“Navigating the In-Between: A Cross-Cultural Researcher’s Fluid Positionality in West Africa”

Abstract

This article explores the challenges and complexities of a cross cultural PhD student conducting research in West Africa. I discuss how I navigated, negotiated and blurred my insider/outsider experiences as a Congolese-American woman as I engaged with themes oscillating between power, legitimacy, language, gender, and my decolonial and social justice commitments. Reflexive research on Africans studying a secondary non-native African country is seldom discussed or researched. As such, I utilised an intersectional transnegritude theoretical framework to centre and complicate the shared transcolonial struggles and neocolonial realities of myself and my participants. I conclude by positing that, despite the challenges of doing transnational work, reflexively recognising our positionality lends to a liberatory and critical transnational exchange that encourages new approaches to knowledge production for social justice. This article contributes to ongoing discussions of insider/outsider research, positionality, decolonising research, and comparative case study to articulate and dearticulate power dynamics in neocolonial contexts.

Keywords

insider/outsider field research positionality social justice intersectional transnegritude

Introduction

Research is far from an apolitical and ahistorical activity; it occurs within a set of historical, political, and social relations of power. However, these power relations are encountered differently by those of us who are historically and politically positioned, and crucially, resist our construction as well as the construction of the subjects (rather than objects) of our research as the “other” of these epistemologies. (Al-Hardan, 2014, p. 63, p. 63)

Reflexive research on Africans studying a secondary non-native African country, or cross cultural researchers, is seldom discussed or researched. Often, research discussing insider/outsider dichotomies focuses on those researchers who are navigating the duality when conducting research in their countries of origin. In her study interviewing managers and workers in information processing companies in Mullings (1999), negotiates “positional spaces” (Mullings, 1999) to transparently reflect on her position as a Jamaican/British female researcher. In her research on the sexual behaviours of black men (specifically sexual health and HIV), Serrant-Green (2002), considers the implications and challenges of conducting research when sharing the same ethnicity as participants and the “screaming silences,” that is the dichotomies that are seldom discussed but are evident among marginalised voices. Ntanyoma (2021), challenges the notion of a native/insider when she discusses her position as a “contested native-researcher” in Eastern DRC, while studying the motivations of young people joining armed groups. Ntanyoma’s (2021) discussion considers the role of an insider when conducting fieldwork in ethnically polarised contexts and volatile settings. And though she confronts the oversimplification of the insider/outsider dichotomy, it is necessary to note that literature on reflexivity-positionality does not fully discuss the fluidity of positions within a cross-cultural setting.

When cross-cultural research is effected, discussions centre those returning to their countries of origin to study, for example, gender dynamics in rural spaces outside of Hong Kong (Ng, 2011) or in the case of Ryan (2015), the concept of positional fixity is contested when researching Irish and Polish migration to Britain as an Irish academic. Moreover, when cross-cultural researchers are positioned, some utilise the support of a research broker to navigate fieldwork for access and “contextual grounding” (Siddiqui, 2023). But, how does a cross-cultural researcher, like myself, navigate her fluid positionality to conduct research in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire without a cultural broker? I found myself questioning my legitimacy and the potential problematic lens of doing fieldwork in Dakar and Abidjan. Additionally, I worried that my decolonial commitments potentially contradicted the position I was in. Could I effectively do my research while using the master’s tools (Lorde, 1984)? As a naive researcher, would I be doing more harm than good in my attempt to articulate young people’s civic engagement (Vanner, 2015)?

Studying the forms of engagement and informal educative practices of young West Africans as a Congolese-American woman, I was confronted with and had to navigate the complex relationship between power, positionality and the intersectional transnegritude reflexive response that emerged out of my epistemic disobedient framework.

Reflecting on the position of the researcher and how the researcher’s position–that is their social background and biases, can impact the research outcome is known as reflexivity (Hamilton, 2020; Ntanyoma, 2021). Reflexivity is a continuous internal process that, when gleaned from an intersectional transnegritude lens, must also consider power, privilege, gender, class, beliefs, transcolonial realities, and other axes of difference and their potential impact on the research process (Berger, 2015; Hamilton, 2020; Ntanyoma, 2021). Prevailing critical and poststructural research encourages self-reflection as a way to “alleviate some of these moral dilemmas” (Beoku-Betts, 1994) forcing us to challenge issues of power, privilege, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. The ensuing article is organised as follows: first, I will provide a brief overview of the research study. Secondly, I will provide a theoretical framework, literature, and methodology that informs this article. Next, I reflect on my positionality vis-a-vis my fieldwork to examine issues of power between the researcher and participants, navigating my insider/outsider status and the internal challenges and power dynamics of being a woman, Western educated Central African refugee conducting research in West Africa. The article concludes with reflections on the blurred, isolating, liberatory and critical facets of a reflective positionality and how it can be navigated to centre and advocate for a transnegritude intersectional practice towards social justice.

