Context-informed,counter-hegemonic qualitative research: Insights from an Israeli/Palestinian research team studying loss

Abstract

Theorizing social work qualitative methodologies have always been closely related to the context of the studied subjects. This paper offers the framework of context-informed, counter-hegemonic qualitative research for theorizing research in conflict zones. Based on a case study of a group of Jewish and Palestinian social work researchers who examined together the effect of the loss of home on families during an ongoing political conflict, this paper explores the impact of participating in a research team on the researcher’s perceptions and study of otherness and otherization in the context of asymmetries of power. Analysis of the group dynamics discovered: (1) a growing ability to see and acknowledge the other, accompanied by a growing willingness to be attentive; (2) a growing ability to empathically listen to and hear the experiences of suffering of the other; (3) overcoming silencing by allowing voices of dissent, pain and resilience; and (4) creating a liminal space of “safe haven” for the researchers. The paper explores the development of context-informed group reflexivity leading to emancipatory consciousness and academic activism.

Keywords

Research team context-informed counter-hegemonic qualitative research context-informed group reflexivity emancipatory consciousness academic activism

The meaning of home and the effect of its loss on individuals and families are intricate issues that require the application of spatiotemporal, political, ethical, and psycho-social analytical frameworks. This complexity is exacerbated when researching the demolition of the family home in a conflict zone. This article relates the experiences of a group of social work researchers who examined the effect of the loss of home under harsh conditions of continued political conflict. Basing our analyses on the case study of Israel/Palestine, we offer the framework of context-informed, counter-hegemonic qualitative research for theorizing research in conflict zones. In presenting the complex modes of exchange of what we call the Safe Home research team, made up of individuals from two conflicting groups—one Palestinian and the other Jewish-Israeli (with assistance from German colleagues)—we aim to walk the reader through the experiences of a path-breaking team, offering new insights into the merits and limitations of researching home. Researching home loss with researchers belonging to conflicting groups in a context burdened by ongoing political violence and intergroup animosity is a daunting task. It challenges our ability to conduct research at all, let alone to merge group efforts. Furthermore, the notion of the home, which is interwoven in wider issues of identity politics, continuity and belonging in a university setting constrained by hegemonic norms, poses serious challenges to research and researchers. The paper’s primary task is not to offer an epistemological theorization on ethics, history, and morality when researching conflict zones, but rather to examine the impact of participation in a research team studying loss, during an ongoing political conflict on the researcher’s perceptions and views of otherness.

Producing such new ways of seeing and knowing enhances creative modes of understanding and promotes new temporalities for theorization. This, in turn, not only allows for revisiting research in conflict zones, but also opens up new spaces to acknowledge, see and read the other, on their own terms, in their own voices and through their own narratives of suffering.

Conceptual framework

Context-informed, counter-hegemonic qualitative research is a new concept around which we theorize. It is the initiative and act of conducting research that recognizes the complexity of both the socio-political context and the workings of power that produce knowledge and affects in a specific situation. It requires taking on the responsibility to make present those who are absent and marginalized. Our use of the term “counter”-hegemonic aims at stressing the agency and activism of research members against the hegemony of power—in this case, the act of home deprivation by power holders.

Following Arendt’s argument that responsibility stands in opposition to the “banality of evil,” (1993: 154, 241; 1998: 187–188), we propose that responsibility in context-informed, counter-hegemonic qualitative research means a political presence and a political position. In her article “We Refugees,” Arendt discusses the absoluteness of loss in the refugee condition: “We lost our home … we lost our occupation ….we lost our language … we left our relatives ….and our best friends have been killed …” (1978: 55). She discusses the “de-politicization of the dark-times” as the loss of spaces, places, frameworks, and fellowships. Building on Arendt’s theorization, we argue that the responsibility of the researcher in conflict zones and particularly social work researchers—centers on a commitment to see, hear, acknowledge, and uncover abuse of power.

In addition to the importance of employing specific methodologies when examining ongoing suffering, researchers should develop innovative-practices for engagement with otherized groups that experience different “ways of knowing.” As the author argues, by foregrounding the narratives and voices of otherized groups, researchers learn that

information is one of the first casualties in conflict-ridden areas, and that the “other” is further invisibilized as a result both of the inability of the oppressed to come forward and explain their positions and their suffering, and of the ability of those in power to maneuver and silence influential actors in the media, the economy, the law and even human rights defenders (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2010: 5).

