migrancy that embodies positionality argued through feminist narratives as imperative to the centre of migration and (in)mobility research.
***
Additional note:
On June 9-10, 2022, #Migration #Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), and Nuffield College sponsored a student-run conference entitled "Measuring Migration: How? When? Why?".
Organised by Christina Pao and Maksim Zubok, the conference sought to bring together students, early career researchers, and practitioners to explore the idea of "#measuring #migration" using a variety of methods from #interdisciplinary perspectives. Participants explored the ethics and implications of what it means to track migratory flows and discussed when this might be appropriate and why these data are helpful/harmful.
There were over 300 participants registered from around the world, spanning six continents and dozens of institutions. There were over 30 paper presentations on 10 panels and four keynote panels that took place over the two days
The conference resulted in the following outputs:
#Conference #Proceedings: The majority of the papers presented are available in a book of conference proceedings published in paperback by the Transnational press London and available online for free thanks to the Princeton Open Access Publication Fund.
https://www.tplondon.com/.../measuring-migration-conference/
https://www.ceeol.com/search/book-detail?id=1085350
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/.../measuring.../1142896024
https://play.google.com/store/books/details...
#Conference #Recordings: This link provides access to recordings of select sessions (both paper presentations and plenary panels) that had the consent of all participants
Migration Oxford Podcast Episode "Who Counts? Data and Migration": Christina Pao (one of the conference co-organizers) spoke about the conference on the Migration Oxford Podcast Episode: "Who Counts? Data and Migration".
The conference organisers are thrilled by the amount of interest that this conference garnered and are excited to continute these discussions moving forward.
Furth further information, please contact the organisers: Maksim Zubok (maksim.zubok@nuffield.ox.ac.uk) and Christina Pao (christina.pao@princeton.edu).
... An initial codebook was prepared, and team process meetings allowed the research team to critically link codes to form patterns of similarities and differences. Preliminary themes were identified and existing codes were reviewed and refined through an iterative and reflexive process (31)(32)(33). While additional focus groups were not possible due to recruitment limitations, themes represented a rich understanding of participants' shared experiences and perceptions teaching in person during the simulation exercise. ...
Objective:
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health agencies and school boards across Canada enacted new protocols, including face masks, physical distancing and enhanced hygiene, to support the safe reopening of in-person school. This study explored the experiences and perceptions of teachers instructing children and adolescents in person during a two-day school simulation.
Method:
This study was part of a large school simulation exercise conducted in Toronto, Ontario. Kindergarten to grade 12 teachers taught in classrooms with either masked students, or students who were un-masked or only masked when physical distancing was not possible. A qualitative descriptive phenomenology approach was utilized, and data were collected via virtual focus groups. Qualitative data analysis involved multiple rounds of inductive coding to generate themes.
Results:
The sample included 14 teachers (92.9% female; 85.7% White), with a median of 9.5 years teaching experience. Three primary themes emerged: 1) learning to navigate public health measures, 2) needing to adapt teaching strategies and 3) striving to manage conflicting priorities. The majority of teachers reported that mask-wearing and physical distancing impacted their classroom teaching, communication and connection with students.
Conclusions:
As schools transition to in-person instruction, teachers will be required to play dual roles in education and public health, with implications on safety, teaching and professional identity. Public health agencies and school boards are encouraged to engage teachers in ongoing conversations regarding in-person school planning and operations. Furthermore, evidence-based interventions, including increased teaching development programs, are recommended to support teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
... Another set of innovative frameworks for reflexive practices take a dialogic approach. For example, Kohl and McCutcheon's (2015) method of "kitchen table reflexivity" fosters informal conversation between colleagues and mentors about their positionalities. Similarly, Fox and Allan's (2014) approach consists of dialogue between the doctoral student and supervisor which aims to promote "reflexive action" (p.101) by recalling salient ethical, performative and conceptual moments during the doctoral student's studies, and considering how the moment in question impacted the student's identity and influenced the course of the research. ...
For qualitative researchers, reflexivity is always an important aspect of ethical practice. However, in research on donor conception, there is a particular need for greater attention to be paid to the ways in which researchers' positionality, experiences and attitudes influence the research process and findings. With the aim of 'doing reflexivity', in this chapter I explore three phases of becoming: becoming donor-conceived, becoming activist and becoming researcher. In 'becoming donor-conceived', I explore how connecting with other donor-conceived people online strongly influenced the way that I understood my own experiences and contributed to my own sense of belonging. Next, I describe how through 'becoming activist', I became more aware of the political value of donor-conceived people's voices and the need to privilege donor-conceived people's perspectives in research. Finally, I explore how I navigate my position as an 'insider' in my research including how I manage risk and reciprocity. People with lived experience bring different priorities and ways of thinking and doing research into the research process. I argue that it is vital that donor conception researchers engage with and empower donor-conceived people to influence policy and practice responses to this complex topic.
... To this, we have offered practical insights into techniques for eliciting rich discursive talk on past practice, including strategies of multi-modality, phased implementation and zooming-in-and-out of temporal registers, as reflected in a visual representation of the paper's contribution in Figure 4. Multi-modal biographic inquiry is an intensive and demanding process, both for researchers and participants. Various competences of the researcher play a role in steering the discursive co-development process, and, as such, it is important for researchers to engage in reflexive deliberation on how their own skills and positionalities impact on, and evolve through, the research process (as highlighted by recent work on reflexivity in geographic practice more broadly, for example, by Kohl and McCutcheon (2015)). ...
Within human geography, there is increasing interest in the application of theories of practice for understanding resource consumption and for pursuing sustainability goals. In stressing the routine, performative and contextual dimensions of action, research on geographies of practice is faced with particular methodological challenges. A lively debate concerns the utility of talk‐based methods for investigating routine practices, such as those relating to everyday consumption. While it has been compellingly argued that people can talk individually or in groups about their practice, as of yet, these methodological debates have not been extended to the question of whether people can talk about past practice over the lifecourse. This is despite the fact that attending to practice dynamics at the lifecourse scale can reveal important insights into the intersections of structure, agency, time, and space in consumption practices. Seeking to address this gap, this methodology‐focused article explores biographic inquiry as an empirical strategy for research on geographies of practice and consumption. After identifying significant challenges in representation associated with researching routine action in general, and past practice in particular, it outlines key learnings garnered during a biographic study on domestic consumption in Ireland. Central methodological features supporting talk‐elicitation include zooming‐in‐and‐out of temporal registers, multi‐modality, and phased implementation. The article concludes that people can talk about past practice in often very detailed, intricate ways and that retrospective talk is a valuable tool for understanding practice dynamics at the lifecourse scale.
... I never really considered how these concepts factor into research, whether we are aware of them or not. Along with my first-year cohort, I read her co-authored article, Kitchen table reflexivity: negotiating positionality through everyday talk, which still -six years later -resides in my mind when I think about a new research project (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015). ...
An awareness of positionality, an attention to accountability, and a commitment to reflexivity are increasingly key elements to conducting geographical fieldwork. As such, the ‘field’ is not only a place where we go to conduct research. The ‘field’ is a place where people live, where histories are present, and where our actions are never objective. This short article discusses my experiences as an early career researcher as I came to terms with these realities during preliminary dissertation research in Nepal. As a result of several formative moments – including surviving a landslide – I slowly began to realize that issues of reflexivity and positionality are not only critical for more ethical research, but also these concepts result in more generative projects. Here, I discuss why I came to these conclusions and explain how my experiences led me to the work I am doing today.
