Critical Complete-Member Ethnography Revisited: A Heuristic Reflection of Nativeness,Insiderness,and Homeland During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

Critical Complete-Member Ethnography (CCME), theorized by Toyosaki (2011), is an intercultural communication research method that uses an ‘insider-looking-in-and-out’ approach. In CCME, researchers immerse themselves as a full member of the culture under study to observe, interpret, and report on intra-cultural interactions. By sharing the same or a similar cultural system of codes, symbols, and meanings with participants, researchers foster mutual intelligibility and a shared identity. CCME holds its value as one of the few critical research methods that incorporates autoethnographic reflexivity in a researcher’s engagement with their own communities and cultures. This serves as essential praxis to promote social justice from within the communities since CCME’s objective is not to neutrally observe researchers’ own cultural groups but to critically politicize and historicize their communal communication phenomena (Chuang, 2015; Toyosaki, 2011).

In CCME, a researcher enters the field as an insider, entitled to complete-membership, and their methodological enactment is based on their epistemological intimacy with participants. This intimacy is a key aspect that scholars have built and expanded, as it poses important questions about researchers’ backgrounds, relationships with participants, and their responsibility in producing intra-cultural knowledge. Specifically, Chuang’s (2015) study contributes to this discussion by evaluating the positionality of researchers and their relationships with participants. Chuang suggests five contextual factors to determine a researcher’s claim of complete-membership in a research community: the historicity of identity, institutional memory, situational (inter)subjectivity, consensual membership, and symbolic codes. These factors are useful in investigating epistemological intimacy through concrete indexes, prompting researchers to reconsider the methodological ethics of claiming their intimate relationship with participants.

However, the praxis of self-reflection and epistemological intimacy in CCME does not fully account for nativeness, which international scholars often take for granted to claim their complete-membership but experience differently when they return to their home countries for conducting intra-cultural observation. Developing CCME as a critical research method requires further attention to transnational contexts that create complex dynamics in re-evaluating international researchers’ cultural intimacy with participants and cultural insider positions in their homelands. CCME is particularly useful for international scholars, including myself, investigating their home countries and communities due to its emphasis on researchers’ insider observation of their own cultures. By integrating a critical consideration of nativeness into CCME, the method can better accommodate international scholars who examine their home or ancestry countries as an observation site.

Exploring the concept of nativeness in accessing and broadening meanings of complete-membership in CCME is a timely and relevant matter in the ever-shifting contexts of globalization. The increasing global mobility of people and resources has made it exceedingly challenging to establish clear distinctions between native/insider and non-native/outsider researchers when studying cultures. This complexity arises from the dynamic nature of the concept of “home,” “home country,” or “native community” which is influenced by many factors, including social values, generational differences, and political orientations, which intersect and coalesce to shape one’s sense of belonging and identity (Al-Ali & Koser, 2002; Kinefuchi, 2010). Consequently, attempting to determine a researcher’s native/insider position within their culture and society based solely on their national affiliation appears outdated. In reality, researchers possess multifaceted identities that result from the interplay of cultural, economic, historical, and political forces in globalization.

This changing and fluid relationship between researchers and their home countries or native communities prompts researchers to reconsider the significance of claiming an insider or native position when they are conducting ethnography in their home countries. Particularly for international scholars, who originally hailed from their non-Western home countries, begin higher education journeys in the United States, and then return to their homelands to explore their own people, culture, and communities for research, the notion of being a native researcher is often taken for granted. However, as Sekimoto (2012; 2014) points out, international identities are always in a process of becoming instead of being, as their cultural and social belonging to both host and home country is temporarily constructed and constantly changing based on different time and space. Considering this shifting, evolving, and in-flux sense of belonging and identity experienced by international scholars, it can be risky to assume that they maintain a fixed and stable native or insider relationship with their home countries and people there.

In this context, I consider nativeness as an important point that adds complexity to the concept of epistemological intimacy in conducting intra-culture ethnography to advance CCME as a critical methodology. This examination explores how international scholars acquire a native position within their home countries and how this position becomes fluid or at risk due to changes in their mobility, access, and understandings of their home country and culture. Specifically, I identify the COVID-19 global pandemic as a transnational moment that shapes a researcher’s native positionality, broadening and enhancing our contextual understanding of how complete membership in CCME is determined Chuang (2015). This extends Chuang’s contribution to CCME by considering global power dynamics, privilege, and limitations in the implementation of CCME during the time of global pandemic. This study proposes a methodological approach for international scholars within and beyond the communication studies to engage in rigorous self-reflection about their native or insider position and their relationship to their field and participants in their home countries.