Researchers who adopt context-informed, counter-hegemonic qualitative research are invited to explore the politics of invisibility, the epistemologies used in conflict zones, and the politics of knowing that pull researchers back to the very personal, as well as the political. Similar to those who propose a critical perspective of qualitative research paradigms (Hesse-Biber, 2011; Kincheloe et al., 2011; Mertens and Ginsberg, 2008; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2006) and anti-oppressive social work research (Strier, 2006), we recognize that we live in a power-laden context, which, in turn, informs how we behave, create meaning, and produce knowledge about our lived experiences. Our perspective asserts that multiple truths exist and are shaped by the context in which knowledge is created. It calls researchers to be aware that knowledge production, as well as research epistemologies and methodologies, is not outside of history.

Context-informed, counter-hegemonic qualitative research requires awareness to power relation in the research act, between researchers and participants and among researchers. The literature is discussing reflexivity as a platform for achieving this awareness. Ben-Ari and Enosh (2011) argue that reflective processes simultaneously involve both a state of mind and an active engagement and that such processes may refer to deliberate awareness involving both a contemplative stance and intentional activity aimed at recognizing differentness and generating knowledge. Probst and Berenson (2014) argue that although researchers may use different modes of reflexive activities, ultimately the mechanism of reflexivity may not lie in the specific activity but in the attitude with which it is carried out.

Context-informed, counter-hegemonic qualitative research on the topic of home loss has to take into account power relations, political resistance, community building, and self-affirmation.

In “Homeplace,” Bell Hooks traces the importance of the home as a site of resistance for African-Americans throughout a long history of oppression. She observes: “Homeplace has been a site of resistance … [containing] our struggle to resist racist domination and oppression” (Hooks, 1990: 47). As the only place of refuge, the home becomes a site of identity formation and community building, where members could strive to be subjects, not objects, “where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world” (Hooks, 1990: 42).

Exploring the psychology of the home from a phenomenological perspective, Bachelard (1969) analyses the symbolic meaning of the house. He attempts to isolate that which transcends our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter and justifies the value of all of our images of protected intimacy. Further, he argues that “the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” and that “the binding principle in this integration is the daydream” (1969: 6). The house therefore represents humanity at its deepest core. Bachelard argues that, because the house serves as a conduit for memory and daydreaming, it creates a continuum of intimate space which, as it is so deeply rooted in our subconscious, marks the very essence of our being. He concludes, “The house … is a ‘psychic state,’ and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy” (1969: 72).

Through our understanding of Hooks and Bachelard, we propose that, because the home is so bound up with the self, its destruction is tantamount to destruction of the self. It is through this understanding that home loss gains more meaning. Given the logic of hegemonic academia, it seems a daunting task to study the loss of home in a team comprised of members of victimized groups that have suffered attacks on their homes, together with members of those very groups that planned and carried out those attacks. This essay foregrounds alternative methodological approaches, based on critical counter-hegemonic analyses that may potentially undo the hegemonic logic of research and subvert the attacks of those in power by decolonizing the research and the analytical mind from within.

Background of the Safe Haven project

One of the co-authors of this study is a Palestinian feminist researcher living in the area of the research, an expert in studies of trauma, abuse of power, and agency in settler colonial contexts and conflict zones; the other co-author is a Jewish-Israeli expert in cross-cultural qualitative research and families in cultural transition, particularly immigrants, and refugees, who examines questions of trauma and agency. Together we supervised the Safe Haven research project, which operated from 2005 to 2012. The research team conducted several studies of house demolition. The aim was to better understand the meanings that children and adults attribute to the experience of an attack on their home, and the ways in which they have coped with that loss. Specific objectives for the Safe Haven project included: (a) documentation of the experiences of survivors of home loss; (b) exploration of agency and coping strategies among survivors; (c) creation of platforms for them to voice their personal and political experiences and be heard; (d) development of research methodologies that combine therapeutic intervention, engagement with and empowerment of those who cope with the loss of their home; and (e) research capacity building and engagement of graduate students—Jewish, Palestinian and German—in building analytical bridges despite stormy challenges of conflict, trauma, and identity, while documenting their experience.

