Blurred Lines: Negotiating the Researched and Researcher Relationships

• In Event: Ethnographic Research for Repair, Liberation, and Community Empowerment in Early Childhood Settings

Abstract

Many scholars describe the complications of engaging critical research methodologies in communities with overlapping identities (Cox, 2016; Urrieta, 2019). In this paper, we analyze power dynamics we confronted as researchers developing relationships with communities often labeled the “researched” (Villenas, 1996). Academic, social and historical practices conspire to sustain inequitable power hierarchies (LaRocco, Shinn, & Madise, 2020) by dividing communities along racial, social or caste lines.
Positionality is concerned with situatedness, an awareness of the connectivity between oneself, one’s surroundings, and the people with whom one engages (Haraway 1988; Neumann & Neumann 2016). With observations from gathering consent, deciding data collection, and sharing analysis, we examine how researcher positionality and participant relationship influenced how stories were told, what kind of experiences were included and who was able to hear. We share examples from two research studies,
● a comparative video-cued ethnographic study conducted in India to understand school readiness practices; and
● an ethnographic study following methods in Storywork (Archibald, 2008) with young Garifuna children in the United States.
This process of acknowledging researcher positionality at all stages of research design was a step towards complicating research practices beyond the researcher-researched binary.
Scholars and researchers have an opportunity to view knowledge production as a process of relationships in context (Denzin 2009). We discuss where the lines blurred in our research as opportunities to acknowledge the tensions. We developed researching methods intended to repair harmful power dynamics. Research is an intersubjective process whereby each interaction asks researchers and communities of focus to negotiate many identities, expressions of agency and politics of the broader context (Richmond, Kappler, & Björkdahl, 2015). We describe how “challenges” became opportunities for repair as we moved beyond binaries of researcher-researched relationships and embraced the complications in transparent research.

Authors

• Nnenna Odim, University of Texas at Austin

• Shubhi Sachdeva, San Francisco State University