To critically understand the complexity of the concept and practice of reflexivity, I offer an exploration of some of its epistemological and ontological foundations. Specifically, I discuss 3 assumptions that tend to be entailed in most views of reflexivity: realism, humanism, and linguistic representationalism. I provide for each of them a social constructionist or posthumanist reinterpretation on the basis of relational views of ontology and on constitutive understandings of knowledge. I suggest some alternatives to these 3 assumptions in order to foster a plurality of viewpoints about practices of reflexivity and entanglements of objects and subjects. In particular, posthumanist theories may provide the language to counter postpositivist inclinations within qualitative inquiry and to offer horizontal, diffractive, and transformative modes of knowing that more fully embrace reflexivity not as a tool or strategy but as a discursive and performative practice-that is, as inquiry in itself.
Research interviewing is not just a practice of exchanging data through communication and collection. Rather, the qualitative interview is an active process in which participants and researchers take part in a situated co-construction of meanings and memories. In this article, I argue for viewing memories and the acts of storing, accessing, and telling the past as relational processes in which the researcher’s position shifts from collector to co-constructor. Moving away from seeing participants as “informational commodities” and data as merchandise, I problematize the assumption that participants’ memories may simply be accessed through narratives, which serve as sources of “data.” I suggest that a possible way to gain a complex view on memory and remembering is by focusing on both the told and the untold, the remembered and the forgotten. From this epistemological viewpoint, a narrative focus on the untold and forgotten contributes to the constructive potential of the inquiry process.
When doing research on topics that are sensitive and involve core dimensions of the researcher’s identities and subjectivities, the process of inquiry is likely to generate significant emotions, attachments, and reactions that transgress traditional forms of data and research positions. If embraced and addressed, the researcher’s emotional reactions can be an important source of reflexivity and data as well as creativity, motivation, and engagement. This relational aspect of the research parallels psychotherapists’ experience of reacting to their clients’ concerns and narrations. This process—called countertransference (CT)—may leave the researcher open to vulnerability and the need to account for the necessary presence of personal biographies and identities in qualitative inquiry. From my research with refugees, I provide examples of my CT reactions and interpretations and the ways in which they became crucial assets to the study.
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