The project covered the following research sites: (a) recurrent demolitions of Palestinians’ homes in East Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities; (b) forced displacement of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip (Gush Katif) by the Israeli army following a government decision; (c) damage and destruction of Palestinian homes in the north of Israel during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 by Hizbollah forces in Lebanon; (d) damage and destruction of homes of Jewish immigrants from the former USSR in the north of Israel during the Second Lebanon War in 2006; and (e) recurrent house demolitions in the unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Negev/Naqab area by Israeli authorities.

The central research question informing this paper is: How does participation in a research team during an ongoing political conflict effect the researcher’s perceptions of otherness and otherization in the context of asymmetries of power?

Method

Research group members

The research team included the co-authors and 10 Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian masters and doctoral students, all from the fields of social work and early childhood. Jewish students studied Jewish survivors of home loss and Palestinian students studied Palestinian survivors of house demolitions. All the members remained in the group that worked together for seven years. During the first year the group lost one of the Palestinian members due to sudden death.

Students collected data via qualitative methodologies from children adolescents and adults. They each analyzed their data and wrote doctorate or master's thesis. They participated in group meetings and presented their data in conferences.

Professor Heidi Keller, a cross-cultural psychologist from Germany, was invited to join the project and evaluate the dynamics of the research group in 2007. Professor Keller and a group of her doctoral students (including Anna Dintsioudi who served as our evaluator) came to Israel several times during the course of the study to assess the dynamics of the research team and meet with its members.

Data collection

We used several data sources for our analysis. The list below includes the abbreviated reference for each source type, as presented in the findings section:

Recorded group meetings, which took place regularly (grp mtg).

Interviews by the German evaluator, who spent a week in Israel in 2008, visiting group members at their sites and interviewing them individually about their experiences as researchers (interv).

Report written by the German evaluator (rep).

A focus group conducted by the German evaluator, in which all members of the research team discussed their experiences in the study and on the team (foc grp).

Reflective papers presented at a conference organized in 2009 by the research team, through which members could summarize their personal experiences and refer to the effects the research had on them (reflect).

Group discussions celebrating the research team’s doctorate and thesis completions (held both in 2012 and in 2013), at which the group held member-checking procedures and discussed the lessons from the research, as analyzed by the authors (grp disc).

Data analysis

According to qualitative guidelines for data analysis, the transcripts of the above data sources were read and coded. We used line-by-line descriptive and analytic coding techniques to analyze the data, as described by Charmaz (2006). We then extracted theoretical and practical themes from the published literature and compared these themes to descriptive themes found in the data. This comparison was used to create analytical themes, which are the basis for the results and discussion.

Findings

Our findings focus on four main premises that emerged from analysis of the dynamics of the research group: (1) from invisibility to seeing through multiple lenses; (2) from deafness to challenged listening; (3) from silencing to voicing pain and resilience; and (4) researching and searching for a “safe haven.”

From invisibility to seeing through multiple lenses

When interviewed by the German evaluator about the history of the project and how it all began, both the Jewish and Palestinian leaders of the research team (i.e. the co-authors) started with a story of invisibility:

Living under Israeli settler colonialism has taught me that colonizers use various tools to carve their power over the living and dead bodies and spaces of the colonized. One of the tools is “science,” including the psycho-social theories to justify, excuse or deny the pains of the colonized ….That day [that we decided to undertake a joint research project], I was overwhelmed emotionally. I had just arrived at my office at Hebrew University, following the demolition of Siham’s home [demolition of the house of a Palestinian woman by Israeli authorities]. The voices of the children, the cries for help, the sense of helplessness, and her daughter’s question: “Can you stop the bulldozers?” I decided to share my encounter with her [the Jewish research partner] … I discovered that she did not know …. she did not see … she did not connect the demolition of Palestinian homes with what the Jewish state did to Siham, to my people, to my own family home in Haifa, and the displacement of my family home, leaving two of my siblings in Lebanon to this moment. Exposing this to her, sharing with her, walking with her, showing her, led me to suggest … let’s work together to expose such atrocities … let’s take the first step … talking about the trauma of losing one’s home (interv).

