You Have Never Lived a Day Outside of Your Body: Engaging Racialized and Gendered Positionality in Ethnographic Research

Abstract

Anthropology's well‐known history of racist and colonial practices continues to inform which bodies go (un)marked with regard to researcher and researched subjectivities, with consequences for methodology and analysis. The imagined unmarked body of the researcher in the ethnographic context disallows consideration of any interaction between their subject position, its attendant histories, and how researchers interact with the community under study. And when the researcher's positionality is made explicit, it is rare to find discussions of how the researcher's positionality informed how and what they could observe. This article argues that overtly engaging, not just noting, research positionality in ethnographic texts illuminates underexplored, analytically rich, and pedagogically valuable aspects of the ethnographic process. By highlighting three ethnographic encounters as a Black male ethnographer of young white conservative students, this article explores some of the benefits and challenges of engaging researcher positionality, and how doing so benefited the ethnographic process. This article contains references to sexual assault and sexual violence.

Racialized Sociolinguistic Processes in the Spanish Learning Journeys of Non-Latinxs in the U.S.

“…For instance, some journals encourage a "positionality statement" in published articles in which the researcher critically examines the impact of their identity and power in their work, such as the researcher's cultural biases, nation-specific ethical values, or their relationship to the communities they study. 2 Some scholars assert that centering researcher positionality as a site of inquiry has theoretical and empirical benefits (Muhammad et al 2015;Muwwakkil 2023). Per these scholars, positionality impacts the entire research process, allowing scholars to theorize the affordances and limitations of their identities in their research contexts.…”