Hip-Hop Pedagogy, Youth Engagement and Critical Consciousness in West Africa

My doctoral study investigated the ways in which Y’en a Marre, a civic movement in Senegal and FESCI, a student organisation in Côte d’Ivoire, viewed Hip-Hop and its pedagogical utility as a means to promote engagement, authenticity, and foster leadership (Niati, 2020). Through Hip-Hop, young people are drawn to a cultural expression that reflects the social, economic, and political realities of their lives speaking to them in a language and manner they understand. Hip-Hop is adopted and remixed to suit cultural contexts and becomes a tool of expression and mobilisation through Wolof in Dakar and Nouchi in Abidjan. Through pedagogic concerts, cyphers, break dance competitions,workshops, and social media YEM and FESCI challenge the concepts of schooling and its purposes (Jenkins, 2013; Seidel, 2011; Goodlad & McMannon, 1997). Given their global reach, these two organisations provide a pan-African outlook albeit diverging approaches to the conditions of young people throughout the continent.

By focusing on young people as an asset, my research argued that young people are at the helm of social change, utilising culturally relevant pedagogies as a means to counter and confront corruption, migration, and political instability. The influence and notoriety of organisations such as Y’en a Marre and FESCI, illustrate the impact of a Hip-Hop pedagogy that not only heals but promotes leadership, ownership, and autonomy. Clark (2018), Pennycook (2007), and Chang (2006) speak of the transversal relationship of Hip-Hop in Africa and in the U.S., a connection that has crossed oceans and influenced a “global African population” (Clark, 2018, p. 9). This is critical given sub-Saharan Africa’s tremendous youth population and their potential impact on the continent and the world.

Though similar in their experiences, I also noted how the two organisations, FESCI and Y’en Marre, deviate in their methods of engagement. One, YEM, espouses non-violence, transparency, transformation, and citizenship, the other, FESCI, attempts to meet these ideals but as described to me, seems stuck in the “ old ways of doing things,” promoting student rights through bribery and political influence. Sitting on the intersections of resourcefulness and violence, Fescists and young people in Cote d’Ivoire, have found inventive ways to “break the rules” inorder to engage and express themselves (Oumar, 2015, p. 203). I started my research emboldened by my socio-political commitments to young people in Africa, interest in Hip-Hop culture and my cross-cultural upbringing. As I navigated fieldwork, I found myself continuously negotiating and navigating my gender, legitimacy, language, and insider/outsider status. I continuously fretted that I may have bitten off more than I could chew. Here I was, an idealistic young woman working with predominantly male run organisations, with a notorious reputation. I found myself asking: what was I thinking? Could I handle it? Would this be worth it and for whom?

Theoretical Reflexivity: An Intersectional Transnegritude Approach

Though I used transnegritude as a theoretical framework to contextualise my dissertation research, I recognized however that in my research journals and self-reflections, I incorporated an intersectional lens for a reflexive positionality that considered not just my transcolonial and transnational subjectivity but also my many axes of difference that structure, inform and influence my position (Collins, 1991). For those who recognize inherent power dynamic in our everyday lives and are committed to social justice, intersectionality provides an interdisciplinary approach in the study of power dynamics within our social structure that hopes to “improve our understanding of workings of these systems and further the cause of social and economic justice (Weber, 2010, p. 10).

As a theoretical framework, transnégritude is my epistemic call to arms. Transnegritude is informed by negritude, an artistic, political, and cultural movement originating in Paris in the late 1930s amongst the West-African and Caribbean elite (Akingbe, 2015; Bird, 2019; Jones, 2015). As a theoretical framework, transnegritude, is informed by aspects of deconstructionism and decolonisation, as it seeks to not only question and deconstruct meaning, ie. words and texts (Derrida, 1997) but is also critical of Eurocentric and “Third World Fundamentalisms,'' which are based on the premise that “there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 4). Transnegritude builds from these disciplines but goes beyond Derrida’s Eurocentric epistemic hegemony, which offers no space for the subaltern (Bernasconi, 1997; Mignolo, 2003) and sees decolonization not as a metaphor, but as a historical process that leads to a relinquishing, a repatriation of political, economic, and psychological sovereignty (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Building from this, I also invoke Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic as a means to contextualise my reflexive positionality in trying to “face two ways at once” (Gilroy, 1993, p. 3). That is, as he notes, contending with the “stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms…within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating and remembering…” (p. 3). Gilroy’s conception of hybridity and intermixture marries well with Niati (2020), Niati and Shah (2022) and Toure’s (forthcoming) geocultural flexibility, that is an imagined transcolonial community (Anderson, 1983; Clark, 2013), that allows for a recalibration of “linkages and bonds” among those with shared roots navigating the “psychic disorientation” of neocolonialism (Toure, 2020 fc).

Intersectional research “attends to the different and sometimes contradictory or unexpected ways in which…[multiple targeted identities] manifest themselves in narratives of lived experience” (Hamilton, 2020, p. 521). Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality was first used to “conceptualise the intersection of race and gender” in her analyses of antidiscrimination legal cases of women of colour. Crenshaw criticised the courts for forcing women of colour to articulate discrimination along one identifier; either gender or race, not both. Crenshaw argued that “dominant social patterns and systemic inequities affect the lived experiences of groups and individuals who embody multiple targeted identities and that such patterns and inequities often produce “intersectional disempowerment” (Anders & Devita, 2014, p. 32). Thus, an intersectional intervention in the conceptualisation of reflexivity begins by “treating neither the researcher’s positionality nor that of the participants as entirely static or fixed” (Hamilton, 2020, p. 522). Rather, the assumptions that can impact the research process are “contextual and require careful deconstruction.” (p. 522).