The other researcher’s perspective on the above encounter was as follows:

She [the Palestinian research partner] entered my office at Mount Scopus and told me the story of a family whose house was demolished before her eyes that same morning. I was caught by surprise. “I didn’t know this took place, where?” I asked. “Just look out your window,” she replied and pointed. There it was. I wondered how long I had been blind to the invisible people who lost their homes under my window. Being a descendant of a family who had lost their home in Germany, I wondered how I had become numb to house demolitions. I realized it had been several years since the Second Intifada, and that my heart could not take it anymore and numbness took over. The decision to start the research team was taken when my window and my eyes opened (interv).

The first encounters of the research team were very cautious. They took place at the university. The team discussed critical theory, trauma, and resilience in a general manner, as well as research methodologies. Various members told the German evaluator about a sense of underlying tension (foc grp). All team members, students and professors alike, found it necessary to rethink how to join discussions and research the loss of home, while homes were being demolished. Group and individual discussions, email exchanges and phone conversations, helped researchers to articulate their frustrations related to studying home loss. As the research advanced, the team members started to share their data and the invisibilized began to come to light. The mothers and fathers who were interviewed in the study had names; their children drew pictures of their lost homes; the loss of homes was filmed and documented. The researchers started to share these voices at the Safe Haven group meeting and to present these images at conferences and talks.

Over time, the students described their experience of studying home loss in a “mixed” group (i.e. Palestinians and Jews together) as one of their most challenging yet enriching professional experiences (foc grp). Most of the students on the research team considered a primary benefit of this experience to be their growing ability to see the other (reflect). There were many “others,” including Palestinian Jerusalemites, settler Jews, Palestinian Bedouins, immigrant Jews and Germans, who became visible as study participants (in the field) and as research team members. Otherization and invisibilization were also apparent among individuals from the same cultural group. For example, a Jewish member of the research team who studied the Jewish settlers told her supervisor that, prior to the study, she could not bear the color orange, the symbol of the settlers. When she presented her findings a few years later, she used the color orange for her PowerPoint presentation, stating: “People need to see the story through the participants’ eyes in their own colors” (reflect).

The German evaluator writes in her report:

The discussions were difficult for group members, and the shared data and analyses lead to some uncomfortable conversations, but with time, members of the team reported that they were fortunate to have such exposure and privileged to meet and exchange in such an academically safe setting, to see and get to know people they would not normally be in contact with in their private lives … to learn a lot about the “other” and about themselves, when they “managed to acquire multifocal lenses” (rep).

The evaluator indicated that this new vision and the ability to deal with and incorporate different views from outside one’s group were of great benefit. This was particularly clear to the evaluator “while watching the two professors working together and communicating, arguing openly, with full honesty, without hiding details, yet maintaining mutual respect” (rep).

From deafness to challenged listening

Listening to the voice of the other is an important challenge when conducting research. Empathic listening, which is both a goal of social work and the most refined tool of the qualitative researcher, is difficult in a research team where some members belong to opposing groups who are engaged in ongoing violence. This challenge intensifies when the loss of home is conducted by an opposing group, be it one’s own national group (as in the Jewish-Israeli case) or external to it (as in the Palestinian case).

Two years after initiating the project, members of the research team were still reporting difficulties in achieving the goal of listening to the narratives of the other group (Jewish or Palestinian). Based on the focus group, the German evaluator reports:

One [Jewish] student tells the group about his struggles …. He wants to hear the other side’s voice, but it’s sometimes so hard for him that “a curtain comes down,” as a form of self-protection, when he hears harsh blame and criticism of the Israeli state. At the end of the day, the Palestinians are still “the enemy” (not the team members, but the Palestinians as a collective). However, he doesn’t give up on the group meetings; he tries to be involved in discussions and to gain insight into the personal experiences of Palestinians, which can already be considered a matter of success in such a complex situation (foc grp/rep).

Another Jewish student explains the complexity from another angle:

There is difficulty arising from the fact that I am part of the hegemonic power that rules over a subordinate population. I missed one of the meetings due to army service. I could have come for a short time as I was near the university, but I didn’t feel comfortable arriving in [my military] uniform (reflect).

One group meeting was held at the same time that the Israeli media reported a Palestinian man running over and killing Jewish bystanders. At this meeting Palestinians in the research group voiced harsh criticism against the Israeli state. A Jewish researcher stated:

I was overwhelmed by a feeling that there may never be peace in this torn and divided region …. I hope this group resulted in all of us understanding that suffering, pain and hardship are not exclusive to one side. Moreover, there is no one absolute truth, in the social and political “notebook” … each side embraces a worldview and looks through a different prism at the complex reality of Israel (reflect).