Ethnography of Communication and CCME

Ethnography is a field of study that primarily explores and generates descriptions of cultural phenomena and interactions. It has been central to anthropology, developed by renowned scholars such as Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Clifford Geertz. As a foundational social anthropologist, Malinowski (1984) viewed ethnography as a functional practice for studying a community or culture, aimed at obtaining a complete and adequate picture of the subject. Furthermore, documenting and understanding a culture is seen as the production of thick descriptions that focus on symbolic interactions and offer interpretations of systems of meanings (Geertz, 1972). Particularly with this descriptive and interpretive turn in ethnography, the anthropological interest in exploring culture has increasingly incorporated the consideration of language or language use in social contexts, illustrating the interconnectivity between cultural anthropology and linguistics (Saville-Troike, 2008).

The Ethnography of Communication (EoC) is an interdisciplinary field that has come to be known when Dell Hymes, a North American linguist, anthropologist, and folklorist, calls for the literary turn in ethnography, critical awareness of the interrelationship between language and culture. Specifically, in Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Communication, Hymes (1964) emphasizes the constitutive role of language in formation of culture and society, claiming the necessity of constructing EoC as a field wherein researchers investigate human’s different modes of linguistic interactions as a crucial site of social formation. Influenced by the sociolinguistic and anthropological stance of studying culture and society, the early writings in EoC took a comparative ethnographic approach to language and culturally distinctive speech events (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz, 2008). During this time, researchers’ role in EoC was to record and describe linguistic situations and compare them to others and characterize different modes of communication in various groups, including tribal groups in Africa and industrialized people in Europe, Asia, and North America (Saville-Troike, 2008). However, critiques raised about this approach by postcolonial anthropologists arguing each language has ideological and historical implications of colonialism and imperialism, which cannot be considered and compared as a single and neutral unit of analysis for a nation’s post-colonial culture (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz, 2008). Later on, EoC began providing context-bound discourse analysis that enables researchers to do more in-depth, situated, and critical interpretations of discourses, which contributes to intercultural communication research (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz, 2008).

Since then, EoC has been successfully adapted and integrated into communication research by scholars, profoundly by Gerry Philipsen (1987; 1975), Dwight Conquergood (1991;1992), and their students. In communication studies, EoC observes communicative forms and activities, ranging from popular televised interviews, representations in cultures, and inter-/intra-group symbolic exchanges, connecting them to structural and contextual analysis of the communities in which they occur (Littlejohn & Foss, 2011). Particularly, Conquergood’s (1991) influential essay, Rethinking Ethnography: Towards A Critical Cultural Politics, takes EoC one step further with his critical insight into ethnographic observation of communication as an embodied political performance. His view on EoC as performance allows communication researchers to consider their fieldwork as an embodied and collaborative performance between observer and observed, which in turn leads them to construe cultural communication as a process, not a depiction. Additionally, Conquergood (1991) emphasizes a hermeneutic way of finding, observing, and uncovering power in ethnographic observation such as epistemological underpinnings and institutional practices, as these factors enable, shape, and reshape people’s daily communication and performances. In this way, Conquergood (1991) critically shapes EoC’s focus on communication elements as embodied and interactive performances, going beyond its practice of a data-driven and interpretive approach to culture and language.

With its critical and performative focus, EoC has invited scholars to explore ways of speaking and communication within (inter)personal, organizational, and mediated contexts. Williams et al. (2023) conduct a critical ethnography to explore how non-profit organizations facilitate racial (in)equity through specific languages. Drawing on Conquergood (1991), the authors highlight the performative aspect of EoC, acknowledging their embodied presence and understanding of various identities and communication within the organization. The implementation of EoC extends to digital media, where scholars observe language use and construct meanings in mediated spaces. For instance, Kent (2020) conducted nine months of ethnographic research on Instagram, including interviews with participants. Centering on Conquergood’s (1991) idea of the body as a site of knowing, the author maintains that communicative interaction and analysis are context-based as well as embodied, particularly within online communities. The performative and critical emphasis in EoC also encourages scholars to engage in autoethnographic accounts of power, identity, and culture, exploring embodied communication processes through their own lived experiences (McIntosh, 2020; McIntosh & Eguchi, 2020).

As a communication research method, CCME is anchored in EoC’s primary emphasis on communication processes and interactions while taking a stance of critical ethnography that not only underscores the production of knowledge for and by marginalized groups but also places significant emphasis on researchers’ rigorous self-reflection regarding their positions and roles in cultural interpretation and production. Critically oriented, CCME places significant emphasis on researchers’ self-reflexivity, associating with the value of autoethnography that recognizes researchers’ relationship with self and others. It serves as a reminder that researchers’ presence, participation, and interpretation are intrinsically tied to shaping the cultural interpretation of their own culture and people. In this way, CCME stands as an intimate and critically constructive method of communication, allowing researchers to gain insight into how their own communities and groups imbue communicative resources with significance. With its critical foundation, CCME fosters a deeper understanding and reevaluation of social and cultural identities, while addressing issues of marginalization and empowerment.