Through an intersectional transnegritude lens, I am able to articulate my multi-hyphenated identities, or multiple axes (Mullings, 1999; Ng, 2011; Ntanyoma, 2021), epistemic and social justice commitments through the shared experience of colonial and neocolonial oppression in Africa and within its diaspora. I also examine my privilege and agency in relation to the epistemologies of young people as knowledge-makers to analyse how my positionality was challenged and reformed through my fieldwork in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.

Researcher Reflexivity and Methodology

“…for all research necessarily starts from a person’s view of the world, which itself is shaped by the experience one brings to the research process” (Grix, 2002, p. 179).

This section provides the motivation behind my epistemological pursuit; a reflective analysis through my research journal of the challenges of my positional fluidity while blurring and challenging the insider/outsider dichotomy. Reflexivity in qualitative research is a crucial and necessary step to gain new knowledge and/or a deeper understanding of the subject at hand. Reflexivity, is defined as “self-critical sympathetic introspection and the self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self as researcher” (England, 1994, p. 244). Incorporating a reflective gaze to study allows for the researcher to acknowledge their positionalities and how it affects “both substantive and practical aspects of the research process – from the nature of questions that are asked, through data collection, analysis and writing, to how findings are received” (Carling et al., 2014, p. 37).

It was necessary for me to consider my positional fluidity to better assess the dynamics and relationships with myself and my research participants to not only reflect inwards towards myself but also outwardly to the social, political, linguistic and other structural factors influencing both researcher and participant that shape and forms their social interactions. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that my nationality, my refugee background, immigration to the U.S., and the influence of Hip-Hop, significantly informed my comprehension of the larger social dynamics impacting myself and my research participants.

I have traversed the many iterations and hierarchies of “immigrant status” –from a central African refugee to an expat working in a European university with an American passport. My status as an immigrant is differently perceived depending on my social circles–my refugee background evoking the image of a helpless, troubled narrative and my expat status appealing to images of a privileged international scholar. Growing up in the Midwest of the United States as a Congolese refugee, my ontology was in effect placed within sociopolitical structures that encapsulated my post/neocolonial, gendered, politicised and racialized social realities. But as life experiences have continuously shaped my identities, I have also come to accept how and why I am critical and work to deconstruct the social, cultural, and political dynamics that influence our everyday lives.

My experience as a “cross cultural kid” (Pollock & Van Reken, 2009) comes from a refugee lens that is troubled and multilayered. There is an image of the “refugee” that connotes the sense of powerlessness, vulnerability, destitution and/or danger, experienced more commonly through Black and Brown bodies. These helpless, unnamed beings colour our perceptions of refugees who are seen and seldom heard. Images of refugees fleeing their countries are simply enough to provide a concise narrative of their experiences–mostly negative. What’s more, refugees have always been a “particularly troublesome” (Mavroudi & Nagel, 2016) population as their status is ill-defined and their experiences overshadowed and undermined by international humanitarianism and development.

Mavroudi and Nagel (2016) suggests that our cultural understanding of the refugee is misleading because historically the forced migration of people across borders was a more common feature in the Global North than in the Global South (p. 3). Mavroudi & Nagel’s historicity of refugee migration from the 16th century to the present state, illustrates a refugee flow that mostly permeated the Global North until the end of the Cold War resulted in a mass migration of refugees from the “Global South” or Low/Middle Income countries (LMIC). Up until the end of the Cold War, Chimni (1998) equally affirms that the “image of a 'normal' refugee was constructed white, male and anti-communist-which clashed sharply with individuals fleeing the Third World” (p. 352). It is this “myth of difference” that has shaped and coloured refugees and refugee studies since the 1980s. Unbeknownst to my young self, upon first fleeing to Kenya and then the United States, I was thrust into a geopolitical narrative whereby my identity was coloured by my status: refugee; my race: Black; and my gender expression: woman. Through these migratory and sociopolitical experiences, I was also becoming, unbeknownst to me, a cultural broker; a “cross-cultural kid” (Pollock & Van Reken, 2009), oscillating between worlds, while “not having full ownership in any” (p. 13). It seemed that my new identity was really the ability to navigate through and between multiple cultural expressions while simultaneously struggling to affirm my own.

Paul Gilroy’s (1993) “Black Atlantic” encapsulates my narrative within a shared transcolonial and transnational narrative that has “come to constitute…Black cultures’ special conditions of existence” (p. 111). One of the expressive cultures of the Black Atlantic, he writes, is the special mood of “restlessness.” Once used to “evoke and affirm a condition in which the negative meanings given to the enforced movement of blacks,” it is transposed and “becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical perceptions about the modern world become more likely” (Gilroy, 1993, p. 111). Being a racialized, “restless” minority means that issues of identity become acutely visible in perceptions of self and the “other.” It is from this vantage point whereby I unknowingly began to understand and look at my social reality. My cross cultural, geobody politics, it seemed, was rooted in a shared transcolonial narrative of resistance, transparent reflexivity and ownership. Cue: Hip-Hop.

