Hidden Contexts,Multilevel Comparisons,and the Postcolonial Location: Reconsidering the Documentary Method Vis-à-Vis Decolonization

New Theoretical Horizons for Empirical Interpretation

Post- and decolonial studies, along with CRT and Critical Whiteness Studies, offer robust theories about the constitution of society. These theories present challenges for qualitative research methodologies that claim to be inductive or abductive, aiming to generate new theories from the methodically controlled interpretation of empirical data. There are two strategies to incorporate the theoretical assumptions of postcolonial and other related studies:

First, such theory—or more precisely, its most generalized components—can be used to develop basic theoretical concepts intended to guide empirical research without themselves being questioned by it. A relevant example is Scheurich’s (2023) thesis that white supremacy is fundamental to the constitution of modern society (see also Quijano, 2000). However, corresponding basic theoretical concepts must allow enough leeway so that “substantial theory” (Glaser & Strauss, 1969, p. 32) can be developed in the course of empirical research.

A second strategy for incorporating postcolonial and other related theories is to use, for example, CRT to inspire the interpretation of empirical data. Using CRT during (rather than prior to) empirical analysis, is, however, by no means a simple process. Malagon et al. (2009), in their thorough discussion of Grounded Theory as a suitable methodology for integrating CRT, initially remind their readers that this approach is conceived as an inductive methodology. However, they then argue for an abductive understanding of Grounded Theory, in which it is possible to use a “prior theoretical framework like CRT” (p. 263). If one wishes to “get at larger social structural factors that have an impact at the micro-level and beyond,” such a theoretical framework, used as a “conditional matrix” (Strauss and Corbin, cited in Malagon et al., 2009, p. 268), seems downright necessary to them.

At this point, however, it is important to reflect on the fine line between using CRT as an all-dominant theoretical concept and employing CRT as a theoretical source of inspiration for empirical interpretations. A succinct example of the latter is an empirical inquiry by Gillborn (2015) who, in his research on Black middle-class parents whose children were suspected of having a dis/ability, empirically considered the intersection of class, race, gender, and dis/ability. By doing so, he did not theoretically assume racism but instead turned it into an empirical question. It is precisely by showing that the class affiliation of parents (and the cultural and economic capital they deployed) was influential in their interactions with schools, but ultimately took a back seat to their race, that Gillborn demonstrated the “primacy of racism” (p. 283) empirically.

Decolonizing Existing Methodologies

Instead of, or in addition to, introducing new theoretical frameworks like CRT to inspire empirical interpretation, many scholars opt to revise established methodological assumptions to decolonize their research. A significant focus of these decolonizing revisions is the practice of coding, initially formulated by Glaser and Strauss (1969) and further developed by other scholars.

According to Viruru and Rios (2021), Glaser and Strauss emphasized coding to protect their approach from positivist criticism. However, this allowed both positivist quantitative researchers and those who perpetuate a colonial way of knowing “to lay claim to such coded qualitative data for the purposes of quantitative categorical comparison robbed of context and amorphous in meaning” (Viruru & Rios, 2021, p. 1149). By using coding to isolate the utterances (e.g., in interviews) from their context, researchers are able to create their own “narratives that only vaguely resemble their origins” (p. 1152), that is, do not convey the meaning-making of the marginalized people under scrutiny. As decolonizing strategies, Viruru and Rios propose to present research findings “as tentative, transient, and incomplete,” rather than “with authority” (p. 1154). This approach allows for the inclusion of the research participants’ own meaning-making processes and, hence, the development of a “pluriversal rather than a universal worldview” (Couldry & Meijas, cited in Viruru & Rios, 2021, p. 1153). An important aspect of this approach is to consider not only the words spoken but also “the way in which” (p. 1154) they are said by interview partners. Regrettably, this last point, which is also significant for the Documentary Method (see below), has not been further elaborated on by Viruru and Rios (2021).

