Abstract
This article explores questions of reflexivity, positionality, identity, and emotion within the process of ethnographic research. We reflect on our feelings of privilege and guilt in and through our ethnographic fieldwork and discuss the ways in which these experiences encouraged reflexive thinking and a crucial interrogation of the place of the self in the research process. Specifically, we construct individual vignettes centered on our differing research efforts to acknowledge that our work is unavoidably personal and to embrace the myriad ways in which our positionality impacted our findings. We conclude by offering insights into the ways in which our field experiences are important in the production of knowledge, both in our own work and more generally.
Introduction
This article explores questions of reflexivity, positionality, and identity politics related to the construction of the researcher self within the process of ethnography. By drawing on our personal experiences while we conducted our respective doctoral dissertation research, we examine how feelings of guilt and privilege affected our work, encouraged us to remain reflexive, and led us to interrogate our own researcher identities. Overall, we call for ethnographers to harness—rather than dismiss—difficult emotions experienced in the field to produce meaningful academic work that acknowledges the complexities of constructing knowledge.
First, we examine the broader concepts of positionality and reflexivity within the practice of ethnography, arguing that reflecting on the role of the self is a crucial task for researchers working to understand the lived realities of others. We then offer individual vignettes describing our fieldwork stories to acknowledge that our work is unavoidably personal and to embrace Widdowfield’s (2000) argument that “not only does the researcher affect the research process but they are themselves affected by this process” (p. 200, emphasis in the original). We openly admit to struggling with guilt and wrestling with our privileged selves during our research to consciously place our presence within the field and contribute to an honest dialogue about the often unexpected difficulties of doing ethnographic work. We conclude by discussing the implications of embracing uncomfortable feelings for the production and dissemination of knowledge, suggesting that meaningful learning and discovery can emerge from discomfort.
Though our respective research sites were vastly different, confronting feelings of guilt and privilege became an integral part of our overall research experience, from managing fieldwork interactions to analyzing and writing up the resulting data. Jaime spent four years investigating familial membership at a private swim club in the United States, taking on the multiple roles of swim instructor, coach, and ethnographer. Callie spent two years living in India conducting ethnographic research on how the relationship between India and the West is manifested in and through sites of sport and physical culture.
Both of us engaged in research that was immersive and strongly connected to our personal interests, daily activities, and the communities of which we were a part. Neither of us were an “academic tourist” (Scheyvens and Storey 2003:2), merely wandering into the field for the sake of collecting data and producing detached, objective scholarship. We were stitched into the daily realities of our chosen sites, and the act of conducting research became intertwined with our everyday lives. Accordingly, this article draws on C.W. Mills’s ([1959] 2000:195) declaration that “you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work.” Yet we also strive to place those experiences within a wider methodological context that has relevance beyond our own lives and might be helpful for other ethnographers grappling with issues of guilt and privilege.
Reflexivity, Positionality, and the Self in Ethnography
Both of us utilized ethnography as a key research method and were keenly aware of the crucial need to engage in reflexive practices throughout our time in the field. Reflexivity in ethnographic work relies on identity management and the researcher’s understanding that information is always mediated through the self. Saukko (2003:56) argued, “One can only understand the Other through reflecting on its similarity to, and difference from, the Self”; thus, any representation is only partial and based on the specific limitations of the particular researcher’s positionality and perspective (Boyd 2008). Ergun and Erdemir (2010:34) asserted that “factors such as cultural, social, and linguistic affinities; ideology and political preferences; age, gender, marital status, and profession; and the interplay of these identities” can be crucial in constructing relationships with research participants during fieldwork. In speaking to the importance of being cognizant of the self throughout the research process, O’Reilly (2012:100) declared, “We cannot undertake ethnography without acknowledging the role of our own embodied, sensual, thinking, critical, and positioned self.” Without engaging with the self, identifying positionalities, and managing shifting identities in the field, one simply cannot conduct rigorous and honest ethnographic research.