Young people of the Hip-Hop generation, represent a duality and contradiction that is unique and that which transcends geography. Hip-Hop’s origins were highly influenced by interactions between Black American residents, Puerto Ricans and West Indians in the Bronx (Clark, 2018). Some of the early pioneers of Hip-Hop were Caribbean born immigrants who helped shape the sound and style of Hip-Hop (Clark, 2018, Chang, 2006). Yet, the Hip-Hop generation is also one of contradictions, one which sees a population born after the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements in the U.S. and the end of the colonial era in Africa (Bridges, 2011; Collins, 2006; KRS-One, 2005). Hip-Hop like Transnégritude speaks to the delinking and expressive actions of those othered; it is the restlessness of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993), connected to the “notion of a global black experience of oppression and resistance” (Haupt, 2008, p. 145), in the construction of a black nationalist identity. From this then stems my own reflexive positionality to go beyond the insider/outsider dichotomy and instead, not only question my position as a researcher and the why-ness of belonging as Serrant-Green (2002) offers, but also by asking in part, who am I as a researcher and how do I make sense of my (un)belonging?

Researcher Subjectivity/Positionality and Language

“During fieldwork the researcher’s power is negotiated, not given.” (Merriam et al., 2001, p. 409).

It has commonly been assumed that being an insider means easy access into a community (Merriam et al., 2001), or can be contested (Ntanyoma, 2021) or is seen as a paradox (Serrant-Greene, 2002; Ng, 2011). Some might contend that the ‘insider’ has the ability to not only ask more meaningful questions, have a better cultural understanding or recognize non-verbal cues but that they may be biassed or too close to the culture to raise provocative questions (Hellawell, 2006; Merriam et al., 2001; Savvides et al., 2014). The outsider, on the other hand, is stated to have a decided advantage in their unfamiliarity and their ability to ask taboo questions and therefore gaining more information (Merriam et al., 2001), may have an apparent objectivity from being detached but also may be accused of lacking understanding and of detachment (Savvides et al., 2014), lastly, there is the question whether an outsider can remain a true outsider over time (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009; Milligan, 2016). It is thus assumed that the “insider’s strengths become the outsider’s weaknesses and vice-versa.” (Merriam et al., 2001, p. 411).

I often found myself grappling with the insider/outsider dichotomy to much dissatisfaction. Why did I have to choose? Did I have to align myself with Banks (1998) typology of positionality as I did in the first draft of this article, when my personal and professional life have been mostly blurred and intersectional? Going beyond Banks (1998) and Merriam et al. (2001), I chose to navigate what Dwyer & Buckle call “the space between,” looking beyond the binary scope of insider/outsider and instead situating the multiple positionalities and axes of difference of myself and participants (Milligan, 2016; Mullings, 1999; Ryan, 2015). Much like Sultana (2007) expressed while conducting research on the gendered/classed implications of access to water in Bangladesh, navigating and negotiating my positionality saw me going between insider or outsider, both and neither (Mullings, 1999).

The positionality of a researcher is a political one (Bilgen et al., 2021). If we are to go beyond the insider and outsider binary, we can look at it as a space between, and the hyphen of insider-outsider as the dwelling place (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009, p. 60). As researchers, there is no “enunciation without positionality,” because we must first position ourselves “somewhere in order to say anything at all” (Hall, 1990, as quoted in Bilgen et al., 2021, p. 523). There are “no clear cut distinctions” between insider/outsider perspectives. Some see it as a continuum on where one’s positionality lies (Fenge et al., 2019), while others see it as a dwelling place (Aoki, 1996; Dwyer & Buckle, 2009). Dwyer and Buckle (2009) draw from Aoki’s (1996) work, when establishing their concept of the space between by using the “hyphen…not as a path but as a dwelling place for people. This hyphen acts as a third space, a space between, a space of paradox, ambiguity, and ambivalence, as well as conjunction and disjunction” (60). As an intersectional transnegritude researcher, I occupy and work from the space between. Working with my participants, I came to realise that like Sultana (2007), while I may not always have shared the same identity as my participants, “we were able to share affinities that helped us have some common ground from which to speak (p. 378).

Going beyond the insider/outsider binary means acknowledging that we need to “keep it bubbling away, like other troubling research issues, as part of our overall reflexivity about our work” (Acker, 2001, p. 14). Within intersectional frames, we must also consider the “privileged status of either/or” binaries where “categories are given meaning only in terms of their difference,” (Acker, 2001, p. 14) this dualistic thinking disempowers Black women who are constantly forced to choose between their multiple targeted identities.

Why Not the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Being Congolese-American, the general assumption is that I would conduct my research in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I have family and friends there and know Kinshasa well enough to forge professional and social connections. Much as I wanted to conduct my research in the DRC, I realised that I had not built strong enough connections at the university or within the civil service in Kinshasa. Additionally, it was no guarantee that my home country would be amenable for research. In writing about the challenges of doing research at “home” Sultana (2007) contends that it “brings in different dynamics, in terms of concerns of insider-outsider and politics of representation, across other axes of social differentiation beyond commonality in nationality or ethnicity” (p. 378). Would it matter if I were Congolese if people would place me in certain categories of either authority or subservience?