It should be noted here that the fact that Jewish students served in the army further complicated an already contested reality. Jewish researchers perceived army service as a duty to protect their homeland, while Palestinian researchers perceived it as complicity with hegemony, an attack against their people and as justifying the killing of Palestinians. At one group meeting, a Palestinian student asked a Jewish student: “How can you be a social worker and be part of an army? After all, in the army, they teach you how to shoot us.” The Jewish researcher replied: “I defend my people. I don’t want to shoot or kill anyone. I need to protect my country” (grp mtg).

Another Palestinian researcher spoke candidly about the presence of the ongoing conflict under the surface:

It is so challenging to be in a mixed group dealing with a highly politically charged issue without addressing the political stance of the other side. Israel is a Zionist Jewish state and the soldiers are the Jewish students …. Half this group is Jewish. No doubt one of their children or grandchildren will serve in the army or the reserves in the future and may destroy someone’s home … maybe even my own home! (reflect).

It was also a challenge for Palestinian students to listen to the pain of the Jewish settlers. This sometimes sharpened feelings of injustice:

I listened to to my [Jewish] colleagues’ stories of Jewish families who were evacuated from the settlements and were provided with a safe alternative, a proper place to move to. Meanwhile the Palestinian families that I interviewed were left homeless …. Social and psychological services were provided to the traumatized Jewish settlers, while the Palestinian native families have no one to listen to their pain.

Over time, for some team members, the extended listening and knowing about the other led to the development of new ways of listening. In the group discussion of 2012, a Jewish researcher who struggled with the concept of “enemy” stated that when he now listens to news on the radio, he can also listen with the ears of one of his Palestinian colleagues, whom he has grown to appreciate very much (grp disc). Listening to the settlers opened up new venues as well. This same researcher, who was a soldier and took part in army combat activities, used a new terminology, shifting from his security argumentation:

It was hard for me to realize that the crucial importance of keeping your home and having a safe place exceeded loyalty to the state. In the case of Gush Katif [evacuated Jewish settlements], people were ready to protect their home even by hurting their soldier-brother. I learned in the research group that a home is a home. It can be in a dangerous area or in a quiet village, a tent or a fancy cottage, but the experiences of the inhabitants who lose their home are the same in all cases ….

I learned in the group that destroying one’s house is a very extreme action or punishment …. For policy makers, house demolition should be equal in their considerations to taking one’s life … (reflect).

The exchange revealed the assymetries of power between the two studied groups and produced many moments of anger, discussion, tension, silence, and anxiety. The opportunity to challenge each other, to hear criticism, fears, and concerns, while spending time together, eating together, and reading each other’s writings, opened up new venues of exchange inside the group—while outside that safe research haven, the political violence and the conflict continued with all their ramifications.

From silencing to voicing pain and resilience

The voices of Palestinian Jerusalemites, Palestinian Bedouins, Jewish settlers, and Jewish Russian immigrants whose homes were lost are rarely present in the Israeli or international discourse. The little scholarly literature that exists on house demolitions deals only with trauma. The people whose homes were lost are depicted as victims and described in individualist terms of personal and family pathology and symptomatology. Such individualizing and pathologizing analyses silence the collective voices of the people studied, denying them agency and the ability to speak truth to power.

An analysis of the topics discussed in group meetings reveals the history of our attempts to voice the pain and resilience of the people we studied. At a public hearing in 2005 that took place at the Jerusalem YWCA, Palestinian mothers from East Jerusalem gathered to tell their stories of living with demolition to the audience, including members of the media. Prior to this hearing, the children of these mothers had expressed interest in participating. They were provided with the opportunity to write a “letter to the world”—a venue developed by the co-author (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2005)—that was jointly prepared for the public hearing. This method was incorporated in our research methodology thereafter. A similar public hearing was held in 2008 at the Hebrew University. Over 300 participants from Gush Katif, members of the media, and scholars, and students attended. This hearing included an exhibition of large posters of children’s drawings of their lost homes, collected by the researchers, as well as children’s letters to the world. The researchers presented preliminary findings and the study participants told their stories.

