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Qualitative Research
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Reflexivity in research teams
through narrative practice
and textile-making
Beatriz E. Arias López
Faculty of Nursing, University of Antioquia, Colombia
Christine Andrä
Institute of Political Science, Technical University Dresden, Germany
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara
Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, UK
Abstract
This article discusses narrative practice and textile-making as two techniques of researcher reflexivity
in diverse teams conducting qualitative-interpretive research. Specifically, it suggests definitional
ceremonies—a collective structured method of storytelling and group resonances—as a useful tool
to interweave diverse researchers as a team, while maintaining the plurivocity that enables deeper
reflexivity. Additionally, textile-making is introduced as a material and embodied way of expression,
which complements narrative practice where words fail or need a non-linguistic form of elicitation.
We illustrate the two techniques with examples from our international, collaborative qualitative-
interpretive research project with demobilized guerrilla fighters in Colombia.
Keywords
Reflexivity, narrative practice, definitional ceremony, textile-making, collaborative research,
qualitative-interpretive research, transdisciplinary research, Colombia, peace process
Introduction
We have been saturated with death and pain; we have also survived. We have seen the war very
closely; it has been present in the daily life of all of us. Today, we do something to reinvent the
story. We meet and talk, which gives us hope; it lets us know that there is something that can be
done, and that we can go ahead and do it.
(Excerpt from editorialized team reflection, Andrea Ortega, Medellin, 2019)
Corresponding author:
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Penglais,
Aberystwyth SY23 3FE, Wales, UK.
Email: beb14@aber.ac.uk
1028799QRJ0010.1177/14687941211028799Qualitative ResearchArias López et al.
research-article2021
Standard Article
2 Qualitative Research 00(0)
This article proposes narrative practice and textile-making as innovative techniques
through which heterogeneous teams of researchers can practice processual reflexivity in
qualitative-interpretive social research, particularly in research on violent conflict and its
transformation. Based on the fundamental assumption that the researcher-subject cannot
be separated from the social world and that her research contributes to the social mean-
ing-making processes she studies, reflexivity is a cornerstone of all qualitative-interpre-
tive research. The specific research project underpinning this article sought to unearth
subjugated knowledges and alternative self-narratives of former combatants of the
Colombian guerrilla group FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionárias de Colombia)
who are now in the process of reincorporation into society, as well as of their rural host
communities, with the stated aim of fostering dialogue between antagonistic groups
within Colombian society. In the context of this project, the generally assumed need for
researcher reflexivity in qualitative-interpretive research became particularly pertinent,
for the past armed conflict had affected the lives of the majority of our team’s members
in manifold direct and indirect ways.
A broad, long-standing literature on reflexivity in qualitative-interpretive research
addresses many topics relevant to our research process, for instance the role of position-
ality and privilege in research, challenges of reflexivity in research on emotionally taxing
topics, methods of reflexivity that encompass the researcher and researched, and ethics
in structurally unequal teams involving researchers from the Global North and South.
However, only comparatively few texts engage with the practical challenges of actually
‘doing’ reflexivity as a team, over time, and in relation to difficult subjects such as armed
violence (Soedirgo and Glas, 2020). To contribute to addressing this lacuna, in this arti-
cle we develop and discuss two novel techniques of reflexivity—narrative practice and
textile-making—which, while centrally focussed on textual aspects, also extend existing
practices of (team) reflexivity to the material and the embodied. By developing these
techniques, our article makes two major contributions. Firstly, it suggests a practical and
collective approach to reflexivity through structured storytelling and resonances, sup-
ported by textile-making, in which different members of the research team collaborate in
ways that allow them to weave themselves as a team and create relationships through
reflexivity, while maintaining the plurivocity that enables deeper reflection. Secondly,
the article proposes an approach to reflexivity that, rather than reflecting on relatively
stable researcher identities in an anticipatory way, emphasizes researcher-subjectivities
that emerge, develop and potentially transform throughout the research process.
By ‘narrative practice’, we refer to the specific narrative approach pioneered by
Michael White and David Epston (1990). Originating in psychotherapy and subsequently
developed for social and pedagogical work with communities (Denborough et al., 2006)
and reflective teamwork in therapeutic settings (White, 1995), we have adapted the
approach to enable processual, intersubjective reflexivity in our research team. By ‘tex-
tile-making’, in turn, we mean processes of needlework, including embroidery, sewing,
appliqué, and other techniques (Andrä, 2020). Previously employed by one of the authors
as a method in research with victims of violent conflict in Colombia (Arias López, 2017),
here we use textile-making as a material and embodied complement to narrative practice.
