White Woman di Tok Pidgin?! Troubling Positionality, Participation, and the Politics of Language in Cameroon

• In Event: 61.079 - Who Are We Here? Interrogating Positionality in Participatory Arts-Based Research

Abstract

“She is situated, not by what she knows, but by what she uncertainly performs. However, this is not to suggest that as a ‘decentred self’ the researcher can somehow elude the dynamics of power” (Rose, 1997, p. 316).

Researchers are increasingly taking up participatory visual methodologies in international contexts to find ways to broaden access to knowledge production activities (Mitchell, 2011). Often, this entails working across two or more languages and/or with translators. Whether collaborating with NGOs, facilitating workshops, or interviewing leaders, that researchers must negotiate multiple languages is not an exception but the norm. Despite this normalized practice, however, the complexities of language are infrequently reported on in these meaning-making processes. This paper explores the specific troubles and possibilities related to language in participatory visual research practice, through the particular lens of positionality.

Overlapping traditions concerned with ethical research practice frame this inquiry, including feminist calls to situate knowledges (Haraway, 1988; Rose, 1997), postcolonial concerns about interpretation and representation in the production of texts (Said, 1978; Spivak, 2000) and, relatedly, how translation constructs meaning (Muller, 2007; Smith, 1996). In particular, I adopt Fiona Smith’s (1996) hybrid spaces of uncertainty as “conceptual places where one need not accept the dominant structures of one or other position but instead can find ways of challenging and questioning these positions” (p. 165). Building on links between positionality, interpretation and language (Twyman, Morrison, & Sporton, 1999), I unsettle how I situated myself during 12 months of fieldwork in Cameroon.

In this context with over 250 indigenous languages, institutional spheres such as politics and education remain dominated by colonial French and English. Cameroonian Pidgin English – originally a “contact” pidgin developed when Europeans first arrived, now a distinct language – is widely spoken as a lingua franca, notably by women, yet marginalized and explicitly discouraged in wider society (Neba, Chibaka, & Atindogbe, 2006). Seldom do foreigners speak Pidgin; does white man di tok Pidgin. In this paper, I interrogate how being a white woman doing participatory research in Pidgin constitutes a contested but productive hybrid space for meaning making.

Drawing on my work facilitating photovoice and participatory video workshops about gender and water with over 120 women and men across four communities, I examine shifting power relations in moments when the politics of speaking Pidgin surfaced. Reflexively unpacking my fieldnotes, I explore differences, tensions and conflicts “not as problems, but as spaces of conceptual and indeed political opportunities and negotiation” (Smith, 1996, p. 165). Situated through my experiences growing up as an Anglophone in Quebec and learning Krio in Sierra Leone, I complicate the emerging insider/outsider identity and language politics around how I “performed” Pidgin in Cameroon. I explore the ways language mediated fieldwork, paying specific attention to participant negotiations during research workshops, doing visual research in an oral lingua franca, and what it means to now translate/inscribe the work into English during the writing process. The paper contributes to ethical discussions related to positionality, gender studies, participatory visual methodologies, and working in multilingual international contexts.

Author

• Jennifer A. Thompson, McGill University