Dynamic embodied positionalities: The politics of class and nature through a critical ethnography of homelessness

Positionalities

Positionality refers to researchers’ social location (i.e. race, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) in relation to those of the research subjects (McCorkel and Myers, 2003; Roer-Strier and Sands, 2015). Positionality, while neither assured nor necessarily stable, can change in relation to the context of a particular research inquiry, or within a particular ethnographic engagement with a research participant (Merriam et al., 2001). Positionalities are always already contingent, partial, clouded, situational, and contextual (St. Pierre, 2000). In the ethnographic process, “…the researcher as human subject is similarly in flux, dealing constantly with shifting realities and contradictions” (Nilan, 2002: 368–369). Geographic and social locations of qualitative research encounters, whether ethnographic or otherwise, shift the positionalities of the researcher, influenced by place-based knowledges, among other changes (Kusenbach, 2003; Wiederhold, 2015). A signification of a researcher’s engagement with their own positionalities often indicates quality qualitative scholarship (Deutsch, 2004).

Like positionality, reflexivity has become a common exhortation in qualitative and critical social science scholarship (Caretta, 2016: 305). Positionality and reflexivity have been “placed at the core of participatory research practice” (Caretta and Riano, 2016: 259). Reflexivity is not merely the reflections that one might have in response to a particular social or political situation; reflexivity is the processing of these reflections through our own lenses that are necessarily informed by ontological, epistemological, and other theoretically paradigmatic considerations. Reflexivity is, in other words, the personal, yet theoretically informed, relationships that researchers have with their subject matters. Reflexivity attends to researchers’ subject positions through a dynamic process of ongoing reflective engagement throughout the duration of the research process (Johnson and Parry, 2015). Researcher subjectivities, theoretical tensions, and methodological considerations are all implicated in reflexivity processes.

However, disclosure of researcher positionalities is not a panacea for producing and representing rigorous qualitative scholarship. Becoming more reflective and reflexive of our own positionalities can lead scholars to become more self-revealing and vulnerable, as we move from the position of expert to a position of co-constructor of knowledge and understanding (Ladson-Billings, 2003). Reflexivity is a way in which a field researcher explains how their social position(s) affected the research process and product. Reflexivity can demonstrate the ways in which research processes are unequal power relationships (Kelley, 1998).

Researcher positionality (gender, ethnic background, language ability, advocacy positions, etc.) creates challenges within sensitive communities. One’s positionality can both increase and decrease access to a specific community, and may lead to increased access to parts of a community, while simultaneously decreasing access to other parts of the same community (Berbary, 2014). Further, gaining access to a particular community of interest is less of binary “in” or “out,” “access” or “no access.” Instead, ethnographic access is often “partial, mediated, temperamental, and conditional, and rarely follows a linear format of ever increasing levels and depths of access. Ethnographers constantly navigate complex sociopolitical environments and adjust the level of access to a particular culture” (Rose, 2015: 135). Communities that are vulnerable due to issues of marginalization, displacement or other susceptibilities are likely to offer particularly confounding access, where incoming researchers’ positionalities are further scrutinized for issues of either sameness, difference or both. Such dynamic relationships have substantial impacts on the path of a particular research project.

Positionality as a form of ethnographic analysis requires us to understand ourselves: our thoughts, reactions, feelings, psyches, and bodies. This necessary corporeality of ethnographic inquiry is essential to ethnographic inquiry (Geertz, 1973). The researcher’s body, their corporeality, invites deeper connections with research settings and participants (Mears, 2013). That said, ethnographers are complex research instruments (Evans, 1988), whereas interviewers, focus group facilitators, and other interpretivist researchers simply do not have to immerse themselves as deeply as participant-observers.

Corporeal embodiment in the field

Ethnographic inquiry uncovers social, political, and economic structures, expressed materially and symbolically, through long-term, intimate contact with people in their everyday environments (Low, 2014). Ethnography requires an encounter with the materiality and human subjectivity through fieldwork that situates the researcher at these interfaces. A researcher’s positionality exists in many different forms, from work both within and beyond scholarship. However, it is the body, the very materiality of the ethnographic research encounter, where the researcher comes closest into contact with one’s own positionalities. The self, through embodiment, is used to “generate insights, establish patterns, and bring the voice of their research subjects to light” (Venkatesh, 2013: 4). In fact, this process of coming to know a situation through one’s body is foundational to the ethnographic endeavor.