Importantly, these methods of researcher reflexivity are also the very methods our team
used in its research with communities of former FARC fighters and their rural host
Arias López et al. 3
communities (Arias López et al., 2020b). An additional contribution of this article is
therefore the development of a method for processual, collective and practical reflexivity
that, in an interpretive spirit, breaks down barriers between methods of understanding the
self and those used with participant-subjects.
In the following, we first discuss the methodological literature on reflexivity, focus-
sing on three questions particularly pertinent to the challenges encountered in our pro-
ject, namely when, by whom, and how reflexivity is done. Next, we briefly introduce our
research project and explain its reflexivity-related needs and challenges. We then turn to
the two core techniques we used to practice reflexivity. Here, we firstly introduce narra-
tive practice—specifically, the tool of definitional ceremonies—and describe how we
used this tool for the purpose of group reflexivity. Secondly, we explicate textile-making
as a technique of reflexivity and illustrate how we have employed it to accompany the
reflexive process enabled by narrative practices. Taken together, we argue that narrative
practice and textile-making enabled reflexivity as an ongoing process that accounted for
how researchers’ subjectivities evolved throughout the research, and as a collective pro-
cess that wove a heterogeneous group of researchers into as a team without smoothing
over differences between their respective individual experiences and perspectives. We
conclude by reflecting on the limits, but also the more general applicability of the sug-
gested tools for ‘doing’ reflexivity.
‘Doing’ reflexivity in qualitative-interpretive social research
With the interpretive turn in the social sciences and its ‘overarching appreciation for the
centrality of meaning in human life’ (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2006: xii), the ideal of
the objective, neutral researcher has given way to the notion that researchers are them-
selves inevitably implicated in the meaning-making activities they study (Denzin and
Lincoln, 2005; Russel and Kelly, 2002). This, in turn, implies the central need for reflex-
ivity. Described as an ‘awareness of the researcher’s own presence in the research pro-
cess’ (Barry et al., 1999: 31), ‘explicit self-aware meta-analysis’ (Finlay, 2002: 209), or
the ‘active acknowledgement by the researcher that her/his own actions and decisions
will inevitably impact upon the meaning and context of the experience under investiga-
tion’ (Horsburgh, 2003: 309), reflexivity demands the clarification of researchers’
involvement in the socially constructed and meaning-laden world they study. Insofar as
methodology and methods are one central avenue through which this involvement and
clarification can unfold, qualitative-interpretive scholars have long conceived of reflex-
ivity as a ‘crucial strategy’ for improving knowledge-making about the social world
(Berger, 2015: 219).
Theoretical perspectives on reflexivity tend to vary by discipline, with cultural anthro-
pology (Geertz, 1973, 1988), sociology (Bourdieu, 2004; Bourdieu and Wacquant,
1996), and geography (Rose 1997), among others, disagreeing about the methodological
possibilities, purposes, and politics of reflexivity. Feminist scholarship, in particular, has
done much to advance theoretical understanding of these matters. It has pointed out the
limited reach of reflexivity as a tool for achieving transparency in social research
(Haraway, 1988; Pillow, 2003; Rose, 1997), established reflexivity’s embodied, emo-
tional/affective, and experiential nature (Malacrida, 2007), and laid out the power
4 Qualitative Research 00(0)
relations inherent also in reflexive approaches to knowledge production and research
methods (Alcoff and Potter, 1993; Reinharz, 1992; cf. Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2017:
13ff., 279ff.). Overall, these and related theoretical debates have furthered our under-
standing of reflexivity in multiple and important ways.
Yet these debates notwithstanding, living up to theoretical ideals of reflexivity in
endeavours to cultivate reflexive empirical knowledge remains a formidable task—as is
attested to by a growing methodological literature devoting itself to ‘the difficulty of
actually doing it’ (Rose, 1997: 306; cf. Soedirgo and Glas, 2020). Here, we discuss this
more practically inclined literature with regard to three aspects of ‘doing’ reflexivity
that are of particular relevance to our research, namely when, by whom, and how reflex-
ivity is practiced.
