Becoming Othered, Thrice: Race, Positionality, and Fieldwork

• In Event: Reconsidering the Field: Researchers, Subjects, and Positionality

Abstract

This paper interrogates this blind spot to the problems faced by NWWs in the field. It suggests that one source of this blind spot is the predominant whiteness of political science as a professional discipline in the West, which creates a racial knock-on effect in comparative politics. Here, white researchers enjoy the systemic privilege to choose any non-Western country to study, without opprobrium. By contrast, scholars of color are expected to study regions and countries for which they have preexisting ethnic or cultural affinities. Thus, all else being equal, Black comparativists face higher entry costs in studying, say, China or Indonesia rather than sub-Saharan Africa; LatinX researchers are more likely to study Latin America, not Russia or India; and Asian political scientists more likely to study Asian countries, not Middle Eastern or European ones. In turn, the accumulated lack of diversity in political science has generated a pervasive image of Western social science in non-Western countries, one that associates whiteness as the appropriate racial identity of someone representing Western academia.

This paper interrogates this blind spot to the problems faced by NWWs in the field. It suggests the blind spot stems from the predominant whiteness of political science as a professional discipline in the West, which creates a racial knock-on effect in comparative politics. Here, white researchers enjoy the systemic privilege to choose any non-Western country to study, without opprobrium. By contrast, scholars of color are expected to study regions and countries for which they have preexisting ethnic or cultural affinities. Thus, all else being equal, Black comparativists face higher entry costs in studying, say, China or Indonesia rather than sub-Saharan Africa; LatinX researchers are more likely to study Latin America, not Russia or India; and Asian political scientists more likely to study Asian countries, not Middle Eastern or European ones. In turn, the accumulated lack of diversity in political science has generated a pervasive image of Western social science in non-Western countries, one that associates whiteness as the appropriate racial identity of someone representing Western academia.

I suggest that overcoming this blind spot requires introducing intentionality about race in mainstream discussions of fieldwork – not unlike how, using American society as an example, overcoming systemic racism requires explicit recognition of whiteness and racial privilege. Recognition of the three-fold othering faced by NWWs overseas has another productive purpose, however. It underscores the multidimensional nature of positionality, a seminal theme that runs throughout contemporary writings about ethical and responsible fieldwork. If identity dictates the nature of social interactions in the production of knowledge, then it is necessary to explore all of those interactions both at home and abroad in order to raze the implicit silos that stratify social diversity in field-based scholarship.

Author

• Sean Yom, Temple University