The concept of the self that we are wrestling with is much more than an amalgamation of our individual positions and personal identities, however. We are both female, white, middle-class, married Americans; these are the basic characteristics of ourselves that we brought into our research and they became inextricable from our everyday interactions and relationships, affected how we were perceived and received in the field, and influenced our ability to gain access to certain sites and people. We were also aware that the mediation of our researcher positionality was a task that demanded the recrafting of our presented selves and an appreciation of the differences between our positions and those of our research participants (Srivastava 2006). Of course, this continual negotiation of the ethnographer self vis-à-vis research subjects is a unique process and dependent on the particular social, cultural, economic, and political contexts in which the work is being conducted.
As such, our management of the Other also impacted our definition of self, a task that Tedlock (1991:81) identified as crucial in acknowledging the “ongoing dialectical political-personal relationship between Self and Other” that drives all ethnographic work. In her research, Jaime experienced a “blurring of Self and Other” (Monaghan 2006:231) that impacted her understanding of privilege, while Callie distanced herself from a constructed conception of the male Indian Other in response to harassment and assault. In remaining aware of these relationships, we used reflexivity as a tool “whereby we can include our ‘selves’ at any stage, making transparent the values and beliefs we hold that almost certainly influence the research process and its outcomes” (Etherington 2007:601). The ways in which we defined the Other and hence reflected on ourselves were very different, but engaging in reflexive practices helped us identify how and why feelings of guilt and privilege affected our work.
Our Stories
In what follows, we offer brief vignettes of our fieldwork experiences, which demonstrate a constant reflection and negotiation between our embodied researcher selves and the Others who impacted our research. We describe how we were confronted with, and forced to reconcile, intense feelings of guilt and privilege during the research process, and while they made us anxious, ultimately these uncomfortable emotions had a powerful impact on the conclusions we drew from our various sites.
Jaime’s Story
I conducted an in-depth, ethnographic investigation of the families belonging to the Valley View Swim and Tennis Club, a suburban club located outside a mid-Atlantic city. I discovered that pool membership was illustrative of the taken-for-granted, lived experience of power and privilege and served to enhance the cycle of familial class reproduction. Well before my research commenced, I became employed at Valley View as the head swim coach and lesson instructor with no intentions of using this summer job as my future research site. However, after considering my research interests and following the sociological tradition of examining a culture with which I had experience (Hockey 1993), I began to conceptualize my dissertation project as focusing on familial participation at the club, and my “culturally definable” role at the pool helped me collect quality ethnographic data (Johnson et al. 2006:114). Gaining access was a nonissue, as my relationships and rapport with members and other facility staff were longstanding and consequently offered me participatory experiences, informal observations, and 35 formal interview opportunities.
Ultimately, my identity was a complicated, delicate balancing act and necessitated continuous reflexive thinking to alleviate threats and maximize the potential associated with this project (Perry et al. 2004). I was viewed as an insider in that I was part of Valley View, spent copious hours there every summer, knew almost all the members, was privy to inner management and board of directors business, governed all team-related decisions, and knew the insider gossip and politics associated with the club and its members. In short, my status professed a “cultural competence” (Hodkinson 2005:138). Further, I shared, or at least was perceived to share, common ground and/or various cultural identities with participants, which garnered increased trustworthiness and rapport (Ergun and Erdemir 2010), bypassed social distance, and had the benefit of “valuable additional resources” (Hodkinson 2005:142) in the form of various swimming club-based experience and affiliations augmenting this research, all of which likely helped facilitate quality data collection.
However, if I were to consider myself an insider at Valley View, I must acknowledge that my role transitioned from “insider to insider researcher” (Hodkinson 2005:136, emphasis in the original). Yet, as Hodkinson (2005:133) reminded us, “the notion of being either an insider or an outsider in an absolute sense is inadequate.” It is important, therefore, to acknowledge that this insider knowledge and positionality were fostered through employment only, which always led me to conceptualize myself as a nonmember and thus an outsider, from both a personal and academic standpoint. Despite my recognition of myself as both an insider and outsider at the pool, there is no denying that my status at the club gave me much more access to situations that I normally would not be privy to. Further, the perception of myself as a club insider increased the level of authentic, in-depth knowledge offered by the participants in this research and served to strengthen my interpretations and understanding of the lived Valley View experience.