Regarding the question of the ‘appropriate times, spaces and contexts to be reflexive’
(Mauthner and Doucet, 2003: 419), much qualitative-interpretive social research empha-
sizes an anticipatory kind of reflexivity, which in practice consists in explicating how
researcher positionalities come to affect the research in different analytical moments. In
this vein, Berger (2015: 221), in her systematization of researcher positionings vis-à-vis
their research along an insider–outsider spectrum, argues that this kind of ‘[r]eflexivity
is crucial throughout all phases, including the formulation of a research question, collec-
tion and analysis of data, and drawing conclusions.’1 Such an anticipatory reflexivity
may be limited, however. Retrospectively discussing her experience of studying trau-
matic cultural memories, Drozdzewski (2015: 30f.) finds that her approach to reflexivity,
which sought to clarify the positionalities she was ‘“bringing” to the research’, had been
insufficiently adept at grasping the emotions arising from the research process and ‘per-
haps even a little naïve’ in its assumption that having thought about and articulated ‘my
own positionality had equipped me for this [research] venture.’ An even more sceptical
stance towards the ‘popular strategy [. . .] of “situating” oneself by prior announcement’
is taken by Patai (1991: 149), who argues that in this practice of reflexivity, individual
and group identities are often ‘deployed as badges’, in effect deflecting ‘attention from
the systemic nature of inequality’ and the question of what can be done to challenge it.
Overall, however, there are still only few attempts to go beyond anticipatory forms of
reflexivity, or to expand the practice of reflexivity to also ‘encompass [. . .] subjectivities
that emerge from the multiple interactions’, which together make up ‘the complex tapes-
try of the research process’ (Russel and Kelly, 2002; cf. Soedirgo and Glas, 2020).
A second question concerns the ‘cognised and cognisant agents (whether individually
or collectively)’ of reflexivity (Guillaume, 2002). Against the overwhelming focus
within the methodological literature on reflexivity as an activity of individual researcher-
subjects (Barry et al., 1999: 31f.; Massey et al., 2006: 133f.), ‘participatory’ practices of
reflexivity (Kumsa et al., 2015) and approaches to reflexivity in/by research teams (Barry
et al., 1999; Horsburg, 2003; Massey et al., 2006; Russell and Kelly, 2002) suggest col-
lectivist takes on reflexivity to be analytically worthwhile. In particular, insofar as the
inclusion of team members with complementary experiences, skills, and personalities
can improve the interpretive process and its outcome (Barry et al., 1999: 28ff.; Mead
1970; Pezalla et al., 2015), collective practices of reflexivity can contribute to safeguard-
ing and further enhancing the analytical benefits of teamwork by underlining the ‘multi-
plicity of voices’ and subjectivities that constitute the team (Russell and Kelly, 2002).
Arias López et al. 5
Awareness of and collaboration on this multiplicity can improve the research by serving
as an additional check on one another’s reflexivity (Berger, 2015: 222), by offering a
space in which to discuss the (often contentious) ‘issue of hierarchy versus collegiality’
(Barry et al., 1999: 29; cf. Rogers-Dillon, 2005), and by providing team members with
‘a stable sense of [not least emotional] support’ that enables them to expedite their analy-
ses beyond what they would have been ‘able to do if left to [their] individual (and indi-
vidualized) devices’ (Russell and Kelly, 2002). Collective practices of reflexivity could
be of particular benefit for research on violent conflict and its socio-political aftermath,
a field of study in which researchers not only grapple with emotionally challenging top-
ics such as the process of accounting for war-time atrocities (Thomson et al., 2012;
Wood, 2006), but which also continues to be characterized by teamwork constellations
in which scholars from the Global North often exploit and erase the intellectual and prac-
tical contributions of their colleagues from the Global South (Bouka, 2018).
Finally, there is the question of ‘how reflexivity can be operationalized’ (Mauthner
and Doucet, 2003: 416), by giving a reflexive twist to an existing repertoire of research
practices (interviewing, fieldnotes, analytical writing, etc.) or experimenting with new
ones. Proposals for ‘doing’ reflexivity include tools to be used throughout the research
process—for example, autoethnography (Brigg and Bleiker, 2010; Caretta, 2015),
‘biographical reflexivity’ (Ruokonen-Engler and Siuti, 2016), or ‘feminist research
ethic’ (Ackerly and True, 2008)—and approaches focused on embedding reflexivity
within other methods for data generation (Fujii, 2017; Pitts and Miller-Day, 2007) and
analysis (Mauthner and Doucet, 2003; Malacrida, 2007). In addition, there are a num-
ber of specific propositions for tools of team reflexivity. For example, Barry et al.