To our great concern, another public hearing that was planned to take place at the Hebrew University, with Palestinians from East Jerusalem who are living under the threat of losing their homes or who had lost their homes to demolitions, was canceled after the invitations and flyers were distributed and all speakers scheduled. The “administrative” excuses for cancelation used the logic of “security” concerns. This silencing was met with great disappointment, frustration, and anger by the research team members. In protest of the cancelation of this hearing, the team presented their findings at a trauma conference held at the Hebrew University at a later stage. The Palestinian researchers prepared a silent presentation with visual data to demonstrate the hazards caused by the demolition of Palestinian homes and to provide a venue for Palestinian study participants affected by such violent acts to share their experiences. The presentation was shown without saying a word. The crowd silently read the qualitative research quotes of the participants and viewed the pictures of bulldozers demolishing homes and fragmenting families. The Palestinian co-author did not attend the presentation to further illustrate how otherized groups are denied a home—even as a professor—and are silenced and made invisible. The Jewish co-author explained that the presentation was in protest of the silencing of the Palestinian public hearing while enabling the public hearing of Gush Katif. The “silent voicing” generated discussions and supportive feedback from the audience and resulted in empowering the research group members (grp disc).

Another form of voicing involves presentations made at six conferences and eight dissertations written by the students participating in the group. Researchers are currently collaborating to publish their work in academic journals.

Researching and searching for a “Safe Haven”

Most members of the team recall how the safe home of the research group was attacked from the outside. Students reported being criticized by family, friends, and even professors for doing this research in a mixed group. A Palestinian student elaborated:

It took me a year to come to terms with my research. At first, my family didn’t support it because of the political connotations. One of the Jewish senior lecturers at the university kept asking me, “What is the research going to do for you?” (reflect).

A Jewish student also recalled how she experienced opposition to her study:

When I started to tell people about my research, I realized how politicized the issue was …. My friends didn’t want to hear much about it, and even at the university, left-wing professors gave us a hard time for studying settlers … (reflect).

Yet another Jewish student, who is a settler herself,¹¹ reported that her friends did not understand how she could work together with a Palestinian professor (rep).

Over time, through reflective reports and group discussions, team members revealed that the content of the research, the meaning attributed to it, the supervision and the research group dynamics expanded their knowledge, touched their lives and identities, and created a new meaningful, but very complex, research home. Two Palestinian students noted that, whereas they had joined the group with some queries about their professional and national identities, as the years progressed, they became more critical, understanding the complexity of their identity. One of them stated:

The study helped me integrate several bodies of knowledge and other domains. From the wars in 1948 and 1967, the separation wall, the policy of family reunions … the treatment of Palestinians in airports and at roadblocks, the way I was mistreated at the university. Losing the home, the story that I heard from study participants and from my Palestinian research partners, is not only the story of the participants, but my story and the story of the other Palestinian group members, it is the story of each Palestinian in the State of Israel …. The study woke me from a deep sleep and led me to the enlightened new era of the development of my personal professional and national identity (reflect).

Our analysis revealed that many of the researchers developed a new understanding of the concept of home, enabling new insights on the meaning of the home in a violent context, which in turn affected their professional and personal lives. This interplay between research data and research group discussion affected the students’ perception of the meanings of home and, at the same time, allowed the joint construction of a “safe home.” The research team became a safe space in an unsafe and uncertain context, a haven in which students could learn new lessons about their national and professional identities, could express otherwise unspoken thoughts and feelings, could mourn losses, could write about oppression and historical injustices, could speak up within a context often subject to silencing techniques, and could speak back with and through the support of the group members.

Discussion

The paper examined the dynamics of a research team that studied the loss of home among different Palestinian and Jewish groups. It explored the impact of participation in this research team during an ongoing political conflict on the researcher’s perceptions and study of otherness and otherization in the context of asymmetries of power. Four themes emerged from our analysis: (1) a growing ability to see and acknowledge the other, accompanied by a growing willingness to be attentive; (2) a growing ability to empathically listen to and hear the experiences of suffering of the other; (3) overcoming silencing by allowing voices of dissent, pain, and resilience; and (4) creating a liminal space of “safe haven” for the researchers.

