A Black Feminist Approach to Positionality as Dynamic Relationships in Education Research

• In Event: Reclaiming Positionality as Methodological Praxis for Truth-Telling in Education Research

Abstract

This co-authored presentation addresses how positionality is a term that is relatively known yet widely misunderstood. We define positionality as a process of dynamic (i.e., ever evolving) relationships researchers maintain with their participants, professional areas of study, and themselves. In defining positionality as dynamic relationships, education researchers will be better equipped to disrupt power hierarchies reinscribed by the research process.

Our purpose is to define positionality in more meaningfully robust ways. We draw upon Collins’ Black Feminist Thought (2000) and Dillard’s Endarkened Feminist Epistemology (2000) to explicate positionality as a process of dynamic relationships. We ask the following question: How can an understanding of positionality as dynamic relationships aid education researchers to tell humane truths amidst consequential times?

We begin by reviewing existing understandings of positionality in education research to articulate how contemporary approaches are rooted in positivist traditions. Across methodological texts (Ravitch & Carl, 2020), scholars conflate insider/outsider dynamics, researcher reflexivity, and positionality as interrelated concepts rooted in understanding “the researcher’s status in relation to the ‘other’ or their research subjects” (Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2018, p. 868). As a result, positionality statements are individualized, often declaring the race, gender, and other identities of the researcher vis-à-vis those of participants without discussing how these factors ebb and flow. We complicate this body of literature by defining positionality as more than individual social identities but rather dynamic relationships researchers maintain with their participants, professional areas of study, and themselves. To do so, we synthesize contributions from Black feminists as a framework to guide our definition of positionality as a process of dynamic relationships to disrupt power hierarchies for truth-telling in education research. Collins’ (2000) and Dillard’s (2000) collectivist insights offer guideposts to disrupt existing approaches to positionality as individual differences of identities between researchers and the researched. We apply their offerings as a language of collectivism and communal relationality—the notion that anti-oppressive scholarship exists only in conversation amongst agentive subjects (not objects) of the research community.

We conclude by introducing the following as our Black feminist informed definition of positionality as this presentation’s substantive contribution to the field: the scope of dynamic relationships researchers maintain throughout the research process including the design, collection, analysis, and public reception of the work. We theorize these relationships across three specific categories: 1) relationships with participants, 2) relationships with professional areas of study, and 3) relationships with the researchers’ individual selves. In the full presentation, we will detail each category with evocative exemplars of positionality practices and discuss implications of this Black feminist approach to positionality for researchers across methodological expertise.

Regardless of whether researchers identify as critical or social-justice oriented, treating positionality as dynamic relationships (more than individual identity differences) is imperative for researchers to tell humane truths about their participants, colleagues and students, and themselves. To conduct consequential research is to engage collectivism in practice and thought. Our reclaiming of positionality pushes the field of education toward this intention by honoring the dynamic, ever evolving relationships of the research process.

Authors

• Michael W. Moses, University of California - Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Francesca A. Williamson, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author