... Reflexivity demands an "iterative and empowering process" (Palaganas et al., 2017, 426) that involves reflecting on self, representation, accountability, data collection and interpretation as fieldwork is "contextual, relational, embodied, and politicized" (Sultana, 2007, 376, 383). Kohl and Priscilla (2014) propose a kitchen table reflexivity; a "community-minded approach" to research and scholarship where informal conversations or "everyday talk" are important to build "spaces of comfort," and recognize the complex relations between people involved in the research process (748-751). ...
Current institutional frameworks in sex- and gender-based analysis (SGBA) are promising, but significant gaps remain in their relation to recent developments in research praxis. In this paper we draw from our own experiences with a national health research funding agency, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), to critically examine the uptake and implementation of its current frameworks and practices of sex and gender analysis in health research. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a cohort of 18 health researchers alongside an institutional policy analysis to show how sex and gender have been understood, integrated, and addressed within the agency and initiative.
Our findings reveal that attention to date has focused on representation (human and data) while deeper justice issues that are attentive to intersectionality, positionality and reflexivity—remain ambiguous. Finally, we discuss possible strategies for institutions to improve the uptake of knowledge, training, and policy to better support intersectional and culturally-relevant frameworks across the diverse research community.
... This article concerns the socio-spatial discrepancy between environmental activists' experiences with nature in their young adulthood and their current situation, living among environmental problems that threaten their public spaces. The key argument here departs from the previous seminal ideas that environmentalists' identity emerges through a juxtaposition of critical self-reflexivity (Adkins, 2001;Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Leonard, 2012). Instead, it invokes the activists' close alliances with nature and emotional bonding with nature, and examines the clash between these emotions and the destruction occurring in the environment (Bell and York, 2012;Dempsey and Robertson, 2012). ...
Despite the huge and growing environmental movement to protect urban forests in Indonesia, the tensions between environmental activists’ past engagements with nature and the emerging environmental problems are under-studied. The inner contradiction between the intensive nature of the connections and experiences that the actor maintains and the recent external threat to the environment is the key energizer of an environmental movement. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal concept of hysteresis, this article explores how activists’ previous experiences with nature suffer disjuncture caused by the threat of urban forest privatization occurring in their neighborhood. Drawn from in-depth interviews with the co-founders of an environmental movement organization, the activist narratives in this article reveal that the development of their current struggles was driven by feelings of disappointment, anxiety, anger and a fear of losing the urban forest. The urban forest, for them, not only constitutes a physical space, but serves social and spiritual purposes, represents local identity and is the basis for everyday life.
... The "rigour" of reflexive positionality assessments and extent to which these are "written into" research outputs varies considerably, however. As Kohl and McCutcheon (2015) note, for some researchers an assessment of positionality amounts to little more than a tokenistic ticking off from a "laundry list" of key identifiers; for others it involves more complex and nuanced engagement with positionality via self-reflexive introspection. Many scholars devote extensive text to the issue on grounds that doing so enables audiences to assess a study's credibility or "trustworthiness" more effectively (Cousin, 2010;Gunasekara, 2007). ...
Positionality has long been a preoccupation for qualitative researchers within and beyond geography. Reflexive assessments of positionality typically examine the ways in which a researcher’s sociodemographic identifiers such as gender, age, ethnicity, dis/ability, sexuality and/or the intersections between these affect research encounters, processes and outcomes. Religion rarely features in such interrogations, and then usually only in relation to participants’ ethnic or racial affiliations. Drawing upon experiences conducting a study exploring the role of faith‐based organisations in welfare provision for homeless people in the UK, this paper focuses on the related (but not synonymous) issue of metaphysical stance, that is, belief or non‐belief in the existence of God(s). It argues that metaphysical stance should be regarded as a sui generis aspect of positionality, which fits into none of the identity categories typically considered, but which is deserving of separate analysis with respect to its ethical and practical implications. Further to this, it contends that extreme diplomacy and discretion are required when exploring issues as inherently value‐laden as the moral frameworks underpinning welfare approaches. This is especially true when participants’ views divide in part along theist/atheist lines, such that religious and policy ‘literacy’ are valuable attributes for researchers negotiating these sensitive terrains in the field.
... It made me question myself deeper around if my desire to use Indigenous methodology was coming from a place of wanting to be 'taken in' by the community. As such, the classroom space, my trusting relationship with her, and my willingness to receive feedback in the space, all fostered an atmosphere in which the classroom functioned both as a counterspace (Ong et al., 2018) and a kitchen table (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015) in supporting my understanding of my own position, power, and process as a graduate scholar. ...
As non-Indigenous scholars, what does it mean to engage with Indigenous methodology and how can Indigenous methods be used to offer unique ways of knowing in a responsible manner? What are ethical concerns using Indigenous methods given our own positionality? In this autoethnography, I grapple with the ethics of using Indigenous methods as a Pakistani-American Muslim woman. Specifically, I write about and analyze poetry, journal reflections, and field notes from conversations in and outside of the classroom about my journey understanding my own power and purpose in the academy as a settler of color. Using AsianCrit, I found five themes were particularly salient: coming ‘home’ to myself, culture and comfort in food, class as a counterspace and kitchen table, power and paying it forward, and trusting my intuition. In the second part of the paper, my instructor and I engage in dialogue about the question of employing methods as a non-Indigenous scholar and reflect again on the role of food, reciprocity, and responsibility within our relationship.
... While academic discussions beyond literary studies have been turning attention to narrative and story in the last several decades, it is clear that storytelling has long been important for many cultural and knowledge practices, from African and African American storytelling (Borona, 2017;Crawford, 2019;Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015), to Yemeni poetry (Miller, 2007), as well as for Indigenous lifeways, ontologies, and knowledge practices across the globe. Indeed, it has long been recognized that storytelling, poetry, song, and oral teaching are foundational for many cultures, and are often key for learning, sharing, and the transmission of values or legal frameworks (Daigle, 2016). ...
Work on narrative, story, and storytelling has been on the rise across the humanities and social sciences. Building on significant work on these themes from Indigenous, Black, and Feminist scholarship, and other varied traditions, this piece explores and elaborates the potential regarding the elicitation, sharing, and analysis of stories for nature-society studies. Specifically, the piece examines core contributions along these lines to date, as well as the methodological, analytical, political, and transformative potential of story and storytelling to enrich, broaden, and deepen work in nature-society, political ecology, and environmental justice. All told, focus on story and storytelling, offers a number of relevant and rich openings to understand and engage complex, unequal, and dynamic socio-natures. While these elements have been present in nature-society work from some traditions and lines of inquiry, the time is ripe to broaden and deepen these engagements to more fully imagine, and respond to, key nature-society challenges.
... Qualitative researchers start our research with our consciousness which is always influenced by our social characteristics like gender, race, age and nationality (Rose, 1997;Bourke, 2014;Sultana, 2016). Geographers have long suggested that researchers should be aware of their identity positions as well as those of their informants in the process of fieldwork, and keep this as part of their research practices (Mullings, 1999;Chattopadhyay, 2013;Botterill, 2015;Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Zhao, 2017). took the chance to take pictures for them to get closer to them. ...