With these critical objects, CCME as a communication research method has been adopted by many communication scholars whose research examines their own cultural communities or phenomena from a critical standpoint. Pindi (2018), for example, conducted interviews with her participants as a complete-member ethnographer to investigate African American female immigrants’ perceptions of their image in the U.S. media. In this study, CCME is used as a means of sensitizing her as a researcher to her cultural proximity within the community of female diaspora immigrants in the United States and contemplating her intersubjective ties with the field and participants. Furthermore, Armstrong and Eguchi (2022) emphasize the insider position of researchers in their critical analysis of queerness in food communication. Drawing on CCME, they reflect structural contexts that have constructed their notions, experiences, and emotions related to food perception and consumption as well as their identity.

However, despite its importance of evaluating the positionality of researchers and their relationships with participants in EoC, methodological development and discussions of CCME are still in its infancy within the field of communication research as Chuang (2015) points out. To further develop CCME as a meaningful method in EoC, this paper regards the matter of evaluating and confirming researchers’ complete-membership to their own culture and community, so as to enhance the critical praxis of comprehensive self-reflection in CCME. In the following section, I investigate the concept of complete-membership in CCME by foregrounding the discussion of researchers’ nativeness and their connection to culture and community. I demonstrate this point by expanding upon Chuang’s (2015) critical intervention with epistemological intimacy, which is often assumed to be embodied by complete-member researchers in their practice of CCME.

Expand CCME with Consideration of Nativeness

Previously mentioned in the introduction, Chuang’s (2015) involvement with Toyosaki’s (2011) CCME is significant in that it provides five contextual factors influencing a researcher’s complete-membership in their research community: the historicity of identity, institutional memory, situational (inter)subjectivity, consensual membership, and symbolic codes. Chuang considers these five factors to explain the concept of epistemological intimacy between a researcher and participants and how it ensures a researcher’s complete-membership in the employment of CCME. Epistemological intimacy, a concept and practice illuminated first by Smith (2005) and later cited by Toyosaki (2011), refers to “the mutually intelligible intracultural knowledge shared among researchers/ethnographers and their participants” (Chuang, 2015, p. 4). In the context of CCME, epistemological intimacy is a central component since CCME’s methodological approach to intracultural examination relies on a researcher’s insider knowledge and intimate experience with their participants.

To reexamine the closeness and proximity between researchers and their participants in the implementation of CCME, Chuang (2015) first claims that a researcher needs to consider one’s identity historicity to ensure whether they share the historical time and space of the community they study and whether they have experiences hailed by this shared history. Secondly, at the meso-level, institutional memory becomes essential in determining whether a researcher comprehends an organization’s unique culture and history, thus qualifying them for complete-membership. Thirdly, situational (inter)subjectivity is another aspect, highlighting that a researcher’s identity is processual, interactive, and shaped by different contexts they find themselves in with their participants. The fourth factor is consensual membership, illustrating the potential disconnection between the identity a researcher avows and the identity participants ascribe to the researcher. Finally, the symbolic code context underscores the necessity of learning and performing cultural symbolic codes, such as language, to establish a researcher’s complete-membership within the group under study.

Chuang’s (2015) work merits recognition for clarifying the abstract concept of epistemological intimacy in CCME by providing tangible elements for a nuanced examination of the researcher-participant relationship. Her intervention facilitates deeper investigation into the perceived closeness and familiarity in CCME. However, in seeking to identify a researcher’s cultural insider and intimate position, her proposed contextual factors do not fully account for the inherently fluctuating identities of international scholars and their changing understandings and relationships in their home countries.

For instance, as Chuang (2015) suggests, a researcher can take consensual membership context into account to evaluate one’s full membership within a community or culture. This approach examines how a researcher presents their identity (avowal) in alignment with how others attribute an identity to them (ascription). Given the field’s increasing hybridity with new cultural practices, however, achieving synchronization between ascribed and avowed identity is challenging (Murphy & Kraidy, 2003). Particularly, a researcher’s native or insider position is inherently hybrid, changing over time and across contexts due to the influence of global discourses (Kraidy, 1999). This also resonates with Appadurai’s (1990) observation that the idea of locality has been disrupted by contemporary global flows of migration, politics, trade, and media, making it challenging to distinguish between native/insider and non-native/outsider identities based on geopolitical boundaries.

In this sense, a researcher’s native/insider position is not necessarily always consensual, even when there is a historical relationality with their participants, as the concept of nativeness and insiderness is neither fixed nor inherently entitled but rather unstable, contextual, and subject to change. This can lead to discrepancies in determining a researcher’s native and insider position when their self-determined nativeness is not recognized or acknowledged by participants. This presents a challenge since Chuang’s (2015) two contextual elements—identity historicity and consensual membership—could operate in an opposite or colliding way in terms of defining a native researcher’s complete-membership within their homeland.

