Positionality and Reflexivity in Political Science I: The Domestic Context

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Both qualitative and quantitative scholars are increasingly aware of the effects of their personal identities on their research. Across the positivist-interpretivist spectrum, researchers are increasingly attentive to the constraints, opportunities and complexities that their social locations bring to all stages of the research process. This includes sex, gender, class, ethnicity, age, life experience, and physical and linguistic traits, among other components of one’s self. That being said, while there is growing recognition that researchers must confront and respond to positionality, there remains more debate and less agreement as to how one can and should recognize and respond to the effects of positionality.

With this in mind, this panel aims to foster a productive, nuanced, and expansive discussion of positionality with the goal of sharing and building strategies to integrate reflexivity into research processes. The first of a series of two related panels devoted to positionality and reflexivity in research, this panel explores and confronts positionality in research in the domestic context. The “domestic” in the panel has two meanings: first, the papers look at the researcher’s positionality within American hierarchies of race, gender, and knowledge; the second meaning of the “domestic” turns the analytical gaze towards academia itself as a set of institutions structuring the research experience along many of these formerly-mentioned lines.

Natasha Behl’s contribution features an autoethnography of navigating American academia as both a scholar of South Asia and a researcher of South Asian origin, revealing the various forms of violence within academic practice that mirror the dynamics of oppression present in Behl’s own research. Similarly, Hajer Al-Faham’s paper looks at the researcher as both scholar and member of an underrepresented and hyper-visible group within the study of politics. Al-Faham thus brings discussions of positionality to bear onto conversations of REP (Race, Ethnicity, and Politics). Like Al-Faham, Ramon Garibaldo Valdez’s paper opens up a conversation about the naturalization of difference within ethnographic work and complicates notions of insider/outsider divides through his academic dialogue with immigrant rights organizers as an undocumented immigrant. Finally, Leila Kawar’s paper – like Natasha Behl’s – looks at academia as a site of power where distinct epistemological currents are validated or delegitimized not merely as matter of objective social research, but in line with disciplinary logics affecting researchers in heterogeneous ways tied to their subjectivity. Together, the papers provide a reflexive dialogue of the ways positionality structures our understanding of politics and of the political dimensions present within the research process.

Keywords: ethnography; positionality; reflexivity; methodology

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 46: Qualitative and Multi-Method Research

Cosponsor

• Related Groups / Interpretive Methodologies and Methods

Individual Presentations

• Mapping Movements: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Violence in Academia - Natasha Behl, Arizona State University, West Campus

• Mapping Judicialization: On the Politics of Methodological Pluralism - Leila Kawar, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Ambiguities of Belonging: Challenging the Insider/Outsider Divide in Ethnography - Ramon Garibaldo Valdez, Yale University

• The Muslim in Muslim Politics - Hajer Al-Faham, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Timothy Pachirat University of Massachusetts Amherst

Discussants

• Michelle Day Weitzel The New School for Social Research

• Osman Balkan Swarthmore College