The Rural Tourism Makers (RTMs) policy initiated by the National Tourism Administration in China aimed to create 100 RTMs’ Model Bases and engage 10,000 RTMs in rural tourism development between 2015 and 2017. The arrival of RTMs to the villages and their engagement in rural tourism raise some fundamental questions about urban–rural population movement, the changing rural landscape in China, and the relationships between newcomers and local residents. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork in four RTMs’ Model Bases in Zhejiang province and Sichuan province in China, including participant observation and 131 interviews with government officials, RTMs, and local residents, this research aims to answer three research questions. Who are the RTMs and why are they moving to the rural areas? How do RTMs produce a new rural landscape and how is their middle-class identity performed in this process? And what are the relationships between newly incoming RTMs and local residents? Addressing current debates in rural studies and related fields, three main arguments are made. First, RTMs are both middle-class consumers and creativeclass producers, taking us beyond the consumer-producer binary found in much existing rural tourism research. Second, RTMs provide a new example of ongoing and flexible urban–rural mobility, taking us beyond the unidirectional, long-distance, and permanent movements of people found in much existing urban–rural migration research. Third, the relationship between newcomers and local residents is complex and shaped by the specific Chinese context, taking us beyond the form of displacement found in much existing rural gentrification research. In sum, this research contributes to understandings of the emerging new middle class and the emerging new rural landscape in China and beyond.
... The intention here is to reduce the burden of participating in research for timestrapped organizers who are focusing on the immediacy of food security efforts and other projects. Where possible, we will offer research and practical supports to such organizations and individuals as a means to generate more of a reciprocal relationship than is typically possible in standard research projects (Kohl and McCutcheon 2015;Sumner 2016). We have already taken such an approach in collaborating with other community partners, including Toronto Urban Growers, the Coalition for Healthy School Food, and the Market City research project, which is associated with the Toronto Food Policy Council. ...
In this overview of a COVID-19-related food system project underway from Toronto, we relate our research questions, methodologies, and initial findings. We focus here on two of the key questions we are asking: (1) How are food supply chains and food insecurity rates being affected within this pandemic context?, and (2) How are different actors—from newcomer urban gardeners and those involved with farmers’ markets to BIPOC groups—responding to food system-related constraints and opportunities during this time? Preliminary results from this public-facing project (www.feedingcity.org) show that the city’s food system is not highly resilient in the face of crisis, although many grassroots initiatives are compensating for this lack of resiliency—from the coordination of food security initiatives, to modified approaches to food production and marketing. Over the span of the project we are also exploring: (3) What experiences from other jurisdictions (nationally and globally) should be considered in informing local food system strategies?, and (4) What policy outcomes, and community and civil society responses, are needed to address identified challenges in both the near term and the longer term?
... For example, radical geographies' theories on the role of racial capitalism in land and property relationships can historicize and inform current actions to address labor abuses in the food supply chain (Freshour, 2016) or solidify the work of Latinx farmers and food system workers (see Minkoff-Zern, 2019;Sbicca et al., 2020Sbicca et al., , 2020. At the same time, the actions of social movements and activists to politicize planning and bureaucratic decision-making about food access can provide needed empirics for radical geographies theorizing on post-political natures as well as opportunities for direct engagement with activists (see Collective, Newtown Florist Club Writing, 2013;Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015;Patel, 2011). Through utilizing a geographic lens, a radical food geography praxis makes use of the interconnectivity between places and movements; relationality between land and people (including questions of positionality); the flows of people, environmental resources, ideas, and culture; and the diverse approaches to achieving justice-oriented objectives. ...
Radical geographies scholarship has evolved over the past decades in pursuit of transforming spatial, political-economic, social, and ecological engagements within oppressive structures. Similarly, food systems scholarship demonstrates increasing interest in the scalar, sociopolitical, and ecological dynamics of food systems, often with an applied or action-oriented focus. Building on these connected, yet divergent, traditions of scholarship and action, we propose a radical food geography praxis that is rooted in the intersections of active resistance to structures that (re)produce power inequity and oppression in food systems in specific places and across spaces, and an ongoing process of critical and theoretical reflection about these structures and geographies. The radical food geography praxis we propose consists of three primary and interconnected elements: (1) theoretical engagements with power and structures of oppression both inside and outside the academy; (2) action through academic, social movement, and civil society collaborations; and (3) analysis through a broadly defined geographic lens. Through bringing together radical geographies and food systems scholarship, a radical food geography praxis reveals the interconnectivity between places and movements, relationality between land and people, the flows of people, environmental resources, ideas, and culture, and the diverse approaches to achieving justice-oriented objectives. In order to build more equitable and sustainable food systems, it is essential to engage with these geographic realities in deeply theoretical and action-oriented ways.
... Activist-scholars, then, must work to not only learn about and make mention of structures of oppression, but also actively engage in dismantling them by working with and supporting communities' efforts for justice (Herrera, 2018). To this end, Kohl and McCutcheon (2015) argue for a "kitchen table reflexivity" in which researchers engage in informal conversations with their collaborators to enable a more thorough consideration of the relationships between positionalities and the broader context in which scholarly work takes place. ...
Food justice scholarship and activism have co-evolved and at times been intertwined over past decades. In some instances there are clear distinctions between “scholarly” and “activist” activities. However, individuals, groups, and actions often take on characteristics of both, producing knowledge at multiple sociopolitical scales. Recognizing and building upon these dynamics is important for strengthening food justice work. This is especially salient in an era in which academia, including geography, seeks more public engagement, yet has a complicated history of appropriating and/or dismissing experience-based knowledge, exacerbating uneven power-knowledge dynamics. These topics are of direct relevance to geography and intersect with radical geography traditions through engagement in social and political action and putting socio-spatial justice theory into practice. Since 2014, a small-but-growing group of individuals interested in the intersections between scholarship, activism, and geography have cultivated a Food Justice Scholar-Activist/Activist-Scholar Community of Practice (FJSAAS). This article examines the evolution and praxes of FJSAAS focusing on power-knowledge and radical geographies. Based on analysis of FJSAAS records and recollections of participants since its founding, we discuss challenges encountered, the broader relevance for similarly-positioned communities of practice, and offer recommendations for those engaging in food justice scholarship, activism, and/or radical geography. We conclude that radical geographies; concepts of radical food geographies; and scholar-activist/activist scholar praxis are mutually-reinforcing in recognizing experience-based knowledge as part of envisioning and putting into place a more just food system.
... This is important considering my positionality as a white researcher engaging with the Black visions, practices, and experiences. As scholars have noted, it is important not only to recognise that our positionality impacts the research but also to practice accountability with research participants (Kohl and McCutcheon 2015;Nagar 2003). My whiteness and corresponding privileges mediated my experiences within these spaces, limiting the reliability of any experiential data gathered during observations. ...
In this article, I argue that places of respite provide relief from the burdens of oppressive articulations and experiences of society and space and are produced through three general practices: relief as a practice that mitigates psychological and physical burdens of oppression; recuperation as a form of (self‐)care that can help heal harms; and affirmative resonance as a practice of counter‐storytelling that challenges hegemonic social narratives and internalises affirmative narratives for marginalised peoples. Through a case study with members of the Marching 100 at Florida A&M University (FAMU), I demonstrate how these relational practices produce FAMU as a multiscalar place of respite for black students. Finally, I claim that places of respite, produced through a black sense of place, offer scholars interested in affirmative black geographies an ontological object produced by (and productive of) visions and practices of black life and produced for the celebration and protection of black lives.
... The situatedness of this study in a research project that accompanied the funding programme had implications for the data collection process and our positioning in the field [55]. It entailed "fluid, every-changing positionalities" ( [62], p., 747) in our relationship to the selected research projects and the actors within them, as well as to the funding body. Our position as 'official' accompanying researchers presumably gave legitimacy to the study and enhanced the researchers' motivation or even perceived obligation to participate in it. ...