Scheurich’s (2024) criticism also begins with the practice of coding that abstracts utterances from their context. However, he is less concerned with giving dominated voices more space but more focused on questioning qualitative researchers’ emphasis on the subjectivity of individuals. Scheurich underscores that “words spoken by individuals do not include many critically important dimensions of any specific context” (p. 4). Most importantly, results from such research “leave out an address of issues like White supremacy racism that is not readily evident in words or observation notes” (p. 4). Instead of proposing a methodology that would empirically address racism (even if it may not be “readily evident”), Scheurich asks qualitative researchers to “do deep study of the ontology of oppression,” for example, of the “ontology of systemic White supremacy racism” (p. 7). He believes this ontology governs not only the social worlds that are the objects of research but also the researchers themselves. In this way, unlike the approach of Gillborn (2015, see above), CRT is turned into an all-encompassing explanatory theory that generally assumes that racism exists unequivocally in all social contexts. However, as a result, racism (and its nuances, modes of operation, and impact) seems to be effectively excluded from empirical analysis.

Whereas Scheurich (2024) and Viruru and Rios (2021) propose substantial (albeit different) changes to existing versions of the coding paradigm, De Eguia Huerta (2020) views the version of Grounded Theory developed by Charmaz (2006) as sufficiently open and flexible to incorporate decolonizing elements. Using her field research in Bolivia as an example, De Eguia Huerta (2020) highlights the (post)colonial involvement of the researcher, which begins not just in data evaluation but already in the data-gathering process, especially in the communication with the research participants. In this regard, her research aligns with approaches that advocate for a decolonial methodology.

Exploring Decolonial Methodologies

It is not yet possible to speak of a fully developed, independent decolonial methodology of qualitative research. However, various authors, including those already mentioned, are exploring new approaches toward a decolonial methodology that are worth taking a closer look at.

A central strategy of decolonization is for colonized and subaltern people to raise their voices or, to put it in a way that acknowledges the power researchers hold, to be given a platform to express themselves. This begins with actually gathering empirical data from social groups previously neglected by mainstream research. As the discussion on coding (see above) revealed, utterances of colonized and subaltern people need to be interpreted in their respective (racialized) contexts (Viruru & Rios, 2021). To do justice to the meaning-making of the researched group, Thambinathan and Kinsella (2021, p. 5) suggest including “cultural insiders or cultural brokers” in the interpretation process. This aligns with Au’s (2023) call for including indigenous and subaltern people in the research process itself: To do more than merely “placate colonizer guilt” (p. 686), it is important to share power with the groups being researched in the sense of “collective ownership over the entire research process” (Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021, p. 4). In her meticulous report on an inquiry into the Coast Salish People, Conrad (2023) emphasizes that this involves not only consulting trusted persons within their community but also following their advice and, at times, their instructions, from the planning stages of the research through to data analysis. At this point, however, one must ask whether it is sufficient to only involve “local Native elders” (p. 1601) and whether this approach might inadvertently reproduce the internal power structures of the communities and overlook their internal heterogeneity.

An important strategy to ensure that dominated social groups’ voices genuinely reflect their perspectives is to focus on storytelling and narratives. This approach has been notably proposed by CRT (Delgado & Stefancic, 2023, pp. 45–58), which “recognizes that the experiential knowledge of people of color is legitimate, appropriate, and critical to understanding, analyzing, and teaching about racial subordination” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 26). Unlike the fragmentation of words and sentences through coding (see above), narratives told as stories allow the experiences of dominated social groups to be conveyed in their own sequential structure. As Parker and Lynn (2002, p. 11) demonstrate, this approach can “provide readers with a challenging account of preconceived notions of race.” When these narratives function as “counter-storytelling,” they serve as “a tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 32). However, similar to CRT itself, Solórzano and Yosso (2002, p. 31) urge researchers to “focus on the intersections of oppression” as these “stories affect racialized, gendered, and classed communities.”

As several scholars make clear, fostering critical (self-)reflexivity of the researcher is a pivotal decolonial principle for methodology. For Henson (2021) the goal here is “unsettling the coloniality of the researcher.” Even though he proposes “to consider a QI in reverse” (p. 1207) by including Black researchers, Henson is aware that social position alone is not sufficient for this endeavor. This is because Black researchers, socialized in Western science, may also think in colonial terms. Moreover, as Thambinathan and Kinsella (2021, p. 3) insist, critical reflexivity should not be reduced to “oversimplified confessions,” as these “can be loopholes absolving researchers from a duty to continuously ensure their research is supporting resistance to colonization.” The authors, therefore, suggest that researchers reconsider their tacit assumptions in light of the voices of the social groups under study. A “decolonization of the mind” (Au, 2023, p. 688), however, is only possible if this process is not done on an individual and occasional basis. As Au (2023, p. 688) argues, it is, therefore, important to “allow indigenous peoples to build their own bodies of knowledge,” which then serves as a counterpoint for researchers to question their own coloniality. Such self-reflexivity can not only be accounted for in autoethnography (Henson, 2021, p. 1209) but can also be enhanced by it (Camangian et al., 2023).

