In Search of Moral Coherence: Reconciling Uneasy Histories and Identities (original) (raw)
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Article In Search of Moral Coherence: Reconciling Uneasy Histories and Identities
2015
Through an autoethnographic account the authors explore the various entanglements, ambiguities, and conflicts inherent in the research relationships of institutionally marginalized communities. Agency and moral coherence are constructs with which personal, political, and sociocultural dimensions of negotiating a research identity
Ethics as Obligation: Reconciling Diverging Research Practices With Marginalized Communities
International Journal of Qualitative Methods
This article argues that research design is impacted by ideological frameworks, and when conducting community-based participatory research (CBPR), can create challenges and conflicts throughout the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and other institution’s approval processes. I explore the ideological frameworks that underpin conventional and CBPR methodologies to show how collaboration can influence the questions asked and answered, the roles of researchers in the project, and how research findings can better impact the community at the center of the research. I offer a snapshot of our CBPR project with women who were currently and formerly incarcerated and document the challenges we encountered given our CBPR methodology and the unique population at the center of our study. I explore the ethical challenges, complications, and delays that emerged from these conflicting ideologies and methodologies. I propose that how we engage in research and our research practices impact the questio...
Integrating Reflexivity: Negotiating Researcher Identity Through Autoethnography
Educational Research for Social Change, 2015
This article illuminates how reflexivity and autoethnography can be integrated into scholarly inquiry. As such, this inquiry focuses on the process of negotiating researcher identity through autoethnography. It presents the author's internal struggles throughout a research investigation on the perceived conflict between Western science education standards and Confucian learning traditions that arose as a result of education reform in Taiwan. The researcher's learning and cultural experiences in Taiwan and Canada and their relationship to the research inquiry are examined using an autoethnographic methodology. In particular, various tensions are explored, including the role of insider knowledge and ethical practice in social science research. The researcher's reflective journal and ethnographic writing are presented to demonstrate the trajectory and evolution of her perspectives on Confucian traditions over the course of the research investigation. A rich discussion of establishing researchers' identities is also provided.
Problematic Autoethnographic Research: Researcher’s Failure in Positioning
The Qualitative Report, 2018
This article problematizes and discusses the “auto”ethnographical approach, which has recently become pervasive in research-oriented writings, to “tell the story of self and subject” in order to analyze wider cultural and social conditions. This method can be found in the remarkable array of a variety of disciplines in which scholars have explicitly and implicitly highlighted identity-related issues. One problem with this approach is its failure to recognize the ideological generalization in identifying the researcher’s position, with the risk of eventually becoming a neutral “truth through the researcher’s reality.” This paper focuses on the crisis between history and memory in contextualizing a researcher’s collective identity, and the crisis between insiderness and outsiderness in research. As a researcher and writer, I apply my examples to the conceptual framework built in this study on the identity crisis of my life, struggles, and conflicts. Considering researchers’ struggles ...
Inside-Out: Representational Ethics and Diverse Communities
Highlights • Representational ethics should be added to any ethical framework for community psychology. • Such ethics refers to how researchers represent identities of people they study in communications. • The term partial insider was used to describe the fluidity of our identities. • We explore our identities as partial insiders and representational ethics related to it. • Implications when research is conducted by those who identify with the communities they study. Abstract The purpose of this paper is to write about insights and special considerations for researchers who are, to some degree, " insiders " to the communities they study by expanding on the concept of representational ethics as applied to research in community psychology with diverse and marginalized groups. Representational ethics refers to the ways that researchers, artists, or corporations represent the identities of the people they portray in their communications. As community psychologists we generate and disseminate knowledge about the communities we work with, and in that process, create narratives about the people who participate in our studies. In preparing a report on psychological issues among Evangelical Christian refugees from the former Soviet Union, Dina Birman struggled with her portrayal of this group and her own status of being both an insider and an outsider to this community. When investigating academic aspirations and psychological distress among Muslim high school students, Ashmeet Oberoi was forced to acknowledge the one-sidedness of the discourse on autonomy and cultural socialization of Muslim adolescents. In her research with Cuban-educated doctors in Miami, Florida, Wendy Moore encountered similar issues as she considered how to represent gender dynamics among her participants.
