‘So what’s arts got to do with it?’: An autoethnography of navigating researcher positionality while co-creating knowledge

Abstract

In this autoethnography, I share about my journey navigating multiple researcher positionalities. I commence with a reflection on how one of my positionalities as an ‘outsider-within’ influences my onto-epistemological stance and approach to the research. Through my shared case, where I am a ‘marginal intellectual’ with an intersectional researcher positionality, I highlight the complexities of negotiating power in co-creating knowledge with participants whilst navigating the insider/outsider/in-between researcher positions. I illustrate how a reflexive methodology incorporating Arts-Based processes (ABP) facilitated navigation of power dynamics in order to mitigate the ‘representation crisis’ often resulting from researcher positionalities.

Ethical challenges in participatory action research: Experiences and insights from an arts-based study in the pacific

“…The research team consisted of myself, two peer researchers (one woman and one man), a local researcher and a local theatre practitioner. Each member of the team sat at different points across the insider/outsider continuum (Kamlongera, 2021). As an Australian with Samoan children and several years working at a local university, I was an outsider with some connection and contextual understanding.…”

Researchers’ reflections on ethics of care as decolonial research practice: understanding Indigenous knowledge communication systems to navigate moments of ethical tension in rural Malawi

“…Adherence to these Indigenous power shifts, meant the elders within the local context could relate to, and easily communicate with the RA. Furthermore, in this case, the decision to appoint a male RA was a conscious choice to help extend the PR’s access to contexts where her gender and age might otherwise have proven restrictive (see also Kamlongera, 2021). Western feminist assumptions of a universally-oppressive patriarchy might view the decision to select a male RA as being one that reinscribes patriarchal stereotypes (see Mohanty, 1988).…”

“…To avoid paternalism, we exercised choices during the ethically relevant moments of the fieldwork together with the participants (Brear and Tsotetsi, 2022; Pettersen, 2011). Furthermore, we enhanced our ‘ethics of care’ approach through the mitigation of power asymmetries between the researchers and the participants throughout the study (Datta, 2018; Kamlongera, 2021). This is undertaken by employing an ‘ethics of care’ approach guided by the IKC theory (Manyozo, 2018).…”

Qualitative research methods I: Emotionally engaged approaches to working with vulnerable participants

“…Creative interventions, from photography to ‘sandboxing’, can be seen in increasing numbers of studies with vulnerable groups, or in specific contexts such as illiteracy (Kamlongera, 2021; Mannay and Turney, 2020). Body mapping, for example, as a form of non-verbal storytelling, originates in arts-based research and community development, and is predicated on the idea that the emotional narrative of painful experiences lies in the body (Collings et al, 2021).…”

“…According to Hagen (2021: 4), adopting a reflexive approach in refugee camps, enabled ‘the work of feeling through the racial, gendered and geopolitical dynamics that govern them’. However, as Johnsen and Fitzpatrick (2021) have argued, the rigour of reflexive processes can vary: from tick lists of benign identifiers to privileged, ‘positional piety’, to ‘self-indulgent discussion about ethnographers between ethnographers’ (Henriksen and Schliehe, 2020; Kamlongera, 2021; Townsend and Cushion, 2021: 251–2). This tendency can be seen in some of the work cited in this report (‘white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, European’; ‘young, middle-class, white, educated’; ‘young, mixed race, female’).…”