But Who Cares? Researchers' (Shifting) Positionalities in Liminal Spaces

• In Event: 72.017 - Liminality and Twisted Normativity in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this investigation was to explore the role of the researcher in facilitating liminal spaces for participants in constructivist qualitative research. In doing so, we emphasize the importance of an ethic of care (Collins, 1991) that engages possibilities and potentialities within liminal spaces, while understanding the discursive and material limitations of those occupied spaces.

Perspective: In qualitative research, the methods researchers use often let us speak to or interact with people directly. Adopting a constructivist perspective, researchers assume reality, knowledge, truth, and meaning are constructed by individuals. Constructivism is not concerned with generalizations. Instead it focuses on how individuals make meaning on a micro-level (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). In this way, constructivism is conducive to the construction and deconstruction of lived experience. Narratives are always historically situated and dependent on the cumulative social and political activity that transforms societal attitudes around a given topic (Cohler & Hammack, 2006; Hammack, 2008), but the construction of meaning is linked between the researcher and participant (Charmaz, 2006, 2008a, 2008b; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). In this sense, researchers serve as participatory interactants, who (inter)subjectively interpret and co-construct meaning based on participants’ perceptions and experiences (Grbich, 2012). Our paper explores the way that constructivist research is conducive to the exploration of liminal spaces within participants’ experiences, and how this exploration can be facilitated by the researcher’s temporally conditional and shifting positionalities as a member of the community of study.

Method and Data Sources: This paper utilized two different research projects as case studies for exploring the role of the researcher in facilitating liminal space exploration among research participants. In the first, the researcher describes how his positionality as a heterosexual Black male with a long history of involvement in Christian institutions both constrained and afforded his intersectional exploration of Black undergraduates spiritual, raced, and gendered identities. In the second, the researcher describes how his positionality as a queer immigrant of color and his involvement in LGBTQ and immigrant rights organizations enabled him to procure cultural competency and ethical care in research exploring the ways undocumented queer activists made sense of, interacted and worked within, the intersection of their sexuality and immigration status.

Conclusions: Researchers’ membership and involvement in their communities of study helps procure cultural competency and ethical care, and assists in gaining participants’ trust for sharing their experiences. Community membership enables researchers to directly interact and connect with participants in ways that are less exploitative, less objectifying, and more politically relevant (Haritaworn, 2008), which allows participants to more comfortably engage in the exploration of liminal spaces.

Significance: A constructivist approach to the interview process along with an awareness of the researcher’s shifting positionality can lead to transformation and empowerment, to the construction of new and unthought liminal spaces. Research participants become able to share their coping and survival strategies as they work to affirm the liminal spaces created by the intersection of their salient social identities.

Authors

• Keon M. McGuire, Arizona State University - Tempe

• Jesus Cisneros, University of Central Arkansas