Abstract The participation of practitioners in transdisciplinary sustainability research has been heralded as a promising tool for producing ‘robust’ knowledge and engendering societal transformations. Although transdisciplinary approaches have been advanced as an effective avenue for generating knowledge positioned to question and transform an unsustainable status quo, the political and power dimensions inherent to such research have hardly been discussed. In this article, we scrutinise the constitution of participation in transdisciplinary research through a power lens. Guided by social theories of power and a relational understanding of participation, we analyse how diverse actors equipped with a variety of material and ideational sources wield power over the subjects, objects, and procedures of participation. We applied a qualitative meta-analysis of five transdisciplinary projects from a major German research funding programme in the field of sustainability to unveil the ways in which the funding body, researchers, and practitioners exercise instrumental, structural, and discursive power over (i) actor selection and (re-)positioning, (ii) agenda setting, and (iii) rule setting. We found that researchers primarily exert instrumental power over these three elements of participation, whereas practitioners as well as the funding body wield primarily structural and discursive power. By elucidating tacit and hidden power dynamics shaping participation in transdisciplinary research, this article provides a basis for improving process design and implementation as well as developing targeted funding instruments. The conclusions also provide insights into barriers of participatory agenda setting in research practice and governance.
... Third, one of the biggest challenges the researchers faced was gaining access to participants from Hong Kong involved in the UK real estate market. The position of the researchers being insiders (Zhao, 2017), outsiders (Merriam et al., 2001), or perhaps somewhere in between (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015;Zhao, 2017) had a significant influence on data collection and research outcome. In some cases, Researcher 1 being an 'insider' who, in Hong Kong, shared the same language, ethnic and cultural background helped to gain the trust of participants. ...
Academic and popular debates around the movement of financial capital tied to the residential housing market in global cities such as London, tend to focus on the super-rich, wealth management and pension funds. While such debates acknowledge that these large scale capital flows influence socioeconomic structures of the destination cities, relatively little is known about how middle-class money flows across national and city boundaries, and between key intermediaries. This article aims to address these empirical and conceptual lacunae by examining the practices of middle-class Hong Kong investors, many of whom have been investing in properties worldwide since the early 1990s. Using ethnographic research and interviews carried out in Hong Kong and the UK, this article sheds light on the investment activity of two groups of middle-class investors: the wealthy middle-class and the aspiring middle-class. The article shows how a wealthy city-state like Hong Kong, with a laissez-faire economy and established international real estate sector, has enabled the outflow of capital to the global housing market. The article also highlights the ability of ethnographic studies to help us look inside processes of transnational housing investment.
This paper argues that through reflexive examination of positions of betweenness in research relationships, insights are gathered that help to understand and address the often-contested research spaces in refugee and forced migration research. Following the completion of a research project with Syrian male refugees in the Netherlands, I investigate how multiple identities and shifting social positions impact research relationships, ethical considerations and knowledge production. Over time, the Syrian men and I occupy various positions due to the intersections of gender, generation, religion, ethnicity and migration status, shifting emphasis between similarities and differences. I show that a focus on positions of betweenness within these relationships may lead to sites of trust and solidarity, mutual acts of support and care, and insights into mutual vulnerability. As a result, the paper first highlights positions of betweenness as a strategy to develop ethical research practices by speaking to wider contexts of social and cultural inequalities and to momentarily transfer some of the power in the research process to participants. Second, the paper demonstrates that novel insights into the dynamic and messy nature of refugees’ everyday lives are gained as insights into betweenness allow both the ‘normal’ and the ‘vulnerable’ to surface.
In this paper, I question how a researcher might fulfil the unique adequacy requirement when studying novices in a setting in which the researcher is already a member. Since novices by definition lack the expected competencies in a setting, having unique adequacy for novice methods may appear oxymoronic. However, this paper suggests that unique adequacy requires enacting specific ways of ‘seeing’ as part of accomplishing local order; once one is competent, it becomes difficult to enact incompetent action in a locally adequate way, suggesting one can actually lose unique adequacy. Furthermore, as any given situated involves a multifaceted set of competencies, exactly which or whose competencies are relevant is both an analysts’ and members’ issue to solve. With reference to examples, I discuss how analysts and members delimit the ‘provinces of meaning’ in the process of finding what is locally adequate.
According to Sylvia Wynter, we are “a storytelling species”: The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as “humans” across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural understandings of our relations with earth? We closely read three anticolonial (feminist) scholars whose theories illuminate the relationship of race, gender, and nature: Wynter’s genealogy of humans as storytellers; Lorena Cabnal’s elaboration of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and ancestral patriarchy; and Mishuana Goeman’s conceptualization of the body as a meeting place. Anticolonial feminist storytelling alters the spatiotemporal scales through which planetary crises are understood by centering the relationship between body and land. We elaborate how the White, cis male, bourgeois and propertied figure of the human reproduces a story that normalizes the racialization of people and ecologies, gendered domination, and extractivism. Revealing this dominant story to be a fiction of modernity, these scholars open a space of possibility, to tell stories otherwise that reimagine what it means to be human on earth. Storytelling as anticolonial praxis troubles the fixity of racial-colonial violence and reconceives the human, not as a liberal subject or fixed object within colonial capitalism, but as a node within a relational network of human and nonhuman kin.
This paper considers the relationship between Black women and literacy and how our pedagogy is embodied through our stories. The stories we share, live, make, and remake, contribute to our positional locations in the world and our physical bodies. I explore connections between emotional scars Black women carry caused by societal and academic norms, and how our teaching experiences in predominantly white spaces lead some of us to disrupt dominant perspectives within literacy education. Counter-narrative (Yosso, 2006 Yosso, T. J. (2006). Critical race counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano educational pipeline. Routledge. [Google Scholar]) is one pedagogical tool Black Women faculty use to disrupt these dominant perspectives. Black women’s faculty narratives help scholars understand how we are positioned within universities and ways we disrupt dominant perspectives in education through research methods and literacy pedagogy. I draw upon Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998 Ladson-Billings, G. J. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/095183998236863[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) to demonstrate its usefulness in literacy contexts. This research has implications for educational inquiry and pedagogical praxis, particularly from diverse, critical perspectives.
In the response to mass protests calling to reform, defund, or abolish the police, a number of U.S. police departments have recently grappled with reforms. In a familiar cycle of periodic crises that lead to calls for police reform, many proposed reforms end up funneling more money into police departments while doing little to address entrenched and systemic forms of racism. In this article, I analyze a city-run reform effort in Lexington, KY that seeks to “dismantle systemic racism” in policing and other government agencies. I show how the police reform committee struggled to address everyday practices of policing that lead to racially disparate outcomes and, instead, largely focused on animus and bias exhibited by individual officers. In response to the perceived lack of data on racially uneven policing practices, in this article I argue that we take seriously minor ‘crime’ data as indicators of police discretion and priorities. To those ends, I map the uneven geographies of marijuana possessions enforcement, showing how they intersect with existing forms of vulnerability. In mapping enforcement, I offer a replicable means to shift the framing through which reform efforts are conceptualized and show how the existing, entrenched model of policing produces, amplifies, and reifies systemic racism.