The Context-Sensitive Interpretation of Weltanschauung

How is it possible to understand the meaning of words spoken by strangers? Karl Mannheim, the son of a Jewish-Hungarian father and a Jewish-German mother, was intrigued by this question when, after political turmoil, he had to flee Hungary, where he had recently been appointed as a professor. His first sociological analyses in Germany, where he restarted his career at the beginning of the 1920s, were concerned with epistemology, especially with analyzing different cultural products and what in German is called “Weltanschauung,” that is, worldviews. Mannheim differentiated between an “immanent interpretation” (Mannheim, 1982, p. 80) and a “documentary interpretation” (Mannheim, 1952, p. 61) of Weltanschauung. The former is concerned with the world as seen by the research participants, while the latter reconstructs how this worldview has come about.

As Ralf Bohnsack, who transformed Mannheim’s epistemology into the research methodology known as the Documentary Method, points out, pivotal for the shift from immanent to documentary interpretation is what Mannheim (1982, p. 80) called “bracketing the validity aspect.” Only when the “claims to truth and normative rightness by those under investigation” (Bohnsack, 2018, p. 205) are temporarily suspended is it possible to:

turn from the question of what cultural and social facts are all about to the question of how they are accomplished or generated, that is to questions concerning the social processes of the coming about of what is taken for granted as cultural and social facts. (p. 218; italics in original)

This approach transcends merely accepting research participants’ truth claims at face value or questioning them from theoretical lenses—whether postcolonial, CRT, or even colonial in origin. By temporarily bracketing the validity aspect during the interpretation of research participants’ voices, the Documentary Method introduces a third analytical pathway and enables researchers to uncover the internal logic underlying the cases under investigation.

The Documentary Method proposes two steps of interpretation for analyzing cases: “formulating interpretation” and “reflective interpretation.” In the “immanent” or, as Bohnsack (2014, p. 225) calls it, the “formulating interpretation,” researchers, using their own words, summarize the content of an interview or other data. This first step of data analysis serves both to carefully attend to the research participants’ voices and to control whether the researchers have correctly understood their immanent meaning. This step is especially critical under conditions of cultural and linguistic unfamiliarity. Following the epistemological principles of pragmatism, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis, the Documentary Method draws on the context within which utterances and actions gain their meaning. In broad terms, this method aligns with decolonial approaches that emphasize the importance of taking contexts into account (Scheurich, 2024; Viruru & Rios, 2021).

However, the Documentary Method approaches the context of utterances and actions in a strictly empirical manner, beginning with single cases, for example, the respective interview. As Bohnsack (2014, p. 223) emphasizes, the “meaning of a single utterance or action is determined by its relation to the context of the other utterances and actions which sequentially take place.” This attention to the sequential context aligns with Viruru and Rios’ (2021) warning against abstracting single utterances into codes. Regarding verbal or textual accounts, this approach compels researchers to consider the narratives, that is, the meaning-making processes of oppressed people (Parker & Lynn, 2002; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

Again drawing on the sequential context of utterances and actions, the second step of data analysis—referred to as the “documentary” or “reflective interpretation” (Bohnsack, 2014, p. 225)—reconstructs how, that is, in which “modus operandi” (p. 229) or “frame of orientation” (p. 225) the research participants tackle the issues and problems immanent in their words and actions. Similar to the analysis of habitus (Bourdieu, 2010), this reconstruction of orientations examines a level of meaning connected to “collective tacit knowledge” (H. Collins, 2007) and, hence, may lie beyond the explicit consciousness of the people under investigation. Viruru and Rios (2021, p. 1154) seem to allude to this practice-based level of meaning when they note with reference to a teacher that her “words could not be separated from the way in which she said them.”