Moreover, Kinshasa and DRC in general, was tense during the years I was conducting my research (2016–2018). Former president Joseph Kabila, had been in power since 2001 and had promised to hold elections and step down by 2016 (Mbaku, 2016). Instead, he essentially held the office hostage by postponing elections first to 2017 and then to December 2018 (Klobucista, 2018; Mbaku, 2016). The country was tense and experienced countless protests that resulted in injury and death; the school year at the University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN) was in shambles and members of the youth movement, Filimbi, were arrested or fled the country (HRW, 2015). The challenges seemed insurmountable for a young, female scholar like myself.

Interestingly, the nascent “African Spring,” that is, the rise of youth movements in West Africa had seeped to Central Africa with mixed results. Many of these organisations worked together and supported each other via social media and other alternative modes of communication. Through their network and popularity, Y’en a marre of Senegal had become the global ambassadors of youth resistance and civic engagement throughout West and Central Africa, namely in Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya and DRC. It seemed fortuitous that I could work with a pan-African youth organisation such as Y’en a Marre that shared the same goals as Filimbi; it was an obvious connection to my research. Dakar and later Abidjan, seemed to quell my research needs and added an interesting layer to the challenges young people face in Francophone sociopolitical contexts. Lastly, I was awarded the NSEP Boren Fellowship to Senegal, which further cemented my research goals to begin preliminary field research.

Role of Researcher

Being a Congolese-American woman, conducting PhD research in West Africa, even with allies, still proved to be incredibly mercurial. It seemed that I always functioned with my guard up, wary of sexual politics, navigating my in-between status, and eager to engage in activism work by proxy. Navigating my insider/outsider status afforded me with certain opportunities but several obstacles. I was privileged to have post-baccalaureate degrees from U.S. institutions, lucky to have been funded to conduct research, and fortunate to have an American passport that afforded ease of travel. My assistants were always irritated when I stated I was Congolese first; having an American passport, seeming to supersede all other nationalities. I worried that my French was not up to par, or too accented to be fully understood, but even with my grammatical errors, we seemed to get along fine. But mostly, I was worried about the position I was in and conducting research on behalf of a colonising entity, using what were once colonial methods of knowledge seeking. Would my being an American scholar imbibe me with an inherent sense of superiority–whether conscious or not? Could I accurately and objectively present my work knowing my biases? In conversation with another Black woman also conducting PhD research in southern Africa, we lamented to one another:

Niati: You know sometimes I think about my [data collection in Dakar], and I'm overwhelmed. I [feel like] I just went into these communities and knocked on doors and just interjected myself... to study them! What the fuck is that about! I feel this weird sense of pride, and shame, and disbelief, and surprise that I pulled it off, but it feels so strangely inappropriate and... well... I feel like the descendant of some coloniser. Honestly...that's been my whole preoccupation this last week. How I'm I not continuing some colonial "let's study the natives" BS by doing what I do and how I do it? I'm not at peace with it at all. Even if I feel like I’ve been fair and transparent… It's making me wary of continuing in academia cause I [don’t know how to justify] this to myself. It's not sitting well with me...and I feel like I'm doing the masters work too at that….

Friend: I get that too...But some of the responses I got... the material... When I read it…

I’m so happy I have it saved forever... because some of it is so heartfelt, so passionate, some of it is real misery that folks are suffering, yet they do it with such dignity and perseverance...Omg do I sound like an Uncle Tom??

Niati: But no! These people have real stories

Friend: I KNOW some of these people wanted to share their stories and it was cathartic, I know that. But the desperation they are in.... I guess the wildly asymmetric power difference will always make us feel uncomfortable, which it should... but how else will people on the outside know what's going on? (Research Journal; March 5, 2018).

I continuously grappled with my layered identities as both an African and an American researcher. I wondered if I was doing more harm than good? As an African and American researcher, I sit in a unique and vexing position wherein I am both a “native informant” (Ogunyankin, 2019, p. 1392) but I am also to “keep the… ‘other’, which is also my ‘othered’ self, in the shadow of my Western self via my knowledge and usage of a Western analysis” (Ogunyankin, 2019, p. 1392). But being in West Africa…my otherness had layers. I was no longer othered in an oppressive, stifled way (Al-Hardan, 2014), but rather I sat in a privileged position wherein my assumed Westernised “otherness” afforded me some credibility and legitimacy. I hoped that given my background and epistemic commitments, I would present my research in such a way to objectively and positively highlight the voices of young people in West Africa. That is I hoped that my research would be“externally oriented” and meet the theoretical and practical needs of Western epistemologies, first and foremost (Hountondji, 2009, para. 18 as cited in Ogunyankin, 2019, p. 1392). In talking to my friend, I was realising that as a cross-cultural researcher when I was presenting the ‘other,’ “I was also presenting myself” (Ogunyankin, 2019, p. 1392) and so I needed to be mindful of how my words, my motivations, and my background could be received.

Sultana (2007) argues that similarities and differences that emerge through relationships forged during the research process mean that research ethics have to be negotiated “in practice on a continual basis” (p. 380). The researcher/participant binary should be critically addressed to “renegotiate power relations, responsibilities and hierarchy within the constraints and contexts of any given research endeavour” (p. 381). Moreover, as researchers we should be cognizant that our participants also have “contested identities that emerge through the research process, and experience of the research project can alter and challenge the identities and power relations that research participants have” (p. 381).