A key challenge for the cross-cultural researcher is how to maintain authenticity in the stories of participants, paying careful attention to any inherent power imbalances. In this article, we share our respective experiences of conducting research with Pacific students and their families in Aotearoa New Zealand as non-Pacific researchers. We discuss tensions we encountered regarding power and positionality, highlighting the importance of engaging with Pacific perspectives and methodologies to help counter these tensions. In our respective studies, we aimed to promote the voices of our participants and conduct research which prioritised Pacific values. We further appreciated that we must not let our own research agenda override the needs of our participants. We explain why we believe these ideas to be so important and draw tentative conclusions on ways to engage in research with Pacific families based on what we have learnt. The data presented from our respective studies highlight our approaches and present some of the challenges, as well as our efforts to engage in reciprocal, respectful relationships with our participants and their families. We hope that, in sharing our reflections, we may offer some useful insight to other researchers embarking on a similar journey to us.
Within qualitative research, much can be learned from the influence of researcher positionality on the research process. Reflecting upon ethnographic fieldwork undertaken for a doctoral study, this paper explores how researcher positionality not only shapes research motivations but also situates the researcher and the 'researched', impacting how data is created and interpreted. There is a long history of engaging with positionality in qualitative research, however, oftentimes this engagement is purely descriptive, providing a 'shopping list' of characteristics and stating if these are shared or not with participants. It is important for engagement with reflexivity to go beyond providing a 'shopping list' of positionality statements to develop deeper discussions about the fluidity of positionality across the research process. Using the previously established concept of 'kitchen table reflexivity', I reflect on how talk allows researchers to outline shifts and adaptability in positionality as research progresses. I expand this concept to argue that kitchen table reflexivity can occur in conversations during fieldwork with participants, utilising a range of in/visible tools at the researcher's disposal. For example, the spaces between fieldwork encounters, the 'waiting field', is often where observations and informal discussions with participants take place. Using fieldnotes and interview data, this paper outlines how positionality fluctuates and interweaves with the theoretical, methodological, and analytical approach taken. The paper concludes by restating the importance of meaningful engagement with positionality throughout qualitative research, in order to avoid static and hollow positionality statements. 2
Ethnographic research is increasingly common in urban planning, yet few scholars have written about critical engagement with their own positionalities, subjectivities, and privilege while ‘in the field.’ In this article, I reflect on my dissertation research examining the socio-spatial mobilities and aspirations of young people in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to describe how decolonial thinking and scholarship shifted my research approach and how I understood myself as researcher. I focus on two moments during the dissertation process where what I was seeing, feeling, and experiencing exceeded western understandings of research and the research process. I suggest that two interrelated concepts, cuerpoterritorio and sentipensar, were particularly helpful in revisiting my research design and methodological tools and expanding spaces of learning to other disciplines as a means to question my researcher positionality and proactively develop a relational solidarity politics.
Undertaking qualitative research requires flexibility in academics, because researching peoples’ lifeworlds is an inherently messy process because the lived realities of those being researched can be convoluted and changing. Academics make structured research designs with the implicit knowledge that the research will not happen in a linear way. This knowledge takes time and experience to achieve. In this article I propose flexible methodologies to describe researchers’ adaptability in terms of their methods, techniques, positionalities, roles, and changes in the research plan. For my PhD research looking at a range of urban places and spaces in Dublin, by being fluid in my research from the beginning, I was able to gain a deeper understanding of the lifeworlds of my participants, and I demonstrate this with three vignettes from my own research. Rather than adjusting my research plan as problems occurred, I instead began with a flexible approach. I argue that beginning with flexibility can aid graduate students in understanding changes and developments in research as a positive, necessary shift in the research plan and is helpful to beginner researchers but also their supervisors. Flexible methodologies are a pragmatic approach for PhD students and early career researchers to achieve their research aims.
For decades Chicanx/Latinx feminists have mobilized important alternative onto-epistemologies and methodologies like testimonio that subvert dominant forms of knowledge production. Yet, these contributions have not been meaningfully engaged in the discipline of geography. This article seeks to address this gap by bridging methodological lessons across feminist geography, Chicanx/Latinx Feminist Studies and testimonio. Drawing on my experiences as a Latina feminist geographer doing research with my community, I critically reflect on how Chicanx/Latinx feminisms and testimonio create crucial openings to work towards a more ethical, relationally grounded, anti-oppressive praxis in geography.
Objective
Embedding researchers within health systems results in more socially relevant research and more effective uptake of evidence into policy and practice. However, the practice of embedded health service research remains poorly understood. We explored and assessed the development of embedded participatory approaches to health service research by a health research team in Kenya highlighting the different ways multiple stakeholders were engaged in a neonatal research study.
Methods
We conducted semistructured qualitative interviews with key stakeholders. Data were analysed thematically using both inductive and deductive approaches.
Setting
Over recent years, the Health Services Unit within the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Nairobi Kenya, has been working closely with organisations and technical stakeholders including, but not limited to, medical and nursing schools, frontline health workers, senior paediatricians, policymakers and county officials, in developing and conducting embedded health research. This involves researchers embedding themselves in the contexts in which they carry out their research (mainly in county hospitals, local universities and other training institutions), creating and sustaining social networks. Researchers collaboratively worked with stakeholders to identify clinical, operational and behavioural issues related to routine service delivery, formulating and exploring research questions to bring change in practice
Participants
We purposively selected 14 relevant stakeholders spanning policy, training institutions, healthcare workers, regulatory councils and professional associations.
Results
The value of embeddedness is highlighted through the description of a recently completed project, Health Services that Deliver for Newborns (HSD-N). We describe how the HSD-N research process contributed to and further strengthened a collaborative research platform and illustrating this project’s role in identifying and generating ideas about how to tackle health service delivery problems
Conclusions
We conclude with a discussion about the experiences, challenges and lessons learned regarding engaging stakeholders in the coproduction of research.
In this paper, I present my experiences as an emerging classroom-based researcher. Using personal narratives, I examine the tensions that emerge from the emotional work often required to conduct educational research. This autoethnographic approach explores the complexity of student-teacher interactions using Swanson’s middle-range theory of caring. In reflecting on my experiences, I hope to inform emerging researchers’ understanding of reflexive practices as a way of developing critical spaces within PK-12 educational research.
The concept of positionality has long been at the heart of feminist geographic scholarship, though today it often remains unengaged within male-dominated segments of the discipline. In this article, I bring the concept of positionality to bear on one area of contemporary geographic theory, post-phenomenology, to highlight how feminist and other critical epistemological stances are rendered improbable, if not logically impossible, by the terms of debate of this emerging subfield. By deconstructing ideas of the subject, experience, identity, and social categories, post-phenomenology dispenses with the critical vocabulary at the heart of feminist claims to knowledge and critical epistemological thought more generally. Reaching beyond the frame of theoretical debate, I reflect on the reception of my own work in the field (through the process of peer-review) to demonstrate that these issues are not mere intellectual differences or positions that occur in some kind of social vacuum; rather, they illuminate the dynamics of identity and knowledge production in geography more broadly. Ultimately, I advocate for an attention to positionality as an antidote to the epistemological and theoretical limitations of post-phenomenology and as a way to foster more critical, inclusive, and accountable dialogues in this emerging field and geography more broadly.