Qualitative Research, 2021
In this article, we propose a distinctive critical, reflexive approach to relational ethics in ‘collaborative, democratic and transformative’ research. Underpinning the approach is the view that the buzzwords of ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-creation/co-production’ may signify equitable, symmetrical power relations and, as a result, romanticise collaborative research as straightforward processes of inclusion. The approach integrates critical, reflexive analysis of the play of power in the ‘with’ in ‘research with, not on, people’ and the ‘co’ in ‘co-creating knowledge’ into the ongoing collaborative research process. As a main method for critical, reflexive analysis, the approach uses ‘thinking with’ autoethnography. In the article, we illustrate the approach by showing how we ‘think with’ autoethnographic texts to respond to discomfort and analyse the tensions in the co-constitution of knowledge and subjectivities in the preliminary phase of a collaborative, participatory research projec...
Ethics and Education, 2014
Positioning the educational researcher through reflections on an autoethnographical account: On the edge of scientific research, political action and personal engagement Ethnographic fieldwork is subject to a number of tensions regarding the position of the researcher. Traditionally, these are discussed from a methodological perspective, and draw attention to issues such as 'objectivity' of the research and the supposed need for 'distance' in the process of knowledge-building. Approaching the issue from a different angle, this article provides a reflection on the positionality of the researcher through an autoethnographical account based on fieldwork with socially excluded groups. Rather than reflecting on (dis)advantages of proximity for the research process, it explores from a personal stance how this role interacts with other roles in the researcher's life (e.g. being a volunteer, a citizen, an advocate, a moral being, etc.). Raised awareness about this intrinsic positionality of the researcher calls for a situated conceptualisation of professionalism and science. The author furthermore explores how an autoethnographical approach relates to educational research, and substantiates the educational meaning of autoethnography for science in general.
Walking the Tightrope: Ethical Issues for Qualitative Researchers
Anthropologica, 2003
Walking the Tightrope is the sort of timely and valuable work that belongs in the hands of every Canadian graduate student contemplating a participant observation and/or interview based thesis or dissertation. All of the most central issues confronting qualitative researchers who are accountable to research ethics boards (REBs) and Tri-Council requirements are addressed in the text. The volume is strengthened by: the mix of perspectives it brings to the issues raised (e.g. senior scholars with multiple ethnographies to their credit and newer voices within the academy), the multiple theoretical positions reflected in the text (e.g. symbolic interaction, participatory action research, standpoint theory) and the range of field studies engaged (e.g. cyberspace, social work, persons with developmental disabilities, and school settings). One always engages a text from a particular position with a mixture of insight and blindness. In my case, I come to this text from multiple vantage points as an ethnographer who tends to focus on matters of deviance and deviance regulation, as a teacher of an ethnographic research sequence where students actually get their hands dirty, as a former faculty association president and, currently, as a university administrator. My choice of issues to address in this review is influenced by these multiple commitments. I highlight three themes within this volume. A Sense of Loss The "bad old days" of human science research marked by Milgram, Tuskegee, Project Camelot and the like, are often cast as referential points to justify the need to protect the citizen from unethical research. On this point there can be little debate. However, I think one would be hard pressed to argue that such research practices are systemic. Rather a strong case can and is made for the reverse. Classic ethnography is not marked by malevolence on the part of researchers towards their communities: Whyte (1934) worked for clean water in the slum, Becker (1967) argued for a committed ethnography and Adler (1985) took upon herself considerable personal risk.
Autoethnographic Realisation of Legitimacy of Voice: A Poetic Trail of Forming Researcher Identity
2014
During my research with home-based care volunteers in South Africa I used autoethnography and poetic reflection to document the parallel realisation of my changing identity as a researcher and the home-based care volunteers' realisation of their identity as significant contributors to the HIV/AIDS care and support networks in their community. I explored how the concepts of space and witnessing were operative in the realisation of a legitimate identity for the participants and me. Physical space or distance from familiar environments, experiences and ideas promoted alternative perspectives and stimulated the development of an understanding of personal identity. Dialogical space created through engagement with others encouraged identity development in both different and similar ways for me as a researcher and the participants. In this article, I recount my role as a witness to the participants’ realisation of identity whilst concurrently being witnessed by others in the process of...
Claiming the Researcher’s Identity: Anthropological Research and Politicized Religion
Fieldwork in Religion, 2012
In this chapter we will discuss the consequences for doing research in the case of a topic and field that has become subject to intense public debate. In three cases involving research on Islam and Muslims we will take up questions pertaining to intersubjectivity, and show how research on public issues, the relation between the worldviews of informants and those of the researcher, and processes of inclusion and exclusion during fieldwork are influenced by the politicization of Islam. We show how sudden changes in the societal context influence local identifications and allegiances. In our cases these changes produced a politicization of the field which, in turn led to the construction of the researchers as “natives” by the informants. We argue that a reflection on this construction is necessary in order to better analyse processes of signification among informants and render a more adequate representation of those researched.