Towards Active Reflexivity: Positionality in Practice

• In Event: Interviews in the Field: New Perspectives and Applications

Abstract

How should Political Science scholars go about reflecting on and responding to the complexities of positionality during field research? Although there is a growing recognition across disciplines of the complex and dynamic impacts of the researcher in the production of knowledge, Political Science scholars have yet to theorize more fully the practical realities of doing reflexivity in the field. Drawing on the authors’ own experiences conducting field research in ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ settings, we demonstrate the need for researchers to take a posture of what we term “active reflexivity.” By this we mean a practice of continual reflection upon the particularities of positionality within each research interaction, and throughout the stages of research design, fieldwork, and interpretation. To advance this argument and to offer a number of practical guidelines to enable scholars to follow it, this paper is structured over three sections.

First, we offer a practical and tactile understanding of reflexivity as, necessarily, an active and sustained posture throughout all stages of the research process. Active reflexivity, we argue, makes possible both ethical and meaningful research interactions and knowledge. In advancing this understanding, we underscore the need to reflect not only upon our assumptions of our own positionality and its impact, but upon the inherent assumptions we make of others’ interpretations of that positionality, and to do so continually throughout the research process.

To illustrate this argument, in the second section we document our own field experiences as qualitative researchers. In our respective doctoral projects, we both attempted to systematically employ insights from the rich and growing literature on positionality and reflexivity across the social sciences to our time in the field – Aarie exploring diplomatic practices at the Secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta and the African Union (AU) Commission in Addis Ababa, and Jessica investigating the dynamics of sectarian violence in Indonesia. However, while we both engaged in reflexivity during our research, we both confronted moments of surprise and unanticipated effects of positionality in the field. In this section, we outline a number of these moments of surprise and describe their consequence for the conduct of our field research and our own interpretations.

In the third section, we offer three practical and concrete strategies that will better enable researchers to be actively reflexive. These include explicitly recording assumptions around positionality for benchmarking purposes; engaging in reflexivity in both “revelatory moments” and in the mundane; and bringing other actors, such as research assistants, formally into the process of reflection at various points in the research process.

This paper, then, offers an instructive and hands-on approach to reflexivity. It is tailored to the challenges and surprises likely to present themselves to Political Science researchers and outlines a protocol that can aid them in conducting field research that will make possible both ethical and meaningful research.

Authors

• Aarie Glas, Northern Illinois University

• Jessica Soedirgo, University of Toronto