Studies conducted in conflict zones point to ethical challenges facing researchers who attempt a “do no harm” approach in highly polarized research settings (Wood, 2006). They further call for pro-active approaches, rigorous and attentive research intervention (Goodhand, 2000). Furthermore, researchers examining Middle Eastern contexts pointed out that qualitative methods typically offer a more politically sensitive approach to research than quantitative methods (Clark, 2006; Romano, 2006), arguing that such approaches can assist researchers in being more transparent in terms of their choices, analytical categories, and compromises (Hammersley and Traianou, 2012). The current paper used qualitative research methodology to examine a research group that studied the loss of home, allowing us to engage additional analytical directions around researching contested realities when group members carry conflicting narratives and identities.

Researching destruction of home and homeland while creating a safe space

The process of building this research group, which eventually became a safe space for all participants to voice their ambivalence, trust, mistrust, anger, frustrations, joy, love, and hopes, was a challenging task. The conflicting national narratives over the homeland were mirrored and crystalized during the research process. By studying destruction of the family home, the team members ultimately shared a clear view that all individuals and communities have a right to a safe home protected from the destructive powers of the state. The liminal space created by the team generated a research home not only for discussing the psychology of trauma and suffering attached to the loss of home, but also for engaging with the politics of trauma and suffering in conflict zones. The creation of a liminal space for critical engagement promoted the development of self-awareness to one’s choice to deny or see the pain and suffering of otherized groups. This new context-informed affective and analytical space advanced the building of a nurturing ground for identity revisiting for some team members and realization of the importance of home by all. The team became a source of belonging and a birthplace for debunking denials of injustice and violence. Identity politics and discussions about one’s history of rooting and uprooting shaped interactions and discussions.

Kincheloe et al. (2011), building on Freire, Weber, Bakhatin, Habermas and others, have called for the creation of a new form of multidimensional scholarship. They argued for a methodological and multidisciplinary bricolage, which they call “critical humility.” The proposed bricolage requires awareness and development of the researcher’s analytical consciousness with respect to the numerous entangled contexts that shape the researcher’s narrative, such as political and social position, or one’s own personal or group history. The task of the bricolier is to interrogate the complexities of the sociopolitical context, uncovering the otherwise invisible artifacts of the assymetries of power and multiplicity of cultures, and to document the nature of their multidirectional influence, focusing on culture, language, power, desire, enlightenment and emancipation. This perspective is argued to lead to the promotion of a “resistance” version of critical theory and inquiry committed to social criticism, sociopolitical activism, a refusal to live in denial, and enhancement and empowerment of marginalized individuals.

Following this perspective, we propose that researchers who study human suffering, and particularly those who focus on the meaning of and right to home in conflict zones, need to be aware of the multidisciplinary analytical and historic-political perspectives of the interviewees, as well as their fellow researchers. We further argue that this examination of the complexities of the sociopolitical context, as well as the politics hidden in scholarship examining trauma and loss, is mandatory for developing context-informed reflexivity, emancipatory consciousness and academic activism via qualitative inquiry.

Context-informed reflexivity

Reflexivity is particularly valuable to counter-hegemonic qualitative research in conflict zones, as it acknowledges that multiple factors, including our personal histories and narratives, shape the data we produce and our interpretations of that data (Bishop and Shepherd, 2011; McCorkel and Myers, 2003). Peshkin argues that it is only through systematic, ongoing reflexivity, including a continuing examination of personal subjectivity, that we can avoid self-indulgence and “the trap of perceiving just that which my own untamed sentiments have sought out and served up as data” (1988: 20). Through self-reflexivity, we gain awareness of the “political/ideological agendas hidden in our writing and insight (albeit limited) into how factors such as our social location and personal assumptions shape research encounters and interpretations” (Hertz, 1996: 7).

It is our conviction that, by working in a research team that helps to mirror one’s states of denial (Cohen, 2001), one can expand individual reflexivity to be context-informed and in dialogue with group reflexivity. Based on our research team’s discussions and data, we propose to define context-informed group reflexivity as an acquired ability to recognize and consider multiple contexts and their effects not only on the people under study, but also on the individual researcher as a participant in an ethnic, religious or national minority or majority group. Context-informed reflexivity is based on an understanding of the power relations and asymmetries embedded in the process of research and their effect on the researcher’s abilities to detect, understand, name, and deal with loss, trauma and suffering. We argue that context-informed reflexivity goes beyond the ability to reflect on personal stances; it is the growing ability to deal with one’s states of denial and view oneself through the eyes of the other. We further argue that reflective research offers oppositional forms of consciousness, which create research as a mode of resistance forming solid ground for mobilization against injustice. Such an approach re-territorializes the circulation of power and generates new identities. When research methodologies are formulated and learned out of shock, displacement, violence, trauma and resistance, researchers are better able to view power as performative.