In this light, I propose the necessity of evaluating epistemological intimacy in CCME through the lens of nativeness to re-emphasize CCME’s critical focus and purpose as a critical communication research method. As Chuang (2015) emphasizes, CCME offers the potential for a critical communication research method because it is driven by praxis-oriented self-reflexivity to deconstruct inequality in cultural investigation and interpretation. When considering nativeness as well as insiderness carefully, embracing this critical potential of CCME appears promising, as native, insider, or complete-member research is laden with questions of power.

Native researchers’ cultural acquaintance with the field does not diminish the power disparity and imbalance between researchers and those being studied. Instead, native researchers might take an indigenous elite position on purpose, which makes it harder to differentiate between native (decolonized) and non-native/Euro-centric (colonized) ethnography (Qamar, 2021). This is because the power dynamics between researchers and the individuals they study can be locally complicated by factors such as color, class, gender, education level, and sexual orientation. Abdulrahman’s (2017) study provides such an account. As a nursing ethnographer, Abdulrahman critically evaluates his position as a well-educated, relatively wealthy male researcher holding a high degree of power in his homeland, Lamu, in Kenya. Highlighting the strict gender stratification in the community he studied, Abdulrahman illustrates how his native position does not ensure his full acceptance, especially by women in the community, and explains a native researcher’s identity is more complex than the simple dichotomy of insider/outsider.

In this context, critical examination of nativeness is a crucial element for re-evaluating a researcher’s complete-member or complete-insider position within CCME. As a part of this examination, I give special attention to international scholars who return to their non-Western home countries for research as they are often assumed to be complete-members with a native position, engaging in intra-cultural examination. However, international scholars often perceive and feel their connection to their home or homeland as transient rather than fixed, influenced by complex global migratory flows and experiences (Eguchi & Baig, 2018). Consequently, their insider, complete-member, or native position within their homeland cannot be naturally given or fixed. By raising this point, I emphasize the significance of critical reflection on the notion of complete-membership afforded to international researchers in the field, particularly within their homelands.

In what follows, I share my fieldwork experiences as illustrative examples to broaden and enhance our contextual understanding of determining complete-membership in CCME. I do this by shedding light on the contextual factors that disrupt researchers’ native positions and how these factors also prompt a reevaluation of Chuang’s insights into complete-membership in CCME.

Patchworking Fieldwork amid the COVID-19 Global Pandemic

In the first segment, I discuss two contextual influences that reshape my fieldwork experience and my native connection with Korea: the limited resources available for achieving long-term ethnography and the impact of geopolitical regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic. To begin, I provide a concise summary of my fieldwork in Korea. In 2021 and 2022, I made several short-term visits to my home country, Korea, to conduct research on skin-darkening beauty practices among young Korean women. I had these research trips to observe how local tanning salons produce meanings about bodies, beauty, and skin color and record Korean women’s experiences and narratives with tanning beauty and culture. Instead of having a long-term field observation, I had several short-term visits to Korea during summer and winter breaks with my limited financial and time resources as an international graduate student employee. In addition to these visits over breaks, I received a dissertation fellowship from the university, which allowed me to stay in Korea for one academic quarter. In total, I spent seven months conducting fieldwork in Korea.

In conducting my multiple field visits, I apply the key concepts of patchwork ethnography, a term used by cultural anthropologists (Watanabe et al., 2021), in conjunction with CCME. This type of ethnography is designed for short-time field visits, using fragmentary yet rigorous data collection and presentation to resist the fixity, holism, and certainty demanded in the publication process. Patchwork ethnography enables researchers to collect and analyze data over multiple short-term on-site visits, allowing them to reflect on their various commitments and intersecting positionalities (Watanabe et al., 2021). It acknowledges that traditional ethnographic practices can be challenging due to researchers’ personal, professional, and structural hardships to maintain long-term commitments, language proficiency, and contextual knowledge in the field. Therefore, researchers can make multiple short-term visits to the field, accumulate data sets, and provide analyses based on their observations.

The practice of patchworking fieldwork reveals that a researcher’s position is bounded and constrained by a university’s institutional policies in terms of searching for funding and maintaining legal status to conduct long-term field visits. As an international student originally from Korea, I face limitations with regard to time and financial resources to conduct long-term on-site fieldwork. F-1 visa restrictions, funding contracts, and academic requirements make it difficult for me to stay in the field for more than four to six months unless I receive a grant or fellowship that covers tuition, course fees, living costs, and visa-related expenses in both Korea and the United States. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on researchers’ transnational mobility, especially for those who require on-site observation in different countries. International students have been particularly affected by the 2020/21 COVID-19 lockdown, as their bodies are at the intersection of global border politics.