Bringing together feminist works on affect, neoliberalism, and the racial dimensions of dependency discourse, this paper discusses affective politics in policy making spaces by examining a Durham (North Carolina, USA) City Council meeting. We focus on a 2017 Housing Needs Hearing where bodily gestures and speech acts were crucial parts of emotional interactions that defined, maintained, and challenged subject positions and power structures. We argue that embedded within legacies of racial and gender inequality, neoliberal sensibilities work through embodied emotional performances that impact policy conversations. Our analysis reveals how, despite progressive aspirations and accomplishments in Durham, the meeting's extractive set up perpetuates inequities by positioning those seeking assistance to prove their worth through a contradictory performance of desperation and self-actualization while enabling supporters of housing affordability, including city officials, to adopt the role of caring advocates. We find that a performance of pain and the rhetorical proof of self-responsibility opens up potential access to affordable housing and in doing so reveals both the limits and impact of a broken housing system. We thus extend analysis of the neoliberal condition of US housing inequality by deepening understanding of how neoliberal deservingness is embodied and shapes racialized, classed, and gendered subject positions.
Through this paper, we seek to re-imagine and challenge the meaning of archival spaces. While archival spaces are repositories of information, they are also sites where cultural values and public memory are shaped, and forms of power enacted. Drawing on sensory ethnography research in the Le Corbusier archives in Paris, France, we consider how boundaries are disrupted through noise, echo, reverberations, buzzing, and other “sounds.” Our work is presented in two overlapping textures: a soundtrack, with recordings from the Le Corbusier archives; and the text written out below. Alongside tracing archival soundscapes, a secondary function of this paper is to find our way with voice. In our experiences, ethnography is an embodied method, personal and context-specific. This made engaging with the two sets of “I’s” within our work, ultimately, a reflexive and collective process that happened over many conversations. We have chosen to keep “I” and clarify, as much as possible, whose experience is being shared.
This paper is based on the 2018 Neil Smith Lecture presented at the University of St Andrews. It considers the plantation past/futures of Sapelo Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Islands forming an archipelago along the US Southeastern coast. I work through the abolitionist efforts of the Saltwater Geechee’s who have resided there since at least 1803 to better understand how we can mobilise an emancipatory politics of land and property and to produce commons that work to repair and heal the violence done through enslavement and ongoing displacement. I weave together a series of historical threads to better situate linked ideas of abolition democracy and abolition geography, and to extend the notion of abolition ecology as a strategic notion to connect Eurocentric based political ecologies with the emancipatory tradition of Black geographies.
In August 2016, I began fieldwork as Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential campaign reached its peak. As Trump’s popularity snowballed, his campaign and election dramatically reshaped my fieldwork, with implications for power and positionality in the field. This article details how fieldwork and the research process are shaped by formal politics. In particular, I examine the effects of Trump’s presidential campaign and election on fieldwork by exploring how these events transformed relationships and interactions between participants and me in the field. As I show, my identity and positionality in southern Mexico became increasingly visible through contemporary politics in the United States. This process, although unexpected and uncomfortable, provided key opportunities to engage with participants in conversations around my own power and privilege, highlighting the multiple and dynamic natures of positionality in the field. Such insights deepen understandings of positionality and contribute to the methodological literature in geography by detailing how identity and positionality in fieldwork are explicitly shaped by broader, formal politics, which often take place outside the researcher’s control. These issues are especially important as xenophobia and populism proliferate worldwide, complicating the relationships and interactions that unfold between researchers and participants as well as the broader ethics of conducting geographic research. Key Words: fieldwork, migration, positionality, power, Trump.
Children’s school transport has become a major research focus over the past 20 years, particularly within the fields of planning, transport geography, and children’s geographies. However, this work has rarely considered children living with disability. This article presents the pilot component of a visual ethnographic study about school transport within families living with childhood disability. It explains why we piloted the study, details the pilot process, and presents lessons learned from piloting the study with two families of children living with different mobility needs. The lessons largely concern the design of interview guides and the interviewing process, as well as the development of an adaptive photo kit to enable children’s independent participation. The article shows how piloting qualitative studies, particularly those involving disabled children, can be invaluable in terms of improving data collection technologies and logistics, as well as enabling inclusive participation.
Autoethnography as sensibility The concept of autoethnography is best understood as a heuristic device, a metaphorical learning tool. The very term — auto-ethnography, auto/ethnography, aut oe thnography (with a dash, with a slash, with the wink of an eye) — suggests this sort of use. We all know what ethnography is: in a generic sense it is ‘writing about or describing people and culture’ (Ellis, 2004: 26); in a more politically and historically inflected sense it has been described as ‘a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others’ (Pratt, 1992: 7). Imagine what possibilities emerge for linking self to the ‘writing of culture’ when ‘auto’ is tacked onto ‘ethnography.’ So far in its fairly short history the heuristic, exploratory and metaphorical exercise of attaching self to ethnography is still a field of open possibilities. In fact, we have not even settled definitively on what ‘self’ The ...
Feminism, decolonization, and "new social movements' have decentered the geopolitical power of the "First World' and ruptured the relations of exploitation, domination, and imperialism that undergird it and the authority of the white, male, ruling class, Western subject. The tensions and reorientations in the macrological sphere resonate in social and cultural discourse where feminist theory, poststructuralism, and subaltern studies have called into question the subject positions associated with these relations of power. In this paper the author develops these themes by offering a critique of familiar modes and practices of representation and draws on ethnographic research in New York City and rural Sudan to argue that by interrogating the subject positions of ourselves as intellectuals as well as the objects of our inquiry we can excavate a "space of betweenness' wherein the multiple determinations of a decentered world are connected. Appropriating this knowledge we may develop enabling analyses of power and difference to find collective paths toward change. -from Author
Feminist scholars have traditionally emphasized the importance of incorporating “the everyday” worlds of women into the historically masculinist theoretical and empirical foundations of the social sciences. Such emphases have commonly resulted in smaller-scale research projects and more interactive kinds of research methods and methodologies. Feminist geographers have uniquely contributed to the body of feminist scholarship through drawing out the importance of place in everyday constructions of gender and, more recently, sexuality. Critical field-based research has therefore from the beginning been the mainstay of subdisciplinary research. Like the discipline as a whole, however, little explicit attention has been given in publications or pedagogically to the politics of fieldwork (including how a “field” is defined and the politics involved in choosing and working in a particular “field”) or the politics of representation (which includes considerations of the partiality of knowledge and how and to whom we represent our work, ourselves and others in various kinds of texts). These “Opening Remarks” show how these issues are addressed in the papers that follow and how feminist geography has much to contribute to critical analyses of global and multinational processes, including patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.
This article argues the personal/professional/political emancipatory potential of autoethnographic performance as a method of inquiry. Autoethnographic performance is the convergence of the “autobiographic impulse” and the “ethnographic moment” represented through movement and critical self-reflexive discourse in performance, articulating the intersections of peoples and culture through the innersanctions of the always migratory identity. The article offers evaluative standards for the autoethnographic performance methodology, calling on the body as a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy. Autoethnographic performance makes us acutely conscious of how we “ Iwitness” our own reality constructions. Interpreting culture through the self-reflections and cultural refractions of identity is a defining feature of autoethnographic performance.
Many questions-practical, strategic, political, ethical, personal-are raised by conducting field research. Some of these seem, or are constituted as, separate from the “research itself,” yet are integral to it. In this paper I attempt to cut through the breach that divides the doing of fieldwork and the fieldwork itself by addressing what constitutes the “field,” what constitutes a field researcher, and what constitutes data under contemporary conditions of globalization. Drawing on my work in New York City and Sudan, I argue that by interrogating the multiple positionings of intellectuals and the means by which knowledge is produced and exchanged, field researchers and those with whom they work can find common ground to construct a politics of engagement that does not compartmentalize social actors along solitary axes.
