Graying Subjectivity: Positionality as Between Here and There

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

Abstract

Positioning of the self is common across interpretivist research perspectives, specifically feminist, critical race and queer methodological approaches, and often begins by exploring one’s social categories as these are considered to be salient factors in shaping who we are and how we view the world. Such affirmations of researcher self-identity are intended to make explicit the hierarchies of power that exist within social science research and the ongoing navigation of these constructs. Thus, troubling difference between the researcher and participants is meant to promote more conscious and just ways of collecting, interpreting and describing data. If researchers do not problematize their race, gender, class status, educational advantage, etc. (upfront and throughout their work) they risk thinking from an unstated position privilege effectively obscuring and reproducing sources of oppression (Kendall, 2006). However, positonality, like other forms of identity can be thought of as fluid. For researchers to assign themselves and their participants to social categories that are rigid and binary (e.g. black/white, rich/poor, child/adult) suggests no “grey” meeting point, shared ethical space or possibility of understanding (Cousin, 2010). Rather, I approach positionality as a site of betweeness. In this sense no “other” is entirely other and we must acknowledge the aspects of the other within the self (Banerjee, 2011; 2012).

This paper seeks to contribute to discussions of positionality, particularly in relation to white, researchers from the global north working in global south contexts. Drawing on fieldwork in rural South Africa where I collaborated with groups of young people to build communities of artistic practice, I explore various ruptures and points of connection that occurred between us. Using a postcolonial feminist framework and invoking methods of community art education (Barndt, 2011) and critical ethnography (Madison, 2012) I aim to investigate the challenges and possibilities of working in a context deeply affected by poverty, structural racism, anti-child bias, systemic violence, and HIV and AIDS. Central to this investigation is self-reflexivity and ethical self-inquiry as I explore my capacities to attend, to listen and respond to the realities and experiences of others. This ethical navigation is linked to the practice of building transnational solidarity with groups of young people.

In my research with young people of Zulu descent from communities that are marked by varying levels of individual and collective impoverishment rooted in practices of racial segregation, my whiteness and material advantage represented immediate difference. Such visible demarcations along with my being “from away” were hard to ignore and shaped both how I was interpreted and how I interpreted others. Here I explore the influence of my own history growing up in rural New Brunswick, Canada. My particular combination of past and present experiences and social classifications affected how I interacted with others in the South African context and continue to inform how I respond to racial relations, poverty, violence and gender roles. Like bell hooks (hooks, 2003), as I work to examine my own complacency in the very constructs I seek to dismantle, the inherent incompleteness of this process is underlined.

Author

• April R. Mandrona, McGill University