Ethnography’s distinctive research method, participant-observation fieldwork, privileges the body as a site of knowing… [Ethnographic fieldwork] requires getting one’s body immersed in the field for a period of time sufficient to enable one to participate inside that culture. Ethnography is an embodied practice; it is an intensely sensuous way of knowing. The embodied researcher is the instrument. (Conquergood, 1991: 180)

Issues concerning the embodied self have proliferated in critical social science literature over recent decades. “Body politics” constitutes a substantial volume of literature (Longhurst and Johnston, 2014), indicating that researchers’ bodies, our material engagements and interventions with the social and physical landscape, are politicized instruments (Evans, 1988). Our races, genders, classes, and other positionality-defining markers are political statements, positioning ourselves within and against various power structures (Merriam et al., 2001). In “the politics of loitering,” a necessarily ethnographic endeavor, Buck-Morss (1986) contends that “the embodied saturates modern existence,” and that in “commodity society all of us are prostitutes, selling ourselves to strangers; all of us are collectors of things” (104). Or, in other words, we as loitering, observing researchers become wrapped into the very political manifestations of the environments in which we inhabit. We cannot escape the political entanglements of our setting, nor can we escape our own embodied, politicized selves.

The body is also a medium through which many ethnographic relationships interact, and where space is actively produced. Sight, sound, smells, language, touch, and actions are performed in and through the body, where thoughts, feelings, and relationships are made manifest (Daza and Gershon, 2015). The body is how these relationships exist.

If we are to find common ground with [the people we study], we have to open ourselves to modes of sensory and bodily life which, while meaningful to us in our personal lives, tend to get suppressed in our academic discourse. (Jackson, 1989: 11)

Beyond viewing the corporeal self as the vessel through which ethnographers interact with particular sites (the social) and situations (the environmental), the body is also a receptor of discourses and information. The body is acted upon by the political, economic, and environmental forces of a particular setting. In a point that will be taken up through the narratives presented in this ethnography, these materialities of the body as a producer of space have particular influence on framing and understanding the nonhuman natural world in which we live. “The human body is a battleground within which and around which conflicting socio-ecological forces of valuation and representation are perpetually at play” (Harvey, 2000: 116). The ways in which qualitative researchers represent their selves and their ethnographic data as being mediated through embodiment serve as potentially insightful and novel understandings of participants, environmental settings, and their own selves.

Ethnographic narratives of embodiment and positionality

Fieldwork involves a negotiation of complex relations, interests, situations, and logistics, and although critical researchers of a variety of epistemological stripes often have intentions for engagement and change that exists beyond the mere production of scholarship (Rose, 2015), ethnographers also produce description, interpretation, and analysis of particular in-the-field social and environmental settings (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). In this way, ethnographies often present narratives to situate researchers’ analyses of their fieldwork. Narratives are part of a relational and material turn within geography, anthropology, and elsewhere in the social sciences that provide a renewed focus on the political possibilities afforded by storytelling (Cameron, 2012).

Social scientists across disciplines have examined and presented memoirs and alternate forms of personal writing to capture and relate individual experiences occurring during research processes, interactions, and reflections. Researchers’ use of autobiography, journal entries, diaries, and personal vignettes scatter the literature of feminist and other critical accounts of topics as diverse as affect, knowledge production, and fieldwork (Soni-Sinha, 2008). Some feminists have operationalized the political aspect of experience as a fundamental building block of anything personal. Scholars and researchers using intimate writing have durably situated analyses of contemporary issues of the subject, neoliberalism, collective action, and globalization within the familiar worlds and challenges that constitute everyday lives (Soni-Sinha, 2008).

Theorizing dynamic embodied positionalities in ethnographic research

Class and relationship to nature were primary positionalities that were highlighted in my newfound assessments of myself and my dynamic relationships to the participants, setting, research questions, and theory associated with this ethnography. And as demonstrated in the second narrative, the relationship to nature was itself also a class-based consideration, another way in which I starkly differed from the Hillside residents, but was unable to imagine prior to fieldwork and reflexive engagement with my previously static positionalities. I could not have engaged in this critical ethnography in the way that I did without my whiteness and my maleness, among other privileged subjectivities, but the privileges that mattered most viscerally in this research are those associated with class and relationship to nature. Race, gender, sexuality, and other social markers remain imperative, but relationship to nature and class are the subjectivities that most prominently differentiate me from the Hillside residents. My incoming positionality, then, was one that was academically critical but very mainstream in ways that mattered in this research.