In 2020, for instance, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced new international student visa status regulations. With the announcement of this new regulation, international students suddenly faced an ultimatum: take in-person classes to remain in the United States or altogether leave the country, despite universities offering remote teaching due to the risks associated with the pandemic (Treisman, 2020). The regulations were met with criticism for limiting the options available to international students and increasing their anxiety over visa issues and reentry restrictions. The requirement for in-person instruction was also seen as inhumane, given the impact of the pandemic on international students’ mental health and their separation from their homes and families (Maleku et al., 2022). This vulnerability and contingent mobility of international students were highlighted by the directives, which ultimately resulted in the regulations being rescinded on July 8th, 2020.

Although ICE’s visa regulation was rescinded, international students have faced difficulties in traveling to their observation sites, typically located in their home countries, due to border closures and restrictions during the pandemic. These students must comply with visa requirements to maintain their legal status in the United States, and I was no exception. When I needed to travel to Korea for fieldwork, I encountered various institutional procedures to reenter my home country. I had to provide evidence of my Korean citizenship and familial ties, as well as ensure that I returned to the United States before the new academic schedule commenced, which required obtaining a signature on my visa document. Unlike normal circumstances, I also had to register and pay for study abroad credits with my university for the summer to justify my visit to Korea. This was necessary because international travel was strictly prohibited by the university unless it was deemed essential and time-critical for research purposes. Throughout this process, there was a constant risk of rejection from both countries, leaving me in a state of uncertainty. Consequently, my decision to patchwork fieldwork can be seen as a strategic response to the new COVID-19 institutional landscape that governs international research at universities.

The institutional restrictions I encountered during the pandemic underscore the need to expand Chuang’s (2015) approach to institutional contexts beyond a mere backdrop that researchers adapt to so as to achieve complete-membership while conducting CCME. Chuang argues that institutional contexts play a significant role in establishing a researcher’s full affiliation with an organization, therefore, researchers should be aware of the distinct cultural codes embedded within each institutional memory. What I call attention to is the re-conceptualization of institutional memory, shifting from a context where a researcher enters to adjust and immerse to the one that influences a researcher’s capability of utilizing resources for their study. It is crucial to recognize institutional and organizational conditions in CCME as power contexts that shape a researcher’s subjectivity, as this perspective unveils and assesses the structural forces that make a researcher’s position precarious and contingent.

After taking additional steps to secure permission for travel at my university, I flew back to Korea in June 2021. Nevertheless, I continued to encounter challenges. Since 2020, with a steep spike in domestic case numbers, the Korean government ordered mandatory COVID-19 tests and enforced quarantine on all travelers who visited foreign countries to quarantine for three weeks either in a quarantine facility or a direct family house. Right upon my reentry to Korea, I marked a questionnaire asking if I had any uncomfortable symptoms before or during the flight, thinking the questionnaire was a simple checkup on my general health condition, not specific to COVID-19. This one mark I made led me to be locked down at the government-operating quarantine facility for a day before they sent me to my family’s place for self-quarantine. At this facility, I stayed in a government-reserved hotel room and could not go out of it until my second COVID test showed negative results. The facility staff also informed me that even if the result was negative, I might not be able to leave if I exhibited any symptoms related to COVID-19. This experience had me rethink the ever strong and unwavering belief that I can reenter my country at any time without any difficulty. I have never felt or thought that I could get rejected or restricted to reenter Korea.

After being released from the quarantine facility, I again had to lock myself down at my family’s home for 21 days. During this time, I had to do self-check-ins on my phone three times a day. If I missed one, the city liaison person would call either me or family members to ensure I was self-quarantining properly. Because of the enforced immigration policy by the government, I had less time to conduct on-site observations in the field than the actual time I spent in Korea. The global pandemic affected my capability to access the field, which is a different matter than crossing the national border and physically being there in Korea. Isolated in a small room for three weeks, I could do only online search for local tanning salons to visit, take virtual tours of salons, check online beauty communities, and recruit interviewees via social media. There were gaps between my physical presence in Korea and my reentry into its social and cultural spaces. These gaps represent the seams ¹ of my fieldwork, which were created due to institutionalized mobility control and pandemic management enforced by the Korean government.

These seams, in turn, underscore the intricacy of articulating my identity historicity, which is the contextual element influencing the epistemological intimacy that a complete-member researcher possesses in CCME (Chuang, 2015). Despite experiencing the global pandemic along with other Koreans during that period, my sense of epistemological closeness to my participants and communities was not necessarily heightened. In fact, at that time, I found myself feeling and identifying as a pseudo-native or pseudo-indigenous (Henry, 2007, p.75) in relation to my homeland as the research field. It felt pseudo-native when my Korean citizenship did not protect me from the fear of rejection at immigration in Korea. It also felt pseudo-native when my physical presence in Korea did not automatically allow me to fully comprehend and immerse in local ideas, events, and perspectives.