(1999: 35ff.) wrote and shared ‘reflexive position statements’ to render explicit the
assumptions they brought to their joint project and reflected on key theoretical ques-
tions by a similar method of individual writing followed by group discussion. Caretta
(2015: 501) asked her research assistants in the field to write individually and collabo-
ratively authored ‘self-reflective texts’ and thereby practically engaged her team in a
feminist, deconstructive reflexivity. Lingard et al. (2007), to negotiate the identity
politics within their interdisciplinary research team, first individually wrote about their
experiences of conducting research through concepts like ‘knowledge brokers’ and
‘structuration’ and then discussed these reflective writings collectively. These exam-
ples highlight the need for developing practical tools through which reflexivity can be
implemented in team-based projects.
Taking up the questions of when, by whom, and how reflexivity is practiced, in what
follows we propose narrative practice and textile-making as two innovative complimen-
tary techniques for processual, collective, and practical reflexivity. We describe how we
used these techniques to practice reflexivity within a diverse team, focussing on team
members’ relationships to each other and to our research topic and on how these rela-
tionships evolved and transformed throughout the research process. We suggest that
these techniques and the broader approaches they stem from add a novel approach to the
existing toolbox for conducting processual, collaborative, and practical reflexivity. On
the one hand, narrative practices such as definitional ceremonies are particularly helpful
for engaging a research team’s multiplicity of voices, as they can encompass both sto-
ries shared between various team members and stories that are specific to individuals.
6 Qualitative Research 00(0)
On the other hand, textile-making can completement existing, text-centric tools by
accentuating the embodied and affective nature of practical reflexivity.
‘Doing’ reflexivity through collective narrative practice and
individual textile-making
Our project
The funded 2.5-year international, collaborative research project underpinning this arti-
cle explored processes of reconciliation that followed the 2016 peace agreement between
the Colombian government and the FARC, Latin America’s oldest guerrilla.2 While the
agreement put an official end to the war, the implementation of the agreement has
remained fragmentary, and Colombian society remains divided over the integration of
the ex-combatant ‘other’ (Crane and Vellajo, 2018; Kroc Institute, 2020; McFee and
Rettberg, 2019). In this context, our project used interpretive methods including ethno-
graphic observation, narrative biographical interviews, and textile-making to explore
continuities and transformations in subjectivities and relationships in the process of the
FARC peace signatories’ reincorporation into civilian life in Llano Grande and San José
de León, two rural locations in the department of Antioquia. Moreover, the textiles
embroidered by our participants have been exhibited locally, regionally, nationally, and
internationally to generate dialogue and make a modest contribution to the Colombian
peace process (Arias López et al., 2020a).3
The project was carried out by a diverse research team of ten women from different
countries, life backgrounds, academic disciplines—nursing/community mental health,
social anthropology, political science/international relations, plastic arts, psychology—
and civil society organizations. The strong teamwork element of the project warranted a
collective reflexive approach. Firstly, we had to address the question of how to do col-
laborative research when, geopolitically and socially, team members came from evi-
dently asymmetric contexts and positions of privilege, including the Global North and
South (Colombia and the UK/Germany) as well as academic institutions and grassroots
organizations. To reflect on this heterogeneity, it was necessary to avoid the single-story
approach attached, for instance, to professional labels, and to encourage multiple, alter-
native stories of self in relation to the project.
Secondly, it was important to reflect on how team members’ lives had been directly
and indirectly affected by armed conflict. Family trajectories, personal experiences dur-
ing formative secondary-school and university years, and professional encounters in
conflict areas had a bearing on how the Colombian team members related to the research
project and its participants, and with which expectations, preconceptions, and concerns
they entered the field. Meanwhile, the biographies of the two European researchers, both
UK-based but originating from Germany with its particular history of political violences,
also had particular resonances with the project. This made it vital to find ways to capture
team members’ (changing) subjectivities and how these influenced the analysis.
‘Doing’ reflexivity was a major concern from the outset of our project. The team used
the occasion of an initial team workshop, set up to ensure that all researchers felt techni-
cally confident in using the project’s core research methods of narrative practice and
Arias López et al. 7
textile-making, to explore whether and how these methods could also be used to ‘do’
reflexivity. Over the course of the project, these methods were furthered to create collec-
tive fieldwork diaries and to reflect on the effect of the project’s process and data on team
members’ own subjectivities and their understandings of violent actors in Colombia.