The reflective interpretation may uncover a previously unspoken meaning of a practice (such as speaking), which could then be confirmed by the participants if they are asked about it. However, it is also possible that the documentary meaning reconstructed by the researcher diverges from or even contradicts the meaning that research participants explicitly attach to their own words and actions.

An illustrative example is Wivian Weller’s (2003) inquiry into “Hiphop in São Paulo and Berlin.” During her fieldwork in a housing estate in São Paulo—impoverished and neglected by the state, and inhabited mainly by Black individuals and migrants from the northeastern region of Brazil—a young male band member emphasized in a group discussion:

Hip-hop changed my way of thinking [. . .] because everything I really wanted to learn in life was about [. . .] identifying with my race. Those were things they didn’t teach at school, things I didn’t learn at school. Through hip-hop, I started to have a stronger notion of blackness, you know? (cited in Weller & Paz Tella, 2011, p. 197)

Weller, who had aimed to “understand the world views of these youths, the way in which globalized cultural styles are appropriated and re-signified” (Weller & Malheiros da Silva, 2011, p. 300), interpreted this and other contributions to the discussion with this band as an attempt to “construct a notion of blackness by identifying with common elements in the history of the African diaspora and with shared experiences of discrimination and segregation” (Weller & Paz Tella, 2011, p. 197). However, since the experiences of these young people were only partly reflected in their identity as Black Brazilians (and, interwoven with this identity, pertained to class and gender positions), Weller concluded that to “build a relationship of unity and reciprocity” among themselves (p. 198), the group used this “imagined community” (Anderson, 1991) of the African diaspora. Most likely, the band members, from their immanent perspective, would not agree with this documentary interpretation, which focuses on the tacit modus operandi underlying their doings and sayings.

Weller did not rely solely on the sequential context of this case for her interpretation; rather, the contrastive comparison with other cases was also crucial. As will be shown, the documentary meaning of utterances and actions becomes increasingly complex as one delves deeper into the respective contexts through comparative analyses.

Global Comparisons and Multidimensionality

Regarding comparison, the Documentary Method was inspired by the Chicago School and the Grounded Theory’s “constant comparative method” (Glaser & Strauss, 1969, p. 101). Vis-à-vis decolonization, comparative analysis in the Documentary Method serves several functions: First, it is the operation best suited for including previously unheard voices in research. By comparing cases, especially with an emphasis on “maximum differences among comparative groups” (Glaser & Strauss, 1969, p. 56), it is possible to analyze how specific social problems are experienced by different, dominant or dominated actors. Second, comparison helps uncover contexts of utterances and actions that would be overlooked if research were limited to single cases. Third, comparing the first case with other cases enhances the validity of interpretation. All three functions will be explained in the following paragraphs.

If researchers confined their analysis to a single case, their interpretation would heavily rely on their own “intuitive horizons of comparison which are stored in our everyday knowledge” (Bohnsack, 2014, p. 224). Such a single-case approach can inadvertently perpetuate colonial knowledge because it often goes unnoticed (Henson, 2021; Scheurich, 2024; Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021). Comparative analysis can be a remedy. As Bohnsack (2018, p. 210) emphasizes, “the more those intuitive horizons of comparison are replaced or substituted for by empirical and explicit ones—that means by empirical cases of comparison—the more my interpretations [. . .] can be controlled methodically” (italics in original).

For example, Wivian Weller (2003), who aimed at analyzing how young people acquired and performed hip-hop, sought maximum contrasts by including both other bands in São Paulo as well as bands formed by marginalized young male people in Berlin in her sample. Her interpretation of the utterances of the first band (see above) was thus also based on the horizon of comparison constituted by a second Paulistano band whose all-male members, rather than constructing an imagined community of the African diaspora, used hip-hop to deal with disrupting family experiences, including the loss of their fathers. Although one might assume that the Berlin hip-hop bands were completely different, they bore certain similarities: In Berlin, too, there was a group that subscribed to an imagined community—constituted by merging “Turkish” with “Western culture” (cited in Weller, 2003, p. 91, 94)—while a second band used hip-hop to deal with their family problems. What all the bands examined had in common, however, were experiences of racist discrimination, though differences in intensity and counter-reactions between Berlin and São Paulo existed.

