The power and possibilities of positioning enacted

• In Event: Reflections on Positionality: A Call Toward Reimagining Roles, Responsibilities, and Relationships in Research

Abstract

In this paper, we build on a framework we co-constructed addressing the power and possibilities of positioning (Authors 4 and 5, 2024). To do so, we each reflect on a specific project in which we have engaged the onto-epistemic, the sociohistorical, and the sociocultural aspects of positioning throughout the process of generating knowledge about multiply marginalized people. Author 4’s project emphasizes the earlier stages of positioning efforts in a collaborative research endeavor. Author 5 emphasizes the positioning moves made throughout the analysis stages of a study. Author 4 explicates the power and possibilities of positioning as she established a new collaboration with Colombian, Indigenous–-and more specifically— Wayuu educators. She discusses the tensions she navigates being a U.S.-based Black educator with familial ties to Latin America and affiliations with prestigious research-intensive universities. Her partners, in turn, are Indigenous educators and researchers who are affiliated with underfunded—and oft neglected--institutions within Colombia’s higher education structure. This ongoing collaboration affords opportunities to interrogate how the framing of positioning can be applied across transnational/translanguaged contexts. Author 5 focuses on a project with a group of formerly incarcerated youth fellows to 1) analyze data, and 2) unmap data from a prior project on youth incarceration. This prior project was a national study on youth incarceration where the research team has completed over 550 surveys and 80 interviews with incarcerated youth across seven states in the United States. Given the entrenched inequities that incarcerated youth face, we believed that any analysis done with this national data must be done in partnership with formerly incarcerated youth; thus we created the fellowship as a means of remedy–not to fix or change them but, to change the system. In preparing for and partnering with these fellows, we had to deeply consider how to engage theory, axiology, methodology for those in the community who had experienced incarceration themselves as young people in order to create a public database about youth incarceration. Author 5 illustrates specific relational moves we made to engage a multiscalar abolitionist praxis with the fellows and how the fellows then began to engage that same praxis with us and each other. In this way, Author 5 traces how her research team surface tensions, how we fail and repair, as well as how we succeeded from both the facilitators’ perspective and from the youth themselves. In both of our projects then, we deeply consider how attention to positioning and relationality as remedy and repair, “can work to advance the production and utilization of research.” In returning to the notion of the power and possibilities, we give concrete examples of why these considerations are critical beyond making a positionality statement.

Authors

• Mildred Boveda, Pennsylvania State University

• Subini Ancy Annamma, Stanford University