Early discussions of insider/outsider status assumed that the researcher was predominately an insider or an outsider and that each status carried with it certain advantages and disadvantages. More recent discussions have unveiled the complexity inherent in either status and have acknowledged that the boundaries between the two positions are not all that clearly delineated. Four case studies - a Black woman interviewing other Black women, Asian graduate students in the US interviewing people from ‘back home’, an African professor learning from African businesswomen, and a cross-cultural team studying aging in a nonWestern culture - are used as the data base to explore the complexities of researching within and across cultures. Positionality, power, and representation proved to be useful concepts for exploring insider/outsider dynamics.
Feminist and poststructural challenges to objectivist social science demand greater reflection by the researcher with the aim of producing more inclusive methods sensitive to the power relations in fieldwork. Following a discussion of contrasting approaches to these power relations, I present a reflexive examination of a research project on sexual identities. My reflections highlight some of the key ethical questions that face researchers conducting fieldwork, especially with regard to the relationship between the researcher and those being researched. My discussion of these dilemmas reflect the situated and partial nature of our understanding of “others.” I argue that the researcher's positionality and biography directly affect fieldwork and that fieldwork is a dialogical process which is structured by the researcher and the participants.
This paper contributes to the growing literature on methods and techniques for conducting qualitative research in economic geography, as well as to recent feminist debates on the impact that relationships of power between researchers and their informants have on the rigor of the findings of qualitative research. Drawing upon my own experiences whilst conducting interviews with managers and workers in information processing companies in Jamaica, I will examine the ways that inter-cultural perceptions, interactions and representations influenced the fieldwork process, and their ultimate effect on my interpretation and writing of the final text. This paper includes that because of the dynamic way in which identities and their attendant power relations are created and transformed during business interviews, uncertainty will necessarily remain a residual in the evaluation and interpretation of information received. It argues that recognizing and naming these uncertainties is an important step towards not only establishing rigor in the research process, but also to displacing the indomitable authority of the author.
Social Postmodernism defends a postmodern perspective anchored in the politics of the new social movements. The volume preserves the focus on the politics of the body, race, gender, and sexuality as elaborated in postmodern approaches. But these essays push postmodern analysis in a particular direction: toward a social postmodernism which integrates the micro-social concerns of the new social movements with an institutional and cultural analysis in the service of a transformative political vision.
This article investigates the complexities of negotiating subject positions in transnational and transcultural research by focusing on the gendering of race and racialization. As more people claim to be of mixed ‘racial’ descent and Western researchers grow more diverse, it is increasingly important that this diversity is reflected within geographical research; however, much of the existing research on subjectivity and its role in the research process has focused either on ‘white’ researchers in Global South contexts or on researchers working in their ‘home’ country or community. Less visible are accounts from those who challenge conceptions of ‘white’ Western researcher or whose racial identity can be conceived as hybrid. Moreover, there is a tendency to conceptualize race/racialization and their effects on subjectivity and positionality in relatively narrow terms. This article draws attention to the changing subjectivities of a racialized gendered body as it moves into different contexts. I examine how conceptualizations of race and discourses of racialization constitute researcher subjectivity, and how different understandings of ‘race’ mediate relationships between researcher and research participants (and others). To understand the spatial (re)configurations of (race) subjectivities and how this affects researcher positionality, I offer an autoethnography of a bi/multiracial Western woman of New Zealand Māori/Pākehā descent interpellated as ‘insufficient Other’ in her home context of Aotearoa New Zealand, then reconstituted as white and ‘sufficient Self’ in the Philippines by her research participants and Filipino ‘family’ and friends.
Recently, there has been a marked growth of interest in research methods in geography. Stimulated in part by the epistemological questions raised by feminist and post-modern critiques of 'scientific' method, this interest took a severely practical turn when the Economic and Social Research Council required a taught component, including methods, to be part of all postgraduate training. This led to the development of courses on alternative methodological strategies in geography and, especially for human geographers, an interest in developing teaching about feminist methods. In this paper, I discuss some of the issues that may arise from the adoption of explicitly feminist approaches to geographical research. Recognition of the positionality of the researcher and her/his subjects and the relations of power between them, as Pile argued in a different context in his recent paper in this journal, raises important questions for geographers that we are just beginning to address.
This article explores the connections between race, masculinity and urban space in the lives of Canadian-born young men of colour (aged 17-26) who have experienced homelessness in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It is based on ethnographic research including 40 interviews and eight ‘Where-I-Live-Tours’ of the city by the author and participants. This study explores the intersections between racial emergences and masculine performances in the lived experiences of homelessness, drawing connections between spatial representations and material experiences. It utilizes the concepts of affect and ‘racial vibrations’ to show how race emerges differently in different areas of the GTA. There exists a constant racial ‘vibe’ in the suburban areas of the GTA, whereas there is a vibrating whiteness that obscures racial events in downtown Toronto spaces. In both cases, the emergence of race contributes to continued oppression based on the intersections of racialized masculinities and homelessness.
This essay explores the cultural space of the kitchen as a metaphor for explicating the role of African American women scholars in the Academy and African American women's strategies of transforming a traditional institution of white male dominance. The essay suggests that African American women scholars employ a kitchen legacy to transform institutions of higher learning in ways similar to those their foremothers in the Southern plantation kitchens of the nineteenth century used to advance African American women's empowerment through self‐definition while rejecting objectification as other. First, the essay explains the Southern plantation kitchen as a site of struggle and transcendence in African American women's tradition. Next, the essay explores interdependency of the public and private spheres of African American women's experience through the conceptual framework of womanism, and offers new insights into the kitchen and the Academy as spaces of transformation. Finally, the essay discusses ways in which African American women can transform institutions through a redemptive vision of the kitchen legacy, which offers the Academy a future of provocative scholarship in womanist studies and praxis.
This article addresses the discussion, particularly prominent among feminist geographers, of reflexivity as a strategy for marking geographical knowledges as situated. It argues that, if the aim of feminist and other critical geographies is to acknowledge their partiality, then the particular form of reflexivity advocated needs careful consideration. Feminist geographers most often recommend a kind of reflexivity that aims, even if only ideally, at a full understanding of the researcher, the researched and the research context. The article begins with the author's failure at that kind of reflexivity, and that particular reflexivity is then discussed and described as ‘transparent’ in its ambitious claims to comprehensive knowledge. The article then goes on to explore critiques of transparent reflexivity, many of which have been made by feminist geographers themselves. The article concludes by suggesting that some recent discussions of the uncertainties of research practice offer another model of feminist reflexivity that may succeed more effectively in questioning the researcher's practice of knowledge production.
In Hausa villages of northern Nigeria the kitchen rarely exists as a separate room. Except in very wet or cold weather cooking takes place in the open courtyard of the multi-generational extended family compound, or gida. Cooking for family members is a female activity shared, or rotated, among co-wives in what are more often than not polygamous households. Thus, the kitchen is a site of female co-operation, jealousy and various other charged emotions. Using empirical data from a village case study this article analyses how kitchens can be viewed from a feminist perspective as sites of women's power.