To reflexively situate my positionality within an intersectional transnegritude lens encourages me to centre lived experiences and consider the “multiple and intersecting axes of difference that shape these experiences without requiring that there can only be a single explanation for a particular interaction” (Hamilton, 2020, p. 530).

Dakar Reflections

My research focused on two male-dominated organisations Y’en a Marre in Senegal and FESCI in Côte d’Ivoire. Of course gender played a major role in how my project was perceived and received. I often wondered whether my gender and non-marital status precluded me from fully integrating into the two case study groups. I was living alone in Abidjan and Dakar, with no family and few friends. Moreover, these two organisations were heavily involved –either directly or indirectly–in politics, and so tensions were always high and miscommunication was inevitable. As one of the few women in these settings, the gender politics and continuous navigation of my insider/outsider status, led to mental exhaustion and an ambivalence to working every day and interacting with participants. This was evident when I would go in to the YEM headquarters:

Reflection - Marry and Become an Insider

It has become increasingly obvious that the [Senegalese] government and YEM have a very on-off relationship. At once a huge supporter of the current president (Macky Sall), during the anti-Wade protests [former president of Senegal before Sal], they are now one of his [Sall’s] biggest critics and for good measure. A casual conversation I had with my host father revealed what many Africans know to be true, votes are bought not sought. As such, a young movement such as YEM trying to hold voter drives and providing identification is an affront and a threat to the government. They had a quick meeting with the two main members, many were not there today and decided on a plan to make sure that their goals were respected.

Right after the meeting, one of the leaders comes back to the common area, turns to me, and after our usual greeting in Wolof, says [to me in French], “Binda, you must find a Senegalese husband so you can stay.” I laugh and say nothing. This is the constant refrain when I’m in the office. It is both a sign of affection; they must like me and wish for me to stay in my newly adopted country. Could it also be though that my getting married will make me [more] Senegalese and maybe give me status as a married woman? (12 Nov. 2018).

When I would spend time at the YEM headquarters, it was not uncommon to experience both heightened tension, due to some political bullying from the current administration or inquiries on my marital status, and when I would find a Senegalese husband or even a joking proposal. My emotional/mental state continuously oscillated from anxious, eager to annoyed at each interaction. YEM is a young organisation. They are at once attempting to fight for people’s rights, standing up to the government, and trying to pay rent. The organisation is composed of young men; some married with children, some single. As polygamy is legal in Senegal, it wasn’t unheard of that one of them would jokingly ask me to be their second wife or find me someone who was looking for a wife.

I have never felt so vulnerable in my life. Even though I am a “unique ensemble of contradictory and shifting subjectivities,” (Ng, 2011, p. 445), I was constantly negotiating and mediating my identities as an activist scholar, Congolese-American and single woman as I interacted with YEM members. Given their pan-African agenda, they were open to my Congolese roots but were also equally impressed that I was not only schooled in the US but carried the nationality. Did this earn me enough status–insider, outsider, both or neither– to warrant openness and transparency?

Upon further reflection, I realised that much like in the West, I had to make “patriarchal bargains” (Sultana, 2007, p. 380) in negotiating what was in the interest of getting my research done and not offending respondents. Was a joking proposal so different from the university professor in the US asking me why I was pursuing a PhD when I was pretty enough to marry well? Did I not, much like in Senegal, demurely smile and somewhat agree as I pursued my main objective? When dealing with gendered power relations where a particular understanding of womanhood is the norm, I recognised that these were the same diatribes and remarks that I have encountered from colleagues to family members and I had learned to respond diplomatically or with humour. Sultana (2007) writes that power relations in this regard can go both ways, especially as a young female researcher. Field research is intense and brings questions to the forefront that challenge one’s identity, ethics, politics and role within the research process (Serrant-Green, 2002; Sultana, 2007).

It is at this point, I found myself navigating my positional fluidity in how I approached my research; I could continue as a participant-observer and dwell on the “feelings of placelessness” when embodying a restless, cross-cultural identity or I could as Ogunyankin (2019) concedes, “embrace the liberatory potential in being dislocated.” (p. 1388). And so, I relied on my cross-cultural background as my “in.” Even though I carry an American passport, I proudly emphasised my Congolese background, my childhood in Kenya and my travels throughout the African continent. Congolese music is very popular in Senegal and so I carried a minor cultural caché for sharing the same language with Koffi Olomide and Fally Ipupa. I would teach them simple phrases in Lingala and Kiswahili and they would teach me Wolof phrases. Y’en a Marre works with various youth organisations in West and Central Africa; from Balai Citoyen in Burkina Faso to Filimibi in DRC. And, because half of their founding members are Hip-Hop artists, they met with other rapper/activists in East and Southern Africa, priding themselves in their PanAfrican unity and reaching young people in all African languages (Niati, 2020).