Collective reflexivity through narrative practice
Rooted in social-constructionist and post-structuralist thinking, narrative practice (also
known as narrative therapy) was formulated in the mid-1980s as a form of psychotherapy
(White and Epston, 1990). It is based on the assumption that individuals’ subjectivities are
storied: ‘In striving to make sense of life, persons face the task of arranging their experi-
ences of events in sequences across time in such a way as to arrive at a coherent account
of themselves and the world around them’ (White and Epston, 1990: 10). Self-narratives
are not fixed or static, since they only ever present a selection of lived experiences (White
and Epston, 1990: 12), yet they are also not random: people’s (self-)narratives are bound
to wider socio-cultural discourses, which operate within regimes of truth that privilege
some aspects of lived experiences as ‘normal’ (dominant stories), while silencing other
aspects, either because they are considered secondary or insignificant (alternative stories)
or because they are invisibilized or sanctioned (silent/silenced stories). Proponents of nar-
rative practice aim to create space for people to explore alternative and silent/silenced
stories from the stock of their experiences and subjugated knowledges, to enable them to
re-author their lives by choosing different parts of their experience to represent them-
selves (White and Epston, 1990: 13, 16–17, cf. Payne, 2002: 58).
One method of narrative practice which we suggest is particularly useful for doing
reflexivity collectively and taking it beyond ‘identity badges’ or ‘virtue-signalling’ are
‘definitional ceremonies’ (White, 2007: chapter 4; cf. White, 1995). Definitional cere-
monies are group setups that ‘provide people with the option of telling or performing the
stories of their lives before an audience of carefully chosen . . .witnesses’, who in turn
‘respond to the stories with retellings’ that resonate with the story heard without judging
it (White, 2007: 165). Usually, an ‘interviewer’ conducts a first interview with the person
seeking advice, which is observed by the ‘witnesses’. In a second interview, this time
observed by the person who told their story, the witnesses are asked to resonate with the
original story by retelling and relating their own experiences to it. Finally, the person
interviewed at the outset reflects on these resonances (White, 2007: 185–201). In both
therapeutic team and community work, definitional ceremonies have been shown to
enable team reflexivity and allow for ‘‘thick’ conclusions’ through the resonances of
outsider witnesses (cf. Denborough et al., 2006; Pia, 2013; White, 2007: 181). White
(1995: 13) observes that in work-related contexts, members of teams who respond to an
initial story in a definitional ceremony ‘often find themselves talking about what they
would not have imagined they would be talking about ahead of their reflections’. Team
members may recover ‘half-forgotten memories’, change the way they talk or think
about their lives, or uncover alternative life stories ‘that bring new options for action’
(White, 1995: 13–14). These characteristics of definitional ceremonies also render them
useful for continuous collective reflexivity in conflict research contexts.
8 Qualitative Research 00(0)
To constitute ourselves reflexively as a research team and vis-à-vis our research, we
first used a definitional ceremony in our initial methods workshop, for which we invited
a colleague experienced in narrative practice as interviewer. First, the Colombian princi-
pal investigator was interviewed about how she had come to develop the core idea for
our research and invite the other team members to the project. Her account touched upon
the rural origins of her family and her feelings of indebtedness towards, but also roman-
ticization of, rural communities in Colombia; her disillusionments with leftist revolu-
tionary thought and action during her studies which, over time, gave way to the hope that
despite a lack of institutional change there was nonetheless scope for grassroots work
toward social justice; and her engagements with rural victims of violent conflict in her
academic work, which had a blind spot when it came to those members of rural com-
munities who had joined one of the armed groups.
Next, the team members were invited to individually answer two questions: ‘What
caught your attention in what you just heard?’ (retelling) and ‘How does your own expe-
rience relate to this story?’ (relating). From these resonances it soon became clear that all
team members’ lives had been touched by war in some way, and that the Colombian team
members held divergent experiences and positions regarding the Colombian conflict and
its armed groups (the military, different left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary
groups, and criminal cartels).4
For example, one team member recalled the constant flow of stories received by her
mother, a coordinator of long-distance studies for teachers: ‘She told us how this or that
teacher couldn’t come because she had been held up by a guerrilla or paramilitary road-
block, or how some other teacher was forced to get off the bus and threatened with
death, but somebody saved her.’ These horrifying stories of everyday violences in the
conflict contrasted with the odd normality of family life in the conflict: ‘I also had a
relative who was married to a paramilitary commander, and that’s how it was, that was
our everyday life.’ Resonating with this story and a remark by the Colombian PI about
the choice of doing research with former FARC guerrilla, another person reflected on
why our team found it more difficult to imagine a similar project with former paramili-
taries, infamous for their responsibility for the majority of atrocities during the height
of the conflict. She recalled a first encounter with former paramilitary fighters in her
community work and how it clashed with her strongly antagonistic feelings toward the
paramilitaries: ‘Going to their house, getting to know their mothers, how they live
today, how they ended up in this. For me it was very hard to meet these human beings
who for other reasons also ended up in those groups.’