With limited resources and shifting immigration regulations, during my field visits, I took an ambiguous space, akin to a quarantine facility, in which I was in the home-land but prohibited from reentering the home-land. The quarantine period at the start of my fieldwork indicated the physical and cultural distance that I needed to bridge upon my return to my home country. The limited space I occupied during quarantine, situated between the border and society, mirrors my cultural (un)familiarity with Korea as a native. While I can cross the border as a native, I must take time to acclimate myself to cultural changes in Korea before fully engaging in fieldwork. When I lack feelings of being at home-land as a native researcher, my epistemological intimacy with my people and places is not secured, as my capacity to reach my home-land is conditioned upon other institutional factors beyond my own individual control.

Becoming a Halfie: In-Betweenness, Power, and Privilege

The feeling of being a pseudo-native deepened even after I completed self-quarantine and began interacting with Koreans in my research field. In the second part, I explore the term “halfie” to exemplify a personal transformation in complicating how I (dis)identify myself as a native and an insider in Korean society. “Halfie” refers to individuals whose national and cultural identities are mixed due to factors such as migration or parental heritage (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Narayan, 1993). Halfie researchers are “full of diversity and difference in terms of how and how much they are native” (Ryang, 2005, p.145), and they embody different types of native experiences and backgrounds. As such, halfie researchers take an in-between or neither-nor position within the watertight and discrete understandings of insider/outsider, native/others, and researchers/informants (Dasgupta, 2013). Reflecting on my experiences in the field, particularly in my interactions with Korean female interviewees, I illustrate my personal transition to halfie identity and explain how this transformation prompts me to reconsider my complete-membership when conducting CCME.

My native position has become increasingly complex and unstable as notions of home, self, and identity continue to evolve. In my late 20s, I made the decision to move to the United States for graduate school, leaving my family in Korea. At that time, I was unsure if my stay in the United States would be permanent. However, as I developed both personal and professional relationships and found communities to which I could belong, it became evident that integrating my U.S. academic knowledge with Korean contexts would pose challenges. Gradually, I came to the realization that I would establish a permanent life in the United States and actively seek meaning and acceptance of the United States as my new home or country for professional and personal development, turning myself into a “sojourner-turned-into-an-immigrant in the U.S.” (Sekimoto, 2014, p. 382).

This realization transformed my perspective and emotions towards Korea, my birthplace and home to my loved ones for 25 years. Despite visiting every summer, I do not always feel like a native, carrying mixed feelings of neither being an insider nor an outsider. This sense of unfamiliarity has heightened since I decided to permanently settle down in the United States. When I return, I recognize my old neighborhood, but everything is constantly changing. I meet people who are confused about who I was and who I am now. Often, it seems like I am visiting a memory of Kora, rather than the country itself. The homeland clock stopped ticking for me the day I left, making it challenging to adapt to changes, dynamics, and complexity in my homeland.

The growing sense of disconnection from my home country has also influenced my accounts of fieldwork and representations of myself to research participants in Korea. As Korea was my research field, I had to return as a researcher to a place where I had previously lived, and where I had extensive social, personal, and professional networks and resources. During fieldwork, my racial and ethnic position as a Korean was not challenged or questioned by my research participants, young Korean women. As a woman, I had no difficulties approaching them and initiating conversations, and they seemed comfortable sharing their opinions with me, treating me as a native Korean.

Although no one has questioned my Korean identity, and I am treated as a native or cultural insider by research participants, my sense of Koreanness has been destabilized and obscured through my assimilation into U.S. cultures. I find myself highlighting my educational background in a Western country, my transnational mobility and resources, and my multi-linguistic capability when representing myself to the participants. When I disclose my affiliations with U.S.-based higher education, mix Korean and English in conversations with participants by mistake, or inform them about research procedures, I cannot help but signal how privileged or Westernized I am as an investigator.

My confusion about myself in relation to cultural and linguistic boundaries influenced my interview processes. Frequently, I had experienced moments of disconnection between myself and participants when it came to understanding the sociocultural contexts of Korea. This disconnection, as described by Chuang (2015), can be referred to as the weakened sense of situational (inter)subjectivity between myself and the participants. As Chuang illustrates, in CCME, the recognition of a researcher’s complete-membership depends on an interactive process between the researcher and participants. Therefore, a researcher’s complete-membership is not solely determined by their personally embodied historicity but also by the inter-subjective understanding between them.