Language became our unifying force. We often switched between various languages given our various abilities in French, Wolof, and English. Even though I was born in Kinshasa, I truly began my scholastic endeavours in Nairobi. And so my educational trajectory (apart from preschool and Kindergarten in DRC) was in English. We were a French speaking household in Kenya and so I was able to be fully bilingual by the time we arrived in the U.S. However, by the time I was 14 years old, my father demanded we switch to an English speaking household to ensure our academic and professional success in the U.S. This meant that overtime my French atrophied and I needed to study to become proficient but I have yet to be fluent. As a hierarchical language, French and knowledge of French is very class-based. I worried how my command of the language would be perceived but I quickly realised that the organisation aimed to demystify French and promote local languages such as Wolof, Pular, Serer, Diola, etc. Fadel Barro, co-founding member of YEM explained it to me as such: “le français n’est pas notre langue, c’est devenu notre langue ! parce que j’ai payé une lourde tribu pour l’avoir. j’ai payé très chère au prix de la colonisation, de l’esclavage…” (Research participant interview, 2017). Neither French nor English are our languages! They would exclaim. They/we paid that price through colonisation. They recognised and shared my zeal for a better Africa: free of corruption, overreliance on Western influence, and economic prosperity. This allowed for us to engage and fraternise in ways that went beyond my marital status, my adopted nationalities, and my role as a researcher. Inadvertently and over time, I realised that I was indeed embracing the “liberatory potential in [my] being dislocated” (Ogunyankin, 2019, p. 1388).

Abidjan Reflections

I have learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I think it is because I have spent most of my life being a physical outsider rather than an insider. Since the age of six, I have not known my home country. But nothing prepared me for the emotional labour that would involve fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire. Working with the Ministry of Higher Education and at the university with FESCI, placed me in the front rows of West African academic and political challenges. Because FESCI is a student organisation, I was either on campus at the Université Felix Houphouet Boigny (UFHB) or in the offices of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MESRS), who work closely with FESCI. While I was there, the staff at the MESRS, and the university faculty went on strike. In addition, FESCI led a student strike advocating for scholarships and other student benefits that were promised but not delivered. Once again, I was in predominantly male-dominated spaces, in an organisation, in this case, that was militaristic in its order. I was incredibly anxious and I was unsure how I would proceed with my research. Through these challenges, I recognised the importance of allies and pivoting.

Reflection - The Strike

The strike has been ongoing for about 8 weeks (at the Ministry of Higher Education (MESRS)) and about three weeks at the university [Université Felix Houphouet Boigny]. They shut the gates to the university on Monday and I saw students and some faculty standing outside unsure of what to do.

The uneven school year and limited contact with participants (and friends) has got me in a state of depression and lack of motivation that is unprecedented even for me. I have no idea what to do with myself and how to make contact with people who seem to be unwilling or ill-prepared to help me. During my meeting with the Deans last week, everyone told me that they were more than happy to help me after the strike. The issue is–I’m not sure when the strike will end, and neither were they. (June 7, 2018)

It is usually at this juncture where “naive” researchers find themselves with limited guidelines and literature on what to do under these circumstances (Beoku-Betts, 1994; Gokah, 2006). I was in a constant state of uncertainty. I didn’t know what to do. Moreover, taking into consideration that I was not Ivorian and fully familiar with their academic processes, I was learning and doing at once. Prevailing critical and poststructural research encourages self-reflection as a way to “alleviate some of these moral dilemmas” forcing us to challenge issues of power, privilege, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. And so, I spent a lot of time journaling and coming to terms with my fears and my concerns. I wanted to make sure that I was working towards producing “nonhierarchical, nonmanipulative, and interactive research relationships that [did] not objectify research participants but [allowed] them to voice their own accounts of their own lives” (Beoku-Betts, 1994, p. 427). But it was difficult given the social makeup of FESCI, their notoriety, their mission and the challenges in working with a “militaristic” (HRW, 2008) organisation.

FESCI was created to fight for students’ rights--access, resources, and representation-- but as the organisation grew, it became an opposing force and a training school for future leaders as told to me by FESCI members Hie and Zatto in 2018. Today, FESCI continues to struggle with its past as it navigates a conflicting present (HRW, 2008). Hie and Zatto stated matter of factly that FESCI is here because “the educational system is not up to par” and they are there to help the government improve the educational system. For some coming from the “sacrificed generation” (Schumann, 2012), FESCI could be everything. They could be the “elite” and the “leaders of tomorrow.” But more so than that, as Hie would describe to me, they were training the future leaders of tomorrow to combat the “injustices directed towards students.” But the Human Rights Watch report was not wrong. What I saw on campus often contradicted FESCI’s mission. Faculty, students and civil servants alike all told me that FESCI was both admired and feared. Were they a civic movement fighting for students rights or a subversive group out for their own cut? This “mafia” type behaviour as discussed in the Human Rights Watch (2008) report and rumoured around campus, was not the reputation FESCI members wanted me to focus on. However, it was difficult for me not to question some of their methods of engagement and more importantly, how could I continue my research when I was so conflicted with their methods of operation?

My engagement with FESCI was lukewarm at best and oscillated between access and barricade. When convenient, I was presented as the American scholar who came to write about FESCI and their work; on the other hand, when I probed for more answers, I was diverted to other members or meetings were suddenly postponed indefinitely. Because I spent so much time on campus, I became close with a TA who worked with undergraduates. I realised instead of solely focusing on FESCI, I could also focus on student perceptions of FESCI. This allowed me greater access to the university, to students, and incredibly to some FESCI members. I found myself forging relationships with students and faculty alike and gaining insight on their perspectives on the university, the political influence of the ministry of higher education, and the ways in which FESCI had impacted (or not) their schooling. What was evident was clear, FESCI was a mixed bag. Yes, they did fight for students’ rights, but their methods were corrupt and self-serving. Yet still, they commanded a sense of fear and respect on campus and in the ministry (Niati, 2020). I continuously struggled with FESCI’s methods and my idealistic dreams of a new Africa.