Another team member talked about her time as a rural teacher and the personal debt
she felt toward her former pupils, most of whom had ended up in one of the guerrilla
groups and many of whom had been killed. Two other team members reflected on rea-
sons why they did not end up in an armed insurgent group, despite certain opportunities
and temptations in their youth. One related: ‘My home was like a place where the
Franciscans would pass through and rest for a few days. This was a time of storytelling
about what was happening in the north and the south of the country, in Central America,
Nicaragua.’ She recalled how this had inspired an urge in her to change something about
this violent world, but how it had also led her to realize that this change would not come
about through armed violence. This resonated with another team member’s experiences,
Arias López et al. 9
who in her youth had been a leftist activist and who credited it to her family that she did
not take up armed activities despite having relatives and romantic partners who joined a
guerrilla group—and who ultimately lost their lives.
Our definitional ceremony lasted several hours and was an emotional process of sto-
rytelling and resonances. In lieu of the usual third step (final resonance of the original
storyteller), the interviewer used ‘editorialization’, a narrative practice common in com-
munity work, to summarize the team members’ individual resonances into a collective
account, a part of which was quoted at the beginning of this article. Another part reads:
We are survivors of the war. We resume life with radicalism, broadening perspectives,
recovering senses of humanity, listening to those we hadn’t heard. We are starting to understand
what has happened, getting to know the other, living together, remembering that our lives
deserve to be lived. This is our country; this is our story. We have been on a suspension bridge.
Today, we process our own experiences and those of others. We have our debts, debts of justice,
debts of indifference. Today, we listen to others’ stories; we allow ourselves this understanding
embrace, an embrace which recovers humanized ways of seeing that build truths without
discounting the conflict.
(Excerpt from editorialized team reflection, Andrea Ortega, Medellin, 2019)
After the collective account had been read back at us, many team members
remarked that the definitional ceremony had encouraged them to share experiences
which they had seldom shared before and which were not part of their dominant self-
narratives in professional settings. The technique thus enabled our team to go beyond
‘identity badges’ or ‘virtue-signalling’ by redirecting attention to the resonances our
project was causing within us. For many, the definitional ceremony was a first oppor-
tunity to reflect on and share how they had come to be interested in working on vio-
lent conflict and what it meant for their self-understanding that the project’s focus
was not on the victims of conflict, but on its armed actors. While differences between
the team members’ professional, generational, and national backgrounds emerged
clearly, the method also enabled unexpected resonances between personal experi-
ences. The editorialization, finally, wove these distinct experiences into a common
fabric, a shared theme recognized by all team members as representing both them as
individuals and the team as a collective.
In the course of our research, we continued the collective reflexive process started
with this definitional ceremony in two ways. Firstly, during monthly week-long field-
work trips by smaller groups of our research team (usually two to three people) to our
two research communities, we used the practice of resonances to create collective audio-
recorded field diaries. Similar to the experiences of Creese et al. (2008: 198), this way of
creating fieldnotes helped us in further ‘constituting the team and producing findings that
the team share’, while also understanding ‘how researchers’ different life trajectories,
ideologies and viewpoints impact on how they represent research participants and them-
selves’. Our team members’ different experiences thereby helped to maintain curiosity
and safeguard against nonreflective or hasty conclusions emanating from a supposed
familiarity with the conflict.
10 Qualitative Research 00(0)
Secondly, as we discuss in the next section, over the course of the research project we
used definitional ceremonies to engage in deeper reflections on the empirical data and
how the research impacted on our own subjectivities and understanding, and combined
definitional ceremonies with textile-making to this end.
Reflexivity and textile-making
Due to its emphasis on language, narrative practice reaches its methodological limits
when tacit knowledges cannot be put in words, or when individuals find it difficult to
express their experiences and emotions (Da Silva Catela, 2004). Textile-making, with its
long tradition as a form of political expression and memorialization of victims of politi-
cal violence (Agosin, 2014; Andrä, 2020; Andrä et al., 2019; Parker 2010), has been
shown to provide a useful methodological complement to more standard social-scientific
methods (Arias López, 2017; Arias López et al. 2020b). We suggest three ways in which
textile-making can also enhance reflexivity through narrative practice. Firstly, the ‘mak-
ing’ aspect of needlework creates time for becoming aware, feeling, remembering, and
reflecting; revolving around notions of mending, unravelling, and recomposing materi-
ally and emotionally, it also enables resignifications (Gauntlett, 2018; Ingold 2013).