As an ethnographer engaged intimately with the social and material setting, new spaces were produced by increased clarity concerning my dynamic positionalities across the duration of the research process. My class-based positionalities operated at the scale of the body in its corporeal experiences, but also at local, state, and even global scales, as discourses of homelessness extend across scalar levels of capital (Gerrard and Farrugia, 2015). The Hillside residents functionally operated in dynamic positions between legality, safety, and full membership on one hand, and eviction, exclusion, and destruction on the other. This same sense of liminality, when viewed through the dynamic positionalities that inform and impact our research processes, incorporates the researcher as a hybridized subject of in-betweenness. My positionalities at the beginning of the ethnography were superficially the same as at the end of the research process; I had not changed my race, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation or any other traditional markers of various subject positions. However, I came to understand and underscore these subject positions much more carefully and in a much more impactful manner, seeing them as less binary and static, and more relational, contextual, and evolving. Ethnographic and qualitative researchers might consider their subject positions entering a research endeavor, and then subsequently revisit and perhaps reconstruct these positionality statements toward the latter stages of the project. The comparison of positionalities affords researchers not only the opportunity to understand their processes of change across the duration of ethnographic engagement but also the ways in which these changes might elucidate vital understandings of their research questions, data, and analyses.

Reconsidering the primacy of researchers’ dynamic positionalities in qualitative research processes highlights key issues and challenges for social researchers. For instance, how can and how should ethnographic researchers characterize the relationships between data, reflexivity, and theorization? In this research, I presented my reflexivity-themed fieldnotes as a nuanced method of analysis that would have previously been inaccessible had I not reconsidered my incoming positionalities. While such issues would certainly depend on wide ranging case contingent parameters, it seems reasonable to suggest that aligned and necessarily interconnected ontological, epistemological, and methodological orientations provide guidelines for effective engagement with these concerns. In my research, an overall justice orientation and critical ethnography methodology helped me ask questions (of myself, others, and situations) that enabled reflexive researcher engagements to be brought into analyses of the Hillside residents, myself, and our interconnectivity (for instance, through class). Yet a further challenge for researchers is considering how such reflexive engagements concerning positionalities subsequently impacts research participants. The disclosure of a researcher’s positionalities is a “situated, ongoing, and philosophically informed series of decisions about how, when, and if to be transparent about our work” (Bridges-Rhoads et al., 2016: 536). Considering the dynamic nature of positionalities still does not always lead to clarity concerning how transparency should be deployed, incorporated, and leveraged.

Scholars should become increasingly interested in understanding not only what, as critical ethnographic researchers, our positionalities are, but rather, how our dynamic positionalities might be treated in qualitative research processes to better theorize connections between methods and analyses, and between our own lived experiences and those of our participants. Positionality can be employed to “provide a grounded perspective that explains how large-scale processes are interpreted, responded to, and (re)produced by social actors in specific locations” (Horschelmann and Stenning, 2008: 348). This process may further elucidate the connections, differences, and intersections of positionalities existing across traditional researcher–subject divides. Nuanced and detailed explorations of researchers’ positionalities further implicate researchers in the very systemic practices that we also often critique.

It was only through reflexively constructing and analyzing fieldnotes about the dynamism of my own positionalities, and then foregrounding those positionalities in concert with theory and methods, that I was able to gain new analyses and insights into the class and relationships-with-nature constructions of the Hillside residents. These ethnographic, reflexive conversations about researcher positionalities are essential and should be interwoven as part of qualitative researchers’ analyses.

If participants’ words about subjectivity in interview transcripts counted as data, so did theories’ words about subjectivity in books I had read—why discount their expertise? I thought with everyone’s words as I wrote—Foucault’s and my former Latin teacher’s—and it no longer made sense to separate those data into chapters called “literature review” and “interpretation.” (St. Pierre, 2013: 469–470)

For qualitative researchers, positionality statements, often presented as benign disclosures of one’s race, gender, class, and so forth, gain layers of complexity when they become ongoing, developing, processual experiences that entangle and interweave with theory, methods, and analyses. Ethnographic analyses are often presented as if they can only come from careful engagements with and observations of anything but the self: research participants, nonhuman environments, literature bases, etc. But our own dynamic positionalities, always in need of interrogation, are also rich repositories for knowledge production and analysis.

Postscript: Years later, the social landscapes of the Hillside have changed substantially. As the (local) scale of visible unsheltered homelessness has increased, vocal community concern, health department regulations, and law enforcement crackdowns have led to the Hillside no longer being an ongoing space of unsheltered homelessness.