The Documentary Method uses comparative analysis as a systematic tool to analyze the multidimensionality of experience. For example, the experiences of hip-hop youth that Weller (2003) analyzed could also have been reconstructed regarding aspects such as class, generation, and gender if the respective comparison groups had been included in the sample, that is, rich young people, another generation, and women. The multidimensional comparison with contrast groups not only sheds new light on the cases already investigated but also integrates the dimensions of experience of the contrast groups themselves into the research. Comparative designs that include both dominant and dominated groups reveal aspects that might not have been addressed by members of the dominant group, as these aspects may be part of their taken-for-granted privileges. Thus, regardless of the research question or its significance for postcolonialism, it is always possible to make comparisons with groups that are marginalized or oppressed in specific dimensions of experience. Bearing similarity to intersectional approaches (Gillborn, 2015), the Documentary Method’s multidimensional comparisons, hence, can help to understand “interlocking inequalities” (Au, 2023, p. 691), for example, how postcolonial conditions are experienced in the context of certain gender, class, or educational positions.

A compelling example illustrating the decolonial potential of multidimensional comparisons is R. Nazlı Somel’s (2019) inquiry into educational inequality, which uses the Documentary Method. Based on numerous interviews and her field observations, Somel reconstructed the tacit mechanisms that generated and reproduced inequality in a primary and lower secondary school located in a poor district of Istanbul, Turkey. By comparing 80 biographical interviews with eighth-grade students, she identified three significant dimensions of their experience: Although all students were from working-class families, they were divided into those whose parents were day laborers with “insecure working conditions” and those with “secure socioeconomic conditions” (p. 107). The latter group had already developed educational aspirations that included tertiary education, while the former group, irrespective of their educational success, were “unable to make long-term plans regarding their education” (p. 107). A second dimension of experience became evident when Somel compared students living under precarious economic conditions in terms of their gender positions. The girls experienced their failures at school, which in one case led to dropping out, as a problem of incompatibility with their families and their expectations. This was due to their responsibilities in household work and the domestic production of industrial goods. The boys, on the contrary, worked outside the home to earn a living, gaining qualifications that diminished the significance of their school failure (pp. 142–143). In contrast, for students with a regular family income, differences in school success existed regardless of gender. Some students had fallen behind in their former school performance, viewing this as a consequence of their desire for leisure activities. Others maintained high performance and saw the privileged position that school gave them as their entitlement. However, as Somel (2019, p. 180) reminds her readers, even the “options” for these types of students were “restricted” as they neither considered attending the most prestigious public high schools nor a private high school—options that would become apparent if compared to wealthier students.

The multidimensional comparison, therefore, enables the specific inclusion of social groups that are marginalized and oppressed in particular ways. In Somel’s (2019) inquiry, for example, the female students with precarious family incomes could certainly be described as subaltern in the sense of Spivak (1992). Including such groups in research allows for an empirical examination of how, even among students from working-class families, there are nuanced differences in privileging contexts. However, the Documentary Method’s ability to render disadvantaged contexts visible is not limited to multidimensional comparison.

Tacit Contexts on Multiple Levels

Confining an empirical inquiry solely to those who suffer from marginalization and oppression would inevitably obscure how their situation originated. This approach might lead to two potential outcomes: either holding the dominated individuals themselves responsible for their situation or having the researcher rely on theoretical hypotheses about “external” factors that influenced it (as, e.g., Scheurich [2024] and Malagon et al. [2009] suggest). Somel (2019) did neither. Instead, she resorted to multilevel analysis (Weiß & Nohl, 2012; Nohl, 2019) and rendered previously tacit contexts of the students’ situation visible.

In addition to interviewing students, Somel (2019) interviewed teachers who varied in their social origin, gender, education, political opinions, and even their observations of students (some focused on students’ efforts, while others were concerned with social injustice). However, these teachers “were all inclined to support the school’s relatively successful students, who, they believed, would be successful in their future educational careers” (p. 218). This attitude was reinforced by organizational mechanisms of educational inequality, which Somel discovered through her field research and interviews with school administrators: In the first grade, the school divided the children into homogeneous classes based on social background. In the fifth grade, this class allocation was revised based on performance tests. Along with this “sorting” (p. 221), resources were also distributed unequally: The classes with the relatively wealthier (and later the most successful) children received the most respected teachers, and some of these children even received extra tuition. The school legitimized these practices by claiming that this was the only way it could compete with other schools and attract not only students from its poor catchment area but also middle-class students from neighboring districts.