However, this dichotomous identity invited some emotionally filled consequences igniting my feelings of guilt and privilege and the recognition that an insider status is often problematic (Hockey 1993). The following is a portion of an email one participant, Tracy, wrote me after our interview and represents a pivotal reflexive moment in my research process: I enjoyed our interview today. It made me think about all the reasons why I love Valley View and how important it is to our family’s summer. So thank you for bringing out all those good feelings and reinforcing our decision to spend so much time at the pool.
Second, I believe, in most cases, the duality of my role as a researcher and coach was only apparent to me. All interview participants signed an Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved consent form and were willing coparticipants in my research process. However, by the time I began IRB-sanctioned observations/participant observations, I had become such a permanent fixture at Valley View and my presence was so normalized that even complete disclosure of my research agenda was often dismissed by members after they showed a socially appropriate degree of interest. Some members would check in from time to time to see how my research was going, but it never seemed to be about discovering my substantive conclusions, rather it was to engage in social niceties. An excerpt in my field notes details this: Jane asked me how my research was going and said: “What was it about again, something about the pool, right?” I told her again what it was about and how it had progressed and she said: “I think you should write a book. Like write a book that all of us can read while we are at the pool that is about all of us at the pool.” Then she began coming up with potential titles for me and settled her brainstorming session with: “Whatever, actually you should just write a trashy novel called Lifeguard. Like about everything that happens with the lifeguards here and us folks at the pool, it would be great.”
Yet the truthfulness of my presence was something with which I struggled. To begin with, my research goals were slightly nebulous in that I simply set out to research the importance of familial pool membership at Valley View, allowing my conclusions to emerge from the data. Nevertheless, I had very strong feelings of guilt as I discovered the overarching theme centered on the myriad ways in which members’ lives were fraught with implications regarding their class privilege. I wholeheartedly believe that the participants in this research were nice, caring people who treated me with respect and generosity and who offered their help on a project that was important to my future. While I was not deceptive or intentionally covert about my research, I do not believe the participants considered how their sentiments might be appropriated in my work and implying their lives were rooted in privilege is likely undesirable.
Accordingly, my guilt is multifaceted. Not only am I conflicted about the realization that I reinforced the very privilege I discovered but I also feel guilty about how my self was often perceived in the field and what I believe to be the truth about the lived experience of the Valley View families.
Callie’s Story
My research questions centered on the dialogue between India and the West as expressed in and through a variety of empirical sites, including the 2010 Commonwealth Games, professional cricket, gym and fitness culture, and yoga schools. I spent two years conducting ethnographic research in India, amassing 35 interviews with yoga practitioners and university students and over 400 hours of participant observation at my research sites. I was permanently living in north India, so my engagement with Indian culture, institutions, people, and practices was fully immersive. Challenges in the field echoed personal challenges, particularly in terms of sexual harassment and physical assault, and I was forced to confront the difficult tasks of reconciling personal feelings with professional obligations and maintaining intellectual self-reflexivity during moments of emotional paralysis. Hence, my experiences with guilt and privilege hinged on my presence as a white, female, Western academic researcher in a foreign culture, engaging in work that did little to ameliorate the social injustices and inequities I witnessed on a daily basis and occupying a privileged outsider position.
