Thinking Through Positionality Using Nirmal Puwar's Space Invaders

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

Abstract

This paper considers positionality using Nirmal Puwar’s (2004) concept of ‘Space Invaders’ as a lens to think through the process of researching marginality as a space for community work. Through this lens, I will explore the interconnectedness between the researcher and data as a disruptive force within academia. I reflect on my own position as a South Asian, Irish, Muslim woman in British academia exploring Muslims in Britain, and the tensions I contend with when conducting research in an Islamophobic environment both within and outside of academia.
Drawing on Puwar’s (2004) work, I first ground the concept of ‘space invaders’ itself as represented by ‘othered’ bodies within an institution, against the ‘somatic norm’ as “the corporeal imagination of power naturalized in the white, male, upper/middle-class bodies” (ibid: 652). In this view, for an ‘other’—or a deviation of the ‘somatic norm’—to enter spaces that have largely been reserved for the somatic norm, it disturbs the expected order of the institution, and ‘othered’ bodies are thereby located as ‘bodies out of place’, or ‘space invaders’. To then move through academia as a ‘space invader’ poses an interesting dilemma around how to conduct research. While ‘space invaders’ represent bodies out of place within the institution, as data they, or we, represent ‘bodies in place’. The ‘space invaders’, or the outsiders, belong on the outside to be observed, studied, and theorized on by the somatic norm on the inside. In essence, the private spaces of outsiders are treated as public for the academic to interrogate, upon which the academic then builds both financial and social capital. And herein lies the tensions for those located as ‘space invaders’, for whom the motives for conducting research go beyond attaining such capital or academic ‘impact’. We approach our work as an extension of community as our worlds, realities and lived experiences are rooted in the very issues we seek to interrogate.
Such an approach adopted by ‘space invaders’ blurs the lines demarcating the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ of the institution, which serves as a discordant event in the eyes of the ‘somatic norm’. It “threatens to dislodge the established configuration” (Puwar, 2004: 5) of the ‘ideal’ or ‘proper’ academic as defined and embodied by the somatic norm. I argue that this disruptive disorientation of the ‘somatic norm’ is one that is necessary; as ‘space invaders’ within the institutions we move through, we carry the cognisance that we represent the ‘others’ the somatic norm within academia has historically sought to interrogate as the mysterious, exotic or barbaric Other (Said, 2003). To then disrupt the somatic norm is an epistemic disruption of the ‘othering’ that we, and our communities, are subjected to.
I therefore conclude with a call to hold space for the interconnectedness between the researcher and data on the margins of ‘otherness’. As inspired by the Persian poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi’s view of ‘brokenness’ being rooted in the separation of the ‘self’ from ‘other’, I imagine a reconfiguration of positionality to remedy this brokenness in academia.

Author

• Hanain Brohi
  Presenting Author