My interaction with Korean interviewees affirms the processual and situational concept of subjectivity, prompting critical reflection on complete-membership of a native researcher who conducts CCME. For example, When I could not find the exact word in Korean to translate my work or questions and had to pause briefly during the interview, some participants asked if I had left Korea a long time ago, perhaps during my teenage years. They also asked if I was familiar with cultural references such as K-pop celebrities, YouTubers, or social issues and events in Korea. In these instances, I had to remind them that I am a native Korean who spent over 25 years in Korea.

This line of questioning seemed to suggest that they were interpreting my performance as more U.S. American and less Korean. When they positioned my identity or identity performances in proximity to the U.S. contexts, my role as a native and complete-member researcher became relational, situational, and contingent within the field and among the participants, even though the field is my home country.

During one of my interviews, a participant expressed a strong interest in my experiences living in the United States as she was interested in U.S. popular culture and dreamed of moving to the United States someday. We had the interview at a local tanning salon where she worked, and as she explained the differences between tanning lotions, she assumed I must be fluent in English and did not need any translation for reading instructions printed on these lotions. She even asked if I could check her explanation of a product to ensure it was correct compared to the product’s instructions written in English. Finally, she commented that the tanning culture must be more advanced and developed in the United States, questioning why I wanted to research tanning in Korea. Through this interaction, I realized how my U.S. Americanness constantly oozes out of my disciplined language, behavior, and background.

These experiences highlight that halfie researchers carry a bag of privileges and power, especially when their migration experiences and educational backgrounds are based in Western countries. Their return to ancestry homelands as halfie researchers for fieldwork is not only personalized when they try to make sense of their in-between identities in the field, but it also reshapes and reproduces a relational hierarchy between natives, other ethnic returnees, and immigrant workers in homelands. It is because the power and privilege of mobility as a halfie researcher are rooted in the neoliberal contexts of (diaspora return) migration.

In particular, ethnic return migration occurs when diasporic people return to the countries from which their ancestors originated after having most or all of their lives elsewhere. The foreign-born and raised diaspora descendants travel to the ancestry homeland for various reasons: to reconnect with the cultures of ancestral origin (Kibria, 2006; Tsuda & Song, 2019) or to access better social and economic opportunities in ancestry homelands than they can have in host countries as racial and ethnic minorities (Jain, 2013; Suh, 2020; Wang, 2016). Whether diaspora returnees visit their ancestral countries for tourism, family visits, or economic opportunities, their transnational mobility signifies the privileges of embodying global values as flexible global citizens (Ong, 1999).

However, returnees possess and embody varying levels of privilege depending on where they return from. For example, diasporic Koreans from industrialized countries such as the United States, Canada, and Japan are highly valued as global human capital compared to other ethnic returnees such as Korean Chinese diaspora (Seol & Skrentny, 2009). Particularly, Korean American returnees are perceived and presented as desirable global representations of Koreanness because of their embodiment of U.S. modernity (Kim, 2022; Suh, 2017). This hierarchy is attributed to the neocolonial occupation of U.S. military forces in Korea during the Cold War, which has influenced hegemonic knowledge about U.S. Americanness in Korea.

In this context, I may have inadvertently signaled my privileged position as a U.S.-educated researcher by mixing languages, perhaps as a way to distinguish myself from the participants. While I am aware of the cultural and social capital that comes with having a transnational, multilingual, and globally educated identity in Korea, I may have performed it not only to showcase my achievements but also to lend credibility to my research, believing that my U.S. academic membership would enhance its validity in the eyes of my informants. My insecurity about navigating the liminal space of cultural ambiguity, hybridity, and fluidity was expressed through my decision to perform a privileged insider position, one that is flexible, cosmopolitan, and heavily influenced by cultural ideologies of U.S. American exceptionalism in Korea. When I relate my intersecting identity to participants in neoliberal and neocolonial contexts of Korean society, my privileged positionality as a global subjectivity is revealed (Choi, 2006).

Drawing on my own insecurities about embodying U.S. exceptionalism as a native researcher, I stress the importance of centering power and privilege in the inter-subjective process that determines a researcher’s complete-membership in CCME. Co-constructing a researcher’s subjectivity is situated in sociocultural assumptions and norms that assign hierarchical meanings to different identities. When a researcher with a mixed cultural and educational background engages in fieldwork in their home countries, they bring with them a complex personal history shaped by cultural hegemony, which often reinforces hierarchical relationships between the home and host country. In my case, my privilege of crossing borders and studying abroad has endowed me with social and cultural capital recognized as superior by the U.S.-led neoliberal global economy. The privilege of earning U.S. academic membership is conveyed through my interactions with participants, subsequently reshaping my inter-subjective position relative to some participants who may not possess the same level of social and cultural capital in Korea.