Opening my work to the personal and remaining reflexive became especially challenging after enduring relentless sexual harassment, five physical assaults, and feelings of intense vulnerability while researching in the field. I responded to these experiences with rage, frustration, and anxiety, yet I tried to write through these emotions and acknowledge their effect on my work by keeping a personal journal alongside my field notes and interview transcripts. Here I was guided by Behar’s (1996:273) admonishment that as ethnographic researchers, “we ask for revelations from others but we reveal little or nothing about ourselves; we make others vulnerable but we ourselves remain invulnerable.” Never in the field did I feel invulnerable, so presenting myself as otherwise in my dissertation work would have been inaccurate and dishonest (Gilbert 2010). This vulnerability—steeped in gendered power relations—was a constant theme in my personal notes as I came to question my own sense of self and the value of my work.
For example, in response to the physical assaults, I channeled my hostility into the construction of a generalized Indian male Other as the object of my ever-increasing enmity and fear. In my mind, this male Other was a threat to my physical and emotional well-being. The resonance of the assaults left me hesitant to fully place myself out in the field and affected my ability to comfortably recruit and interview male research participants. I eventually became consumed by guilt for constructing this male Other and for allowing my anger and fear to affect my work so strongly since I also interacted with plenty of Indian men who treated me with kindness and respect. The concept of the Other is mutually constitutive, as I distinguished my researcher self against the Indian Other whom I observed and interviewed, and I was concurrently viewed as a white, female, Western Other by the local host population. This relationship between my self and the Other ultimately reinforced my positioning as a privileged, gendered outsider.
While I felt the constant gaze of the Indian male on my body, my Western academic gaze was equally working on the bodies of the locals implicating myself in a process of defining my own self against the Indian Other in and through the exercise and management of power via the gaze (Maoz 2006). Tormented by what Garland-Thomson (2009:13) termed the “obsessive ocularity” of the male gaze, I was also guilty of engaging in a colonial gaze that serves to perpetuate Western privilege and knowledge creation. The white colonial gaze is a “broadly construed epistemic perspective,” in which the subject engages in a process of seeing without being seen (Yancy 2008:6). No matter how hard I tried to resist this gaze, it was suffused through my daily activities as I tried to hide myself and prevent uncomfortable interactions while simultaneously consuming the events and occurrences around me. I was both the target and the perpetrator of gazes laden with assumptions of gendered, disciplinary, and normalizing power.
To balance the power of my gaze, I attempted to simultaneously engage in a self-reflexive gaze or seeing oneself seeing oneself (Song 2006). I saw myself gazing on and consuming the Other, using my positionality to witness local daily life without becoming embroiled in its troubles. In this way, I never even attempted to occupy an insider position during my research; the distinct boundaries between self and Other and my overt status as a researcher defined me as an outsider, yet I tried to be reflexive about my Western privilege even when my gendered self was being victimized.
Recognizing my generally privileged place within the Indian society also caused great guilt, as I knew that my experiences with harassment and assault were not unique and were not, in comparison to what Indian women must face on a daily basis, all that damaging. Frightening yes, but millions of Indian women struggle daily with socioeconomic invisibility, entrenched gender discrimination, very real threats of rape, and tradition-bound practices such as female infanticide and honor killings that deny girls and women the very right to life (Kanekar 2007; Sev’er 2008).
The Indian female self is constrained by a cultural system steeped in patriarchy that limits opportunities for women, but my Western female self brought in assumptions about women’s empowerment and mobility that were at odds with this cultural context (Lozanski 2007). In response, I developed a conflicted subject position, a fractured subjectivity pitting my perception of empowered independence against my feelings of vulnerability, concern for personal safety, and guilt. By virtue of witnessing and living through instances of gender-based discrimination and violence in India, my Western female self came to question my own reality of equality, restrict my research choices, and develop tremendous guilt for creating a male Indian Other as the object of my fear and animosity. I also felt guilty for feeling afraid, vulnerable, and angry as Indian women face so much more on a daily basis.