Secondly, when carried out in groups, textile-making creates spaces and relations of
trust, affect, and mutual care, which allow individuals to express their experiences and
collectives to establish and/or resignify relations (Bello Tocancipá & Aranguren Romero
2020: 189; Pérez-Bustos & Chocontá Piraquive 2018: 5–7). Finally, textiles also have an
embodied effect on their makers and audiences (Andrä et al., 2019; Thamen and Knights,
2019); as textile artist Mercy Rojas explains: ‘The textile narrative is a language that can
only be transmitted from and received with the body.’5 We observed these affective
rather than intellectual resonances among the audiences of our project exhibitions, but
also recognized them in how team members related to each other’s experiences, thoughts,
and stories when relayed through textiles, which in turn contributed to the process of
coming together as a team.
For example, we used textile-making as a form of reflexivity in group sessions to
resonate with the question: ‘What ideas have you unstitched and/or restitched in the
course of our fieldwork with former combatants?’ Figures 1 and 2 show two examples of
individual textile resonances.
In her embroidery ‘Sandy, the little bear’, plastic artist Laura Coral reflects on a story
shared by a former FARC combatant about a bear cub her fighting unit once found in the
jungle and ‘adopted’ until it became too unruly and had to be left behind. What resonated
with her during the fieldwork, Laura reflected, were ‘all those stories and nostalgias of a
world which supposedly was left behind [by FARC combatants] in search of something
better’, and which made her realize that she had not been able to imagine that, outside of
combat, the war could also be a ‘preferred place’. The fieldwork conversation about
Sandy also led participants to speak about nature and the role of environmental protec-
tion during the war, which resonated with Laura due to her own environmental concerns.
These reflections show how the fieldwork encounters had led to a nuancing of precon-
ceived understandings of ‘war’ and its ‘perpetrators’ and proved valuable for our inter-
pretation of ex-combatants’ experiences.6
Arias López et al. 11
In ‘Always on the go’, social anthropologist Berena Torres uses the metaphor of dif-
ferent houses ‘that give fire and nourish the heart’ to reflect on how her life trajectory
relates to Colombia’s conflict and on the strong role played by her liberal family and
upbringing, which instilled in her an ethics of social justice and human rights and an urge
to work for the rights of the most vulnerable. With regard to the project’s participants,
she shared: ‘I really never felt much empathy for the FARC, despite their peasant origin;
I’ve always felt a certain repulsion against the things they were doing near the villages
where I lived.’ As she reflected, however: ‘I have only started to feel empathy now that
they [the FARC] have decided to take the step to return to civilian life and that I see that
nobody wants to help them.’ This, Berena felt, undermines not only the reincorporation
process but the general vision of peace in Colombia—‘a vision we all have.’ The pro-
ject’s narrative reflections, supported by textile-making, Berena told us later, led her to
seeing the FARC peace signatories as, ‘strangely, a vulnerable population’ and encour-
aged her to stitch new links of association with this population, which changed both how
Figure 1. ‘Sandy, the little bear’ by Laura Coral (Medellin, 2019).
12 Qualitative Research 00(0)
she interpreted field encounters and which value she attributed to the transformative
aims of the project.7
By rendering material our own preferred and alternative stories and sharing them among
our team, the products of our textile reflections came to constitute social memories in their
own right. Moreover, as we shared them with research participants and—through their
Figure 2. ‘Always on the go’, by Berena Torres (Medellin, 2019).
Arias López et al. 13
inclusion in our project exhibitions—wider audiences, the project team’s reflective textiles
garnered further resonances and became interwoven with our research. By doing so, we
aimed to recognize the impossibility of separating ourselves as researchers from the social
and political world we share with our participants, and embraced this entanglement to
actively work toward the construction of social narratives which incentivize peace.
Conclusions
In this article, we discussed narrative practice and textile-making as techniques for
‘doing’ reflexivity in the qualitative-interpretive research process of a diverse team
working on political violence and its transformation in Colombia. Narrative practice’s
understanding of subjectivity as ‘storied self’ emerged as a useful tool for such reflexiv-
ity, which we practiced in word and stitch. By acknowledging the wider power/knowl-
edge structures implicating research participants and researchers, reflexivity through
narrative practice works against the tendency of situating the researcher-self ‘by prior
announcement’ and through ‘identity badges’ (Patai, 1991: 149) or as a mere form of
‘virtue-signalling’. Rather, with its focus on dominant and alternative narratives, it fore-
grounds structural inequalities underpinning researchers’ subjectivities, situatedness,
and privileges. The acknowledgment of (self-)narratives’ indeterminacy, and of the
multi-storiedness of lives which opens the possibility of re-authoring individual and
group subjectivities, makes narrative practice a useful method to reflect, throughout the
research process, how the research itself influences and changes researchers’ subjectivi-
ties and how this in turn affects the interpretation of research findings.