FESCI seemed in contradiction: seemingly protesting for their rights while “succumbing to political temptation” (Oumar, 2015, p. 197). Oumar (2015), writing of youth and the reshaping of the political process in Cote d’Ivoire, argues that organisations like FESCI, who have “long [been] disappointed by the failed promises made by their leaders…have invented ways of externalising their feelings and frustrations somewhere in between the boundaries of legality and illegality, of what is allowed and forbidden” (p. 194). As a researcher, I had to contextualise my role, my commitments, and the research in front of me: as a woman I was extremely anxious, as an African, I was saddened and as a social justice advocate, I was mad as hell. And yet, are these not the same conflicting paradoxes I navigate/d on a daily basis living in the US or while visiting family in DRC or working in Germany?

Through presenting my fieldwork experiences, it was evident that making sense of the effects of my positionality would not be easy (Adeagbo, 2021). My participants were young, idealistic, engaged and struggling with a myriad of sociopolitical and economic woes. I saw myself in them. Here I was, an idealistic young African woman struggling with my own sociopolitical adversity. Consciously sustaining my reflexivity was necessary and critical to process my positionality as a researcher and “how my identities, feelings and thoughts play important roles during the entire research process” (Adeagbo, 2021, p. 191). Working with FESCI allowed me to appreciate the “messiness” that is qualitative field research, respect the at times unsatisfactory nature of the scientific process, and illustrate the dichotomies that all organisations face.

Conclusion

I used to think that because of my cross-cultural, transnational identity, I was “destined to constantly negotiate feeling in/out of place” (Ogunyankin, 2019, p. 1398). Revisiting these field research experiences and being honest about my place, my feelings, and my epistemology on the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ has, led me to ask, what if I went beyond the duality and embraced the fluidity that is my positionality, “be critical about ‘here’ and ‘there’, rather than being preoccupied with naval gazing…?” (Ogunyankin, 2019, p. 1398). My fieldwork experiences highlight that making sense of the in-betweenness, the restlessness and the transparent reflexivity that is my cross-cultural fluidity is not simple but can be liberatory.

Despite the challenges of doing cross-cultural work, reflexively recognising our positionality lends to a liberatory and critical transnational exchange that encourages new approaches to knowledge production for social justice (Ogunyankin, 2019). Daley and Murrey (2022) call this “defiant scholarship,” which cultivates “those ways of thinking and those practices of thinking that are external to, in opposition to, and/or unconventional to the coloniality of knowledge” (p. 160). Informed by Mignolo’s epistemic disobedience (2003; 2009), and Murrey’s (2019) “disobedient pedagogies,” they argue that defiance can be a tool to dismantle coloniality and promote an intersectional transnegritude, that is the Black Atlantic restlessness that has been transposed to a unique appreciation of the special conditions of existence (Gilroy, 1993).

As I continue to grapple and own my cross-cultural identity, I am far more committed to my social justice and epistemic commitments. Upon completing my graduate studies, I was hired as a postdoctoral fellow at a German university. From this position, I made it my goal to recruit and collaborate with young African researchers; especially from Francophone Africa. Working with Senegalese researchers showed me the challenges they face in accessing and working with Western institutions. Additionally, African women face further challenges in accessing and succeeding in academia. Thus, I have been recruiting and working with West African researchers and collaborating with them in qualitative research training and publications. This approach also promotes my epistemic call to arms; that is transnegritude. It recognises the shared struggle of Black/African researchers in academia, it emphasises and highlights the voices of African scholars, and it promotes ‘othered’ epistemologies for a socially equitable international academic system.

Utilising an epistemic disobedient or defiant scholarship lens, allows me to blur the lines of a westernised, hegemonized scholar and that of a disobedient intellectual. At each step of my field research, I had to rethink thinking (Mpofu & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2019). Collectively, the practices of dwelling/working within border spaces and border thinking, or practising epistemic disobedience and defiant scholarship, demands that we “interrupt the idea of dislocated, disembodied, and disengaged abstraction… to disobey the universal signifier that is the rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality, and the West’s global model” (Walsh & Mignolo, 2009, as quoted in Daley & Murrey, 2022). Mpofu and Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2019) call this notion the act of “learning to un-learn in order to re-learn” (p. 15). Defiance in this sense, compliments my intersectional transnegritude reflexivity as a decolonial practice, “rooted in solidarities” and is “relational and place-based” (Daley & Murrey, 2022, p. 166). What I have learned from field research and what I have argued here is that going beyond the insider/outsider binary and tapping into the unique cultural expression of the transnegritude, especially for those of us who identify with multiple targeted axes, is necessary for a critical reflexive, positionality that centres an epistemic delinking while promoting a collaborative, imagined decolonial community.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to Anette Fasang and the reviewers for their constructive feedback. All shortcomings of course remain mine.

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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this contribution is part of the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” (EXC 2055, Project-ID: 390715649), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy.

ORCID iD

Noella Binda Niati

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