Power, Positionality, and Reciprocity in Comparative and International Education Research: Puzzles for emerging scholars and graduate programs

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Training in social science research methods often focuses on data collection techniques and standardized approaches to informed consent with a lack of attention placed on the social, emotional, and ethical dimensions of interacting with research participants and communities. During our training and work as education researchers we are exposed to the arguments against the illusion of researcher objectivity as “no field researcher can be completely neutral,” (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, 2011, p.4). Yet, in the field of comparative and international education (CIE), rarely do graduate students or early career scholars have opportunities to systematically learn how to consider positionality and to confront the frequent ethical dilemmas they face across research sites.

As researchers, we then find ourselves setting boundaries, negotiating issues of power and our positions as “insider” or “outsider”, and addressing complex ethical issues in real-time as we work with and within communities. There is as-yet little written about the challenges that emerging researchers in CIE face as they embark on field work and ways that graduate programs might more thoroughly engage issues of power and positionality. This gap is particularly noteworthy in the context of educational research within contexts of conflict, crisis, and displacement, and is an area that we seek to contribute to in this panel.

We propose a panel that will explore ethical dilemmas related to power and positionality, which graduate students and early career scholars face while conducting field work, and opportunities to address these dilemmas. Specifically, we ask:

(1) What challenges do early career scholars face related to power and positionality in comparative and international education research?
(2) How do we negotiate the line between “insider” and “outsider” and what opportunities and limits does this have for our research and participants?
(3) How can we as researchers address notions of power and reciprocity in our research?
(4) What responsibility do we have to the communities we research and what types of reciprocity are available?
(5) To what extent can graduate education prepare students for their research in the field of comparative and international education?

This panel convenes four researchers who will reflect on ethical dilemmas across the themes of moral injury, positionality, power, and reciprocity in qualitative research. We draw on our experiences using a wide range of research methods across settings, including ethnographic, interview, and observational work with students, teachers, school leaders and families in Jordan, Uganda, and South Sudan. Echoing this year’s themes, we see this panel as a starting point for discussing how we might “build lifelong learning opportunities that are socially and ethically just.” We also look inward to critically examine the field of CIE, considering how we might reshape graduate training to more effectively prepare emerging scholars for the ethical dilemmas of research in settings of conflict and forced migration, and mitigate some of the most pronounced challenges.

While there is extensive literature on ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ positionalities among qualitative researchers (Louis and Bartunek 1992; Robertson 2002), the challenge of positionality in comparative and international education has unique dimensions that are too often overlooked. So too the possibilities and limitations of reciprocity in research relationships that are embedded in unequal social and opportunity structures, and the kinds of moral injury (Levinson, 2015) that education researchers committed to justice face as they undertake research across contexts. These are some of the themes that we will examine in this panel, each researcher drawing on their own professional and personal experiences conducting dissertation field work.

First, we will explore the role of moral injury in comparative and international research based on one panelist’s work studying future-building among refugee children and families in Uganda. We will then examine the role of being an “insider” and “outsider” in South Sudan, and issues of power in the second panelist’s work studying teachers and history education. The third panelist will build on these topics by discussing positionality and the ethical dilemmas of care, adaptation and responsibility in her work with Syrian refugee students in Amman, Jordan. Finally, the concluding panelist will close the panel with reflections on his experiences conducting research with Jordanian and non-Jordanian sixth-graders, reflecting on reciprocity and the challenges we all face in giving back to participants and those who contribute to our research.

As current and recent graduate students, we both share dilemmas we faced in our own research and also examine opportunities for graduate study to engage issues of power and positionality in comparative and international education. As the field continues to wrestle with its past and consider its future, we hope that this panel can contribute toward a more transparent and equitable approach to research in comparative and international education.

Sub Unit

• Education in Conflict and Emergencies SIG

Chair

• Celia Reddick, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Moral injury in comparative and international education research - Celia Reddick, Harvard University

• How will this research help me? Positionality, objectivity, and reciprocity among sixth-graders in Jordan - Daniel D Shephard, Teachers College, Columbia University and NORRAG

Discussant

• S. Garnett Russell, Columbia University Teachers College