We have experienced the collective, intersubjective encounters of definitional cere-
monies as a particularly adequate technique for practicing reflexivity in our team, and
textile-making—using the same logic of stories and resonances—as a material and
embodied form of expression to complement spoken words. Attention to the relational
has been key to these processes and has helped account for team members’ individuality
and for that which emerged between them. Our reflexive exercises resulted in stories
around motivations, prejudices, experiences, emotions, fears, and expectations regarding
our research and also turned into a recurring practice of constructing field diaries.
Sharing experiences through the creative processes of narrative practices and textile-
making has helped us to address challenges including team members’ emotional and
political commitments, their close familiarity with the research topic which, if unad-
dressed, can be a hindrance to understanding (Mannay, 2016: 27–44), as well as some
members’ scepticism of academic research as an institutionalized form of knowledge
production. Our reflexive practices have allowed us to better understand the power rela-
tions, tensions, and asymmetries that intersect both the research process and us as
researchers. Recognizing and continuously putting into practice the plurivocity of our
team through narrative practice and textile-making has also kept us alert to analytical
speculations and anticipations.
This has not entirely prevented failures and setbacks. As Bliesemann de Guevara and
Kurowska (2020) show, the power/knowledge structures of the research context are real
and material, and as such circumscribe what research is possible beyond questions of
researcher positionality. Furthermore, both narrative practice and textile-making find
14 Qualitative Research 00(0)
their limits as techniques of reflexivity where team members, for various reasons, refuse
to engage. For narrative practice, language proficiency may be an important limitation,
not only in multilingual teams. Regarding needlework, a reluctance to engage due to a
lack of prior skills or to (resistance against) gender norms is not uncommon. Such limita-
tions have to be factored into the use of these specific practices of reflexivity.
These limits notwithstanding, we suggest that narrative practice and textile-making
can be of use to all types of reflexive social-scientific research conducted by (heteroge-
nous) teams. In our project, these textual and textile practices of dialogue and listening
have been powerful hermeneutic strategies, which have not only contributed to reflexive
research conduct, but also allowed us to recognize the political implications of our
research in a socially committed way.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the research team members Grey Ceballos, Laura Coral, Pilar
Parra, Marta Rendón, Dr Berena Torres, Blanca Valencia and Jessica Valencia for sharing their
experiences in the collective reflexivity processes described in this article; Andrea Ortega and
Maria Mercedes Rojas for providing invaluable insights into textile narratives and narrative prac-
tices, respectively; and Dr Claire Phillips and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This work was supported by Ministry of Science, Technology and
Innovation in Colombia, Minciencias (project reference FP44842-282-2018) and Newton Fund,
UK (project reference AH/R01373X/1).
ORCID iD
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6299-1204
Notes
1. ‘Relevant researcher’s positioning include personal characteristics, such as gender, race,
affiliation, age, sexual orientation, immigration status, personal experiences, linguistic tradi-
tion, beliefs, biases, preferences, theoretical, political and ideological stances, and emotional
responses to participant’ (Berger, 2015: 220).
2. Project ‘(Un-)Stitching the Subjects of Colombia’s Reconciliation Process’, 2018–2021,
financed by Newton Fund UK (project reference: AH/R01373X/1) and Minciencias Colombia
(project reference: FP44842-282-2018); see https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FR01373
X%2F1.
3. See our bilingual project website: https://des-tejiendomiradas.com
4. The following examples are taken from recordings/transcripts of the team’s definitional cer-
emony, Medellin, November 2018.
5. Interview, Maria Mercedes Rojas, Medellin, November 2018.
Arias López et al. 15
6. Reflections shared at definitional ceremony and textile-making session, Medellin, April 2019.
7. Reflections shared at definitional ceremony and textile-making session, Medellin, April 2019,
and during a follow-up exchange with the authors via WhatsApp, March 2021.
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Author biographies
Beatriz E. Arias López is a Professor in Community Mental Health at the Faculty of Nursing,
University of Antioquia, Colombia.
Christine Andrä is a Lecturer and Research Associate at the Institute of Political Science, Technical
University Dresden, Germany.
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara is a Professor at the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth
University, UK.
