Collaboration Across Borders: Moving Beyond Positionality

Abstract

Discussions about collaborative spaces in postcolonial feminist and geographical analyses have often hinged on questions of positionality, reflexivity and identity, largely in relation to the politics of representation. Such approaches have often led to an impasse, especially in fieldwork-based feminist research, where reflexivity has mainly focused on examining the identities of the individual researcher rather than on the ways in which those identities intersect with institutional, geopolitical and material aspects of their positionality. This kind of identity-based reflexivity does not distinguish systematically between the ethical, ontological and epistemological aspects of fieldwork dilemmas; it also fails to adequately address how our ability to align our theoretical priorities with the concerns of communities whose struggles we want to advance is connected to the opportunities, constraints and values embedded in our academic institutions. This article takes this discussion forward by arguing for a postcolonial and transnational feminist praxis that focuses explicitly and deliberately on (a) conceptualising and implementing collaborative efforts that insist on crossing multiple and difficult borders; (b) the sites, strategies and skills deployed to produce such collaborations; and (c) the specific processes through which such collaborations can find their form, content and meaning. To ground this discussion, I draw upon two collaborative initiatives that I have begun recently in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India.

Mapping the frontiers and front lines of global environmental justice: the EJAtlas

“…A deeper future enquiry and a critical reflection into the epistemology of the EJAtlas should examine the politics and strategies of representation and question voices and authorship, however this is a task that must be reserved for its own article as we do not have space to engage fully with the range of issues that have presented themselves here. This could provide a deeper assessment of whether the EJAtlas is a repository of stories and struggles that is accessible to people with a sociopolitical agenda that could transform "power hierarchies embedded in research" (Nagar and Ali 2003).…”

Teaching Qualitative Research: Experiential Learning in Group-Based Interviews and Coding Assignments

“…But while Davidson et al's collaborative practice identified all the authors as equal collaborators, our practices of authorship more closely resemble Richa Nagar's work with Farah Ali and the Sangatin women's collective (Nagar et al 2003). Here Nagar and Ali coauthored the work, and the women's collective participated in consultation with them, streamlining the writing process while allowing for input from the group for each new draft.…”

“…Here Nagar and Ali coauthored the work, and the women's collective participated in consultation with them, streamlining the writing process while allowing for input from the group for each new draft. All three are examples of collaborative processes and different expressions of a scholarly teaching and research praxis influenced by feminist and postcolonial partnerships (see Boyer 1990;Hutchings and Shulman 1999;Nagar et al 2003;Medley, Zhou, and Condon 2006). The collaborative nature of the class extended well beyond the confines of the classroom and even the work of this article as students and professor continue to dialogue about qualitative methods more than four years later.…”

Engaging creative communities in an industrial city setting: A question of enclosure

“…As Nagar and Ali (2003) intimate, moving between and across subject positions in research is context and path dependent. It happened to be that one researcher was already in the Oxford Tavern's music scene.…”