Throughout my time in India, I consciously strived to situate my own physical researcher body in and among the bodies of others, both Westerners and Indians, in order to better experience and understand the “politics of gender, exclusion/inclusion, and corporeality acting upon, and within,” my chosen empirical sites (Giardina and Newman 2011:49). However, I did not adequately anticipate the complexity of those interactions, the difficulty of gaining access to certain sites, the emotions involved, and the effects on my own sense of self. Looking back, I understand that my struggles were legitimate, acceptable, and served as a valuable part of my research process, but I was unequipped to manage those emotions while in the field. As Rager (2005:23) argued, the role of emotions in qualitative research is a worthy area of inquiry but often “neglects the issue of self-care strategies for the researcher” that help make sense of emotional struggles and connect them to the broader research project. So my guilt was wrapped up in watching my own self become something that I disliked—an angry, fearful, and confused woman who struggled to place herself and her difficulties into proper perspective, given the specific cultural context in which she was working—and realizing that I lacked appropriate ways to deal with these emotions.
Discussion: Implications of Guilt and Privilege in the Research Process
Through our vignettes, we seek to provide a narrative of our challenges negotiating feelings of privilege and guilt and to draw some conclusions to aid other researchers conducting emotion-filled ethnographies. We believe there are always struggles with guilt and privilege to varying degrees in the research process. While certainly unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and messy (see Pillow 2003), we argue that acknowledging and confronting these emotions is an important step in the production of knowledge and in articulating the methodological challenges researchers navigate in the field. Specifically, we offer two considerations of how reflexivity and the recognition of emotions can contribute to a practice of ethnography that is rigorous, honest, and ethical.
First, driven by Jaime’s experiences in the field is the consideration of researcher ethics in relation to positionality and reflexivity. Equally important to her own recognition of her role in various regimes of privilege in and through her personal and academic lives are serious questions regarding the “practicalities, ethical responsibilities, and epistemological implications” (McCurdy and Uldam 2014:52) of Jaime’s embedded influential identity and positionality within the Valley View community. She detailed how members were flippant and forgetful about her research. So, while she feels she explained her desire to research family life at the pool to many members who inquired about her graduate education (participants and nonparticipants alike), likely her continued observations/participant observations verged on covert as time went on, given there was no overt, perpetual reminder about her agenda. McCurdy and Uldam (2014:47) caution that participant forgetfulness is a danger of close involvement yet, paradoxically, perhaps “the point of participant observation.” Additionally, Lugosi (2006) argued that most ethnographers find that there is a level of covertness associated with fieldwork relationships, and Jaime would contend that any covertness resulting from her presence at Valley View was reasonable, not purposefully undercover nor deceptive.
It is important to acknowledge that there was a substantial portion of Jaime’s research process that was more informal and gleaned through her situated presence at the pool before her formal research began. But often it is not feasible or reasonable to gain consent for observations and information acquired before the research began (Spicker 2011). With respect to Jaime’s work, the acquisition of this important knowledge was crucial to shaping her research project. Further, Spicker (2011:131) argued, “Undeclared, incremental learning and discovery is part of the normal process of academic learning and investigation.… Finding out about things—having conversations, forming networks, learning from people, and piecing information together” is a crucial step in formulating knowledge, and thus we argue, an important part of a researchers due diligence in any ethnographic fieldwork.
While Jaime feels strongly she behaved ethically and truthfully—she omitted information participants discussed off the record, her research was approved by the IRB, she only utilized information from participants once they signed consent forms, and she engaged in a variety of validity tools to ensure proper transmission of information gained through the research—there is no way to discount her insider positionality, situated knowledge of Valley View, and its influence in crafting her work. Yet, as Spicker (2011) contended, the interactions on the pool deck would likely constitute public circumstances, so technically there is nothing wrong with this type of observation and it need not be omitted.