Moreover, my privileged U.S. academic membership constrains my native or insider connection with my participants. These different memberships come into conflict when I engage my communities through my institutionally influenced and authorized work. This became particularly evident when I informed my participants about the interview procedures and offered options for reporting any problems or issues that may arise during and after the research process—a practice encouraged by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) at U.S. universities. However, in this process, I doubted whether my participants had the agency to speak up about any issues they may have encountered. Although all the information has been translated into Korean, participants would still need to communicate in English with institutions in the United States if they wanted to report any problems. This could be difficult for those who do not speak English fluently in academic contexts or lack the necessary communication resources to challenge the outcomes of the research. As a result, it is unclear whether the participants can fully exercise their right to speak up. It was indeed a dilemma I found in the process of revealing my U.S. academic membership to ensure that participants are aware of my authentic or ethical position as an investigator and to offer unattainable ways of protecting their rights as participants.

These intersecting layers of my membership, as a researcher educated in the United States and affiliated with that country returning to the home country as a native or insider, compel us to engage in deeper self-reflection to reconsider the concept of complete-membership in CCME. Even if a researcher shares a historical context with their participants and demonstrates a strong grasp of symbolic codes within their community, the sense of complete-membership is not unequivocally endorsed. Instead, the degree of connection and disconnection researchers have with their intracultural communities varies, influenced by the power dynamics stemming from a researcher’s inherently and simultaneously global and local positionality. As a result, it becomes crucial to underscore the centrality of power and privilege carried by native and insider researchers when determining their complete-membership in CCME. A researcher’s embodied privilege may not overtly create tension between their avowed and ascribed identities within intra-cultural communities. Instead, it can serve to create a subtle and nuanced distance between the researcher and participants through the inter-subjective interactions between them.

Conclusion

Through my autoethnographic accounts of implementing CCME as a native researcher, I realize that CCME is a valuable method for international scholars to address cultural and empirical challenges in achieving “insiderness” in their intra-community ethnography. CCME requires scholars to critically consider their positionality and subjectivity as researchers and their relationships with participants, significantly impacting their fieldwork. It also demands rigorous self-evaluation of the quality of information obtained through intra-cultural ethnography and the subsequent analysis and writing, which are primary knowledge-producing practices in qualitative inquiry. Importantly, CCME guides scholars to thoroughly reflect on their roles in critically oriented qualitative research, while considering the power and privilege associated with their status as researchers.

As an illustration, in this paper, I considered my relationship and interaction with participants, highlighting two contextual elements – border-crossing (geopolitics) and in-betweenness – to emphasize the intersection of power, privilege, and subjectivity in global contexts when conducting native, home-returning, or at-home ethnography. My autoethnographic accounts reveal that international scholars are subjects under geopolitical tension, often institutionally bound by their visa status. Affected by changing immigration policies from both the host and home country, they occupy a vulnerable position within institutional power contexts. However, international scholars in their home countries also serve as mediums of power and privilege when they consciously or unconsciously promote their privileged educational backgrounds to identify, inform, justify, or defend their research or their credibility as researchers. These personal accounts of my native position expand methodological considerations for determining and evaluating a researcher’s insiderness and epistemological intimacy with their participants in conducting intra-cultural or native ethnography.

Additionally, the critical reconsideration of researchers’ native positionality and their knowledge production leads us to envision CCME’s methodological potential as a decolonial qualitative research method that encourages scholars to combat researchers’ taken-for-granted or given privileges to (re)enter, occupy, and observe (their own) land and people. Given the fine and unstable line between the native/insider and non-native/outsider dichotomies, labeling an ethnographer as native can be a political act that flattens or fixates on the ethnographer’s cultural, political, and economic positionality. Simplifying or essentializing an ethnographer’s nativeness reproduces the colonial fantasy of an authentic description of people, implying that native ethnographers automatically provide intimate, genuine, and real illustrations of their society. However, there is no static and permanently granted nativeness for ethnographers, as their cultural belonging, nationality, physical presence, and transnational mobility are always in flux.

It is thus imperative to have reflexive critiques of native or insider researchers’ (re)entry, observation, and analysis of the field as ethnographers and their changing relations to participants to avoid perpetuating colonial knowledge production of individuals in their home country. It is my hope that international scholars within and beyond the field of communication will engage in this honest, thorough, and sometimes painful self-reflection on their nativeness as they return to their home countries for research and conduct intra-cultural ethnography. By doing so, international scholars can enhance and vitalize ethnography that requires home-returning processes as a decolonial methodology. With their methodological endeavors, international scholars can not only deny objectivity and authenticity in arriving at the truth, but also seriously consider power differentials in their homeland through their knowledge production and their potential roles in reinforcing or challenging these dynamics.