This multilevel analysis, hence, revealed at least three hidden contexts of the unequal educational situation of the eighth-grade students: The attitudes of teachers, the inequality mechanisms of the school organization, and the competition among schools that functioned as a catalyst of these mechanisms. From a postcolonial perspective, it was significant that Somel considered further possible contexts, including the position of the school in the education field vis-à-vis competing schools, and the role of the Ministry of Education, which does not only allow or even encourage competition and inequality mechanisms but develops its own inequality mechanisms (such as allocating funds to schools unequally). However, it would have been interesting to also examine the relationship between education and labor market inclusion in Turkey within the broader context of global inequality.

Such macro contexts are crucial for postcolonial approaches, as coloniality primarily involves global power structures (Quijano, 2000). However, it is challenging for qualitative research to empirically uncover global contexts of coloniality. This endeavor requires not only cross-country comparisons but also rigorous methodological considerations. First of all, to achieve empirical comparability across national borders, researchers must ensure that cases (such as groups of highly qualified migrants) are similarly situated (e.g., have common occupational characteristics, and unrestricted access to the labor market). By comparing precisely selected cases, researchers can reconstruct hidden contexts such as informal closure mechanisms in a labor market. Through structured comparisons across multiple macro and meso levels, they can attribute these uncovered contexts to responsible social entities, such as occupation-specific labor markets within a state, thus avoiding the pitfalls of methodological nationalism (Weiß & Nohl, 2012). ² This multilevel comparison allows researchers to effectively discern phenomena of coloniality from other important aspects of macro and meso contexts. Moreover, it enables the analysis of how coloniality articulates within different contexts and their specific internal logic.

The Postcolonial Location: A New Search Category

As is evident in the research examples mentioned above, there are certainly analyses using the Documentary Method that are relevant to postcolonial issues. However, such questions have not yet been systematically pursued. This is also reflected in the fact that the Documentary Method, which otherwise has a decidedly theoretical framework (see Bohnsack, 2018), does not provide any corresponding theoretical concepts for the empirical search for and recording of postcolonial phenomena. It is in this context that I wish to introduce the concept of postcolonial location.

Similar to gender, class, and the “generation location” (Mannheim, 1972, p. 292), the postcolonial constellation can be conceived of as a “social location” (p. 293) which defines a limited social space of possible experience. The experiences and social practices that constitute a social location may be tacit. In this sense, the social location exists regardless of whether the individual is aware of this social location “and whether he [or she] acknowledges it or not” (p. 289). In contrast to membership in an organization, belonging to a social location is not “terminable by a conscious act of will” (p. 289) but incorporated by the habitus.

The concept of postcolonial location that I am introducing here incorporates many components of what postcolonial researchers and proponents of decolonization of qualitative methods address in their reflections on colonial knowledge and the structural racism rooted in it. They are concerned with a constellation situated at the societal level, which began with the racist and Eurocentric legitimization of colonization. Since then, this constellation may have constrained people’s potential for experience and action, often beyond their own conscious will.

However, in the Documentary Method, the concept of postcolonial location should strictly be used as a search strategy. It is an empirical question whether the potential for experiences and actions provided by the postcolonial location is realized by the research participants. Mannheim developed a second concept, the experiential nexus, to describe the actual “participation in the common destinies of this historical-social unit” (p. 303). Thus, whether we are dealing solely with the “potentialities inherent in the location” (p. 309) or whether these have been realized in a postcolonial experiential nexus must first be empirically reconstructed based on the (tacit) experiences and orientations of the research participants.

It should be noted that within this experiential nexus—among all those who have (tacit) postcolonial experiences and orientations—very different and even opposing postcolonial milieus can emerge, whose experiences and orientations may diverge. After all, the postcolonial location, that is, the potential of experiences produced by the permanence of the colonial “heritage,” includes not only those who occupy non-White positions in the “subaltern” (Spivak, 1992) of societies and those who are socially privileged as Whites. In addition, intermediate positions—such as those of non-Whites who have migrated to Western societies (Castro Varela & do Mar Dhawan, 2020, p. 324)—must also be considered, especially since other experiential nexuses, including class- and gender-specific ones, also contribute to the multidimensional constitution of postcolonial milieus. On one hand, using the concept of postcolonial location to inform one’s sampling strategy helps empirically identify such postcolonial milieus. On the other hand, only when a range of different postcolonial milieus have been empirically reconstructed can substantive, empirically grounded hypotheses about the postcolonial nexus and postcolonial location be generated.