The question remains, If Jaime behaved ethically, why does she feel guilty? The answer is due to her “investments” in the members (Bott 2010:160) and her “identification with the group studied [and] … the corresponding sense of indebtedness or obligation” (Snow 1980:115). Because of her close relationships with the Valley View families, she feels almost as if her critical conclusions were a betrayal of participants’ trust in that she did not ask any questions relating to their experience or identification as privileged, aside from an anonymous demographic survey. Rather, her research involved understanding the importance of the pool within family life, and an analysis of the data yielded a variety of conclusions focusing on lifestyle characteristics clearly associated with social class. Accordingly, through Jaime’s reflexive experience, we conclude that you can still feel guilty regarding your research process/productions even if/when you behave in an ethical manner. Ethical decisions perpetually occur in ethnographic fieldwork and we should consider them to be “contingent, dynamic, temporal, occasioned and situated affairs” (Calvey 2008:912). There is no simple way to rectify these ethical dilemmas; rather we argue that it is important to consider them reflexively and to harness their role in producing new knowledge.
Second, drawn from Callie’s story is the consideration that reflexivity has limits to its usefulness. Callie’s research deliberately focused on the middle-class experience of physical culture in India, but she felt guilty about not interacting with marginalized populations because her mere presence in the field was an embodiment of privilege. Her experiences with gender-based violence caused her to question her own place of Western privilege, feminism, and empowerment, yet her research did little to confront or assuage these conditions. Here she recognizes a gross shortcoming in her research, as she could not access those spaces where social change and intervention were most needed.
In accepting that “reflexivity can make us more aware of asymmetrical or exploitative relationships, but it cannot remove them” (England 1994:86, emphasis in original), Callie came to understand the limitations of her researcher self and her inability to rectify unequal power relations and social inequities. In turn, Callie confronts another aspect of guilt in accepting that her work was limited in its ability to catalyze social change. She feels guilty that the knowledge she produced did not contribute to the alleviation of the injustices and gender discrimination that she witnessed and experienced while in the field.
Callie’s guilt also lingers because she lacked an appropriate support system to help her process emotions and channel them into future work. Her attempts at reflexivity—keeping a journal, identifying her privileged position, admitting to constructing a male Indian Other—were only helpful in rectifying the difficulties she encountered in the field. So, here we suggest that reflexivity might be better used for analytical and personal purposes when explored as part of a larger debriefing process involving other researchers who have faced similar experiences. Debriefing has been recommended for ethnographers working on such sensitive topics as hospice care, abuse, and mental illness (Hubbard et al. 2001; Mitchell and Irvine 2008; Watts 2008), but there is immense value for all researchers to have access to a professional outlet of colleagues and peers. As Mitchell and Irvine (2008:40) argued, the academic community needs to “think more carefully and proactively about researcher well-being and the need to focus on issues of emotional risk” that ethnographers face in the field.
Establishing self-care strategies is an important task for researchers who are confronting emotional turmoil and fatigue (Watts 2008); ignoring this need creates dishonesty in our work as it is crucial that we acknowledge the unsettling and troublesome aspects of fieldwork. If we are serious about accepting emotions as an integral part of social research and an important area of concern in ethnographic methodology (Bott 2010; Dickinson-Swift et al. 2009), then we need to be equally serious about creating effective spaces for the collective sharing of these emotions and other personal reflections that affect our work.
Conclusion
We feel strongly that the types of relationships, interactions, and communications we engaged in during our fieldwork impacted the conclusions we have drawn in various research productions that have followed. In our methods training, we are often taught that personal bias and biography can threaten the validity of the research. Yet, as we have demonstrated here, our embodied selves and the corresponding feelings of guilt and privilege we experienced were crucially important to our ethnographic work; therefore, we argue that “researchers are very much part of the discourse they create” (Joseph 2009:21). We believe that the emotional aspects of our fieldwork strengthen our conclusions. By accepting our discomfort, acknowledging it publicly, and writing through it, we integrate it into our processes of knowledge production and use it to explore ways of seeing and knowing the world. We agree that “meaningful learning can be discomforting” (Langhout 2006:272), and it is through “our anxiety, dread, guilt, and shame that we honor our participants” (Josselson 1996:70). Ultimately, we believe our encounters with guilt and privilege retain the capacity to be meaningful and instructive beyond our own experiences. We encourage ethnographers to continue to explore the various ways in which one’s self is a constitutive element of the research process and the production of knowledge.
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.