In the 10 years since the first issue of Gender, Place and Culture was published, feminist geography has grown, matured, become part of the normal curriculum in most departments of geography. The need to consider gender as a fundamental aspect of social life has become accepted wisdom. We have much to celebrate. Over the same period, increasing attention has been paid to questions of racialisation, and to projects that set anti-racism on the academic agenda. While I would argue that, socially as well as academically, we have made more progress in overcoming gender barriers than racial barriers, a growing body of work recognises the intersection, indeed the simultaneity, of sexism and racism, as well as classism, ableism and homophobia. Such recognition has characterised the pages of Gender, Place and Culture from its very first issue. Indeed, no paper that addresses issues of social exclusion from a geographical perspective would fail nowadays to make several references to articles in this journal. Theoretically, the connection between gendered and racialised social constructions heightens social awareness of the ways in which social exclusion occurs. It is now received wisdom, well beyond the narrower confines of feminist and anti-racist scholarship, that human attributes are the result of social construction and, while many controversies rage over the findings—and the social effects—of the postmodern ‘turn’, this fundamental theoretical tenet is hardly questioned by intellectuals of the early twenty-first century. Broader attention has now been focused on issues of what kind of society—and what kind of theoretical underpinnings—will replace a world in which social constructions such as gender and ‘race’ are taken for granted. Perhaps the most significant general trend of the last decade, then, has been the fact that our journal has played such an active role in the transition from the early 1990s' struggle to overcome essential ideas to today's struggle to re-place essential ideas with a new geometry of human relations. Significant historical events on every social front emphasise the difficulties of that transition, both theoretically and empirically.
It is widely recognized that our understanding of the racial order will remain forever unsatisfactory so long as we fail to turn our analytic gaze back upon ourselves, the analysts of racial domination, and inquire critically into the hidden presuppositions that shape our thought. However, for reflexivity to be employed widely in the interest of scientific truth, analysts must acknowledge that reflexive thinking entails much more than observing how one's social position (racial identity or class background, for example) affects one's scientific analyses. In this paper, we deepen the meaning of scholarly reflexivity, discussing how it can be directed at three levels of hidden presuppositions: the social, the disciplinary, and the scholastic.
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic are completing a Tenth Anniversary Edition of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction for NYU Press. This best-selling primer explains the movement's organizational history, major themes, central figures, and likely future. The new edition contains material on developments that have taken place over the past decade, including the rapid growth in the Latino population, nativism against that group, the election of the nation's first black president, and the advent of right-wing populism in the form of the Tea Party Movement. The volume will be available in paperback in early 2011.
This article is an attempt to develop a comprehensive framework to examine memory from a sociological perspective with a particular
emphasis on the impersonal, conventional, collective, and normative aspects of the process of remembering. After discussing
the social context of remembering as well as various traditions andrules of remembrance, the article examines the process ofmnemonic socialization. It then moves on to identify variousmnemonic communities
(the family, the workplace, the ethnic group, the nation) as well as various social sites of memory(documents, stories, photograph albums, archaeological ruins, the calendar). Following a discussion of the way in which holidays
allow mnemonic synchronization,the article ends by examining the politics of remembrance as manifested in various mnemonic battlesover the social legacy of the past.
This stunning book represents the most comprehensive analysis to date of the complex relationships between black political thought and black political identity and behavior. Ranging from Frederick Douglass to rap artist Ice Cube, Michael C. Dawson brilliantly illuminates the history and current role of black political thought in shaping political debate in America.
The paper explores the power relations that identified a farming family through a particular farmhouse kitchen in Dorset, England. Studying this kitchen space was important, because on one hand it embodied a systemic sense of power, symbolising patrilineal inheritance with its ownership passed through male hands. Memories and voices haunted its space and pieces of inherited family furniture dominated its configuration, resisted change and defined performances. On the other hand, kitchen space exposed the complexity of power relations as household members were simultaneously disciplined by it and affected its substance. An episode of kitchen life illustrates this paper based on participant observation of a farming family in Dorset. Drama de Cocina: interpretación, patriarca y dinámicos de poder en una cocina granja de Dorset Este papel explora las relaciones de poder en una familia granja a través de su cocina en Dorset, Inglaterra. Estudiando este espacio cocina era importante porque por una parte personificó un sentido sistemático del poder, simbolizando la herencia patrilineal con la propiedad que traspasa por las manos masculinas. Las memorias y las voces andan por el espacio de la cocina los pedazos de muebles heredados de familia dominaron su configuración, resistieron variación y definieron interpretaciones. Por otra parte, el espacio de la cocina expone la complejidad de relaciones de poder mientras los miembros de la familia fueron disciplinado simultáneamente por él y afectaron su sustancia. Basado en observación participante, este papel utiliza como ilustración un episodio de la vida de la cocina de una familia granja en Dorset, Inglaterra.
Sheila's Shop: Working-Class African American Women Talk about Life, Love, Race, and Hair
- Kimberly Battle-Walters
Battle-Walters, Kimberly. 2004. Sheila's Shop: Working-Class African American Women Talk about
Life, Love, Race, and Hair. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture
- Anne L Bower
Bower, Anne L., ed. 2006. African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Hair Story: Unlocking the Roots of Black Hair in America
- A D Byrd
- L L Tharp
Byrd, A. D., and L. L. Tharp. 2002. Hair Story: Unlocking the Roots of Black Hair in America.
New York: St. Martin's Press.
Intersecting Oppressions
- Patricia Collins
- Hill
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Intersecting Oppressions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Accessed May 15,
2013. http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/13299_Chapter_16_Web_Byte_Patricia_Hill_
The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography
- Carolyn Ellis
Ellis, Carolyn. 2004. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut
Creek, CA: Rowman Altamira.
Toward a More Fully Reflexive Feminist Geography
- Falconer Al-Hindi
- Hope Kawabata
Falconer Al-Hindi, Karen, and Hope Kawabata. 2002. "Toward a More Fully Reflexive Feminist
Geography." In Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods, edited by
Pamela Moss, 103-116. Oxford: Blackwell.
Exploring Issues of Race, Land, and Identity, Geographer Carolyn Finney Finds a Place for Herself in Academia
- Carolyn Finney
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Geographer Carolyn Finney Finds a Place for Herself in Academia." Accessed June 26, 2011.
http://berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2007/11/28_finney.shtml
Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race
- S A Inness
Inness, S. A., ed. 2001. Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and
Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Pamela Moss
Moss, Pamela, ed. 2002. Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Exploring Methodological Borderlands through Oral Narratives
- Richa Nagar
Nagar, Richa. 1997. "Exploring Methodological Borderlands through Oral Narratives." In Thresholds
in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation, edited by John Paul Jones, III,
Heidi J. Nast, and Susan M. Roberts, 203-224. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
The Home as ‘Field’: Households and Homework in Rural Appalachia
- Ann Oberhauser
Oberhauser, Ann. 1997. "The Home as 'Field': Households and Homework in Rural Appalachia."
In Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation, edited by John
Paul Jones, III, Heidi J. Nast, and Susan M. Roberts, 165-182. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances
- Laura Schenone
Schenone, Laura. 2003. A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told
through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. New York: W.W. Norton.
If I Can Cook, You Know God Can
- Ntozake Shange
Shange, Ntozake. 1998. If I Can Cook, You Know God Can. Boston: Beacon Press.
Can We Talk about Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation
- Beverlydaniel Tatum
Tatum, BeverlyDaniel. 2007. Can We Talk about Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of
School Resegregation. Boston: Beacon Press.
Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies
- France Twine
- Jonathan W Winddance
- Warren
Twine, France Winddance, and Jonathan W. Warren. 2000. Racing Research, Researching Race:
Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies. New York: New York University Press.
The Kitchen Table Series
- Carriemae Weems
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