Furthermore, adopting Arendt’s (1978) analogy on the responsibility to know, see and acknowledge, and the refusal to hide behind denial, we suggest that responsible and counter-hegemonic research in social work means refusing to depoliticize or ahistoricize analytical frameworks, instead pushing to the forefront a clear commitment to understand, historicize, politicize and to act against the cause of suffering. It also means refusing to deny otherized groups a political and humane presence and space (including a home). In politically conflicting and colonized areas, research cannot be apolitical and researchers cannot be passive bystanders (Cohen, 2001). Responsibility in social work research is required not only because social workers act under professional standards and regulations, but also because they belong to a group that intervenes to stop suffering and halt hegemonic invisibilizing of the other.

Emancipatory consciousness

As this study has revealed, researchers using a critical methodology reorganize their places, locations, and sociopolitical bodies while they narrativize. They become conscious of language and forms of language; they revisit their social and political positions; and they utilize their possession or dispossession of power through the narratives told. We argue that context-informed, consciously vivid research is a catalyst for raising consciousness, which can only be nurtured through dialogue.

Our findings suggest that the researchers’ engagement in the process of seeing, hearing, and speaking history and politics in a mixed and contested group may enhance their emancipatory consciousness. The growing ability to fight denials and start engaging with and listening to excluded and otherized points of view, coupled with the growing ability to acknowledge—to voice, name, document, claim, and morally and ethically describe—the other’s pain and suffering, can create an emancipatory consciousness. This acquired state of awareness helped the Safe Haven researchers to unveil their consciousness and overcome what we call “the curtain effect” (shutting down) when they learned that the narrative of the other contradicted their own narrative, or when they felt guilty, blamed, and a target of unjust accusations and anger.

Academic activism

Home loss is rarely prevented by researchers. This was perhaps the primary frustration of being a member of this research team and is likely a similar issue for groups studying trauma, war, and social injustice. The question of how to make a difference, how to prevent atrocities and how to hinder violators from furthering their abuse is not an easy one. By embracing the concept of academic activism, researchers in contested national groups may reframe their academic contributions by marking trauma, and documenting, acknowledging, presenting, and representing human suffering while taking political steps to name and condemn ideologies, politics, and methods that caused suffering. The microclimate in the research team’s home may be seen as creating a community of resistance, a liminal “home-place” for both groups in the midst of territorial and national conflict—a hopeful example of mutual listening and exchange.

In the words of Sandoval (2000) proposing a research methodology and theorization of oppositional consciousness are “the strategy of articulation necessary to resolve the problematics of the disciplinization and apartheid academic knowledges in the human and social sciences”. It is necessary to “decolonize social imagination, deconstruct supremacy, make visible the unseen, and make acknowledged, known, and heard the unrecognized” (Sandoval, 2000: 77), as articulated in the research team’s joint efforts to understand and challenge injustice and to recommend new strategies for confronting it.

In their activism, this research team centered around a focal concern for social workers: preserving the right and accepting responsibility to unveil, examine, proclaim, and denounce suffering. Such a mode of working led to understanding of the home as homeland and created new temporalities of acknowledgment. Rather than inheriting the past, group members were able to utilize pro-active approaches (Goodhand, 2000), move towards, and take responsibility for, the future. Such an approach allowed the research team to see through multiple temporalities, positions, languages, and images, while preserving the ‘do no harm’ ideology (Wood, 2006).

Conclusion

The journey of the Safe Haven research team uncovered the intricacies of the loss of home in conflict zones. Through this journey, group members refused to silence suffering, rejected apoliticization and ahistoricization, and insisted on studying and giving voice to the ramifications of the loss of home. The research team created an impossible, unseen, unspoken, unheard and unthinkable space, a non-established topos, with an unclear and unestablished order of things that insisted on comprehending and visibilizing the meaning of the loss of home for all. That topos was validated by its multiple, internal regimes of truth and morality, which generated a new visible reality for naming, hearing, speaking, and producing knowledge. Theorizing in such a team through a counter-hegemonic methodology not only reveals invisibility and raises the bar of moral responsibility, but also requires researchers to unpack technologies of domination and control.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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