Self-Reflexivity and the Existential Determination of Doing Research

The postcolonial location pertains not only to the research participants. The researchers themselves are also involved in it. As Mignolo (2009, p. 4) rightly put it: “The knower is always implicated, geo- and body-politically, in the known.” At this point, Mannheim’s (1954) warning should be recalled: “As long as one does not call his [or her] own position into question but regards it as absolute, while interpreting his [or her] opponents’ ideas as a mere function of the social positions they occupy” (p. 68), the analysis risks overlooking its own ideological components. Thambinathan and Kinsella (2021, p. 3) therefore suggest fostering “critical reflexivity” on the part of researchers, as it is “powerful for examining researchers’ epistemological assumptions, their situatedness with respect to the research, and crucial in addressing power dynamics in research.”

However, it is by no means sufficient to merely explicate one’s own position within the postcolonial, gender-, and class-specific locations—for instance, describing the author of this article as an “old white man”—as this would only lead to “oversimplified confessions” (p. 3). For it is precisely the preconscious experiences and habitual aspects of a social position that constitute the “existential determination of knowledge” (Mannheim, 1954, p. 239). The question then is: How can self-reflexivity, extending to the preconscious existential determinants of knowledge production, be fostered?

One answer by decolonial methodologies focuses on “who does research” (Au, 2023, p. 687; italics in original). While it is undoubtedly legitimate to analyze individuals with whom one shares postcolonial, gender, or class experiences, empirical analysis greatly benefits from research teams and research workshops that are heterogeneous in terms of experience. Heterogeneity in these contexts can enhance the interpretative process not only when examining issues related to indigenous peoples or subaltern groups but across all research questions. For instance, Henson (2021, p. 1207) suggests considering “the Black cultural knowledges and philosophies Black researchers bring with us into our knowledge systems, methods, and representational texts” (see also Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021, p. 4). As Henson (2021) clarifies, this involves not just race but also the diversity of gender and class experiences. Moreover, the focus should not be on ascribed or stereotyped affiliations but on a heterogeneity of experiences. Introducing this heterogeneity of experience into research teams or workshops can initiate (self-)reflexivity, as one’s own interpretation of empirical data will no longer be seen as the only possible one. In this context, reflexivity becomes “uncomfortable”—a “reflexivity that seeks to know while at the same time situates this knowing as tenuous” (Pillow, 2003, p. 188). Of course, this requires taking internal power relations under control and refraining from “disciplining non-normative subjects” (Henson, 2021, p. 1205) who conduct research. ³

A second answer builds on the Documentary Method’s emphasis on comparative and multilevel analysis. As outlined above, a multidimensional comparative and multilevel analysis allows researchers to uncover previously hidden contexts of the utterances and actions under scrutiny. Particularly, if one uses a targeted search strategy and includes contrasts in certain dimensions such as gender, postcolonial location, or class in the comparative analysis, not only do new aspects of the meanings of the utterances and actions become evident, but each new comparative horizon also reveals the researchers’ previous blind spots. “Rendering” what one has previously known about oneself “as uncomfortable and uncontainable” (Pillow, 2003, p. 188), “comparative analysis also opens up a certain chance for the self-reflection of my existential and standpoint bonds” (Bohnsack, 2018, p. 210), that is, of the researchers’ “existential determination” (Mannheim, 1954, p. 239). This self-reflexivity can even be enhanced if one considers several levels of the social, for example, organizations and other meso as well as macro contexts.

In view of these two ways of promoting self-reflexivity among researchers, it becomes clear that decolonizing approaches and the Documentary Method agree in conceiving the results of research as “tentative, transient, and incomplete” (Viruru & Rios, 2021, p. 1154). In the Documentary Method, this is not merely a commitment but can be methodologically justified through the gradual yet always limited extension of multidimensional comparative and multilevel analysis.