The Politics and Ethics of Representation in Qualitative Research

Addressing Moments of Discomfort

The Critical Methodologies Collective

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000410792
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book offers insights on politics and ethics of representation that are relevant to researchers concerned with struggles for justice. It takes moments of discomfort in the qualitative research process as important sites of knowledge for exploring representational practices in critical research.

The Politics and Ethics of Representation in Qualitative Research draws on experiences from research processes in nine PhD projects. In some chapters, ethical and political dilemmas related to representational practices are analyzed as experienced in fieldwork. In others, the focus is on the production of representation at the stage of writing. The book deals with questions such as: What does it mean to write about the lives of others? How are ethics and politics of representation intertwined, and how are they distinct? How are politics of representation linked to a practice of solidarity in research? What are the im/possibilities of hope and care in research?

Drawing on grounded empirical research, the book offers input to students, PhDs, researchers, practitioners, activists and others dealing with methodological dilemmas from a critical perspective. Instead of ignoring discomforts, or describing them as solved, we stay with them, showing how such a reflective process provides new, ongoing insights.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429299674, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1
Becoming ‘Unstuck’ Among Positionalities, Terms and Disciplines via Conversation (With Myself)

Exploring Potentials for Affective Reflexivity in Critical Intersex Studies

Tove Lundberg

In memory […] there’s no ahead and no behind really, is there? Memory wells up in the now, in vertical time. And remembered time, as you know, is shot through with imagination.

(Hustvedt, 2019)

Researcher Tove So, where do I start to write reflexively?

Clinical psychologist Tove Well, I guess I am stating the obvious now, but I think you just did.

Researcher I guess I did. By conversing with an externalized part of myself, which is you. Just as if I were doing a Gestalt therapy exercise?

Clinical psychologist Yes, you have split off a part of yourself in order to experience yourself more clearly from different perspectives, just like in Gestalt therapy.

Researcher Great. I guess the next reasonable question to answer is why we are here.

Clinical psychologist Well, yes, I was just about to ask.

Researcher Sure. Okay, let’s see how to articulate that. {Thinking} Well, before I became a researcher, I worked as a clinical psychologist for several years.

Clinical psychologist Mm-hmm.

Researcher As a clinical psychologist, you are such an important part of me and inform my thinking. However, you are never explicitly acknowledged in my academic work. I often feel like I have to choose a certain role or positionality in representing myself in academia, which usually excludes you. I was wondering if this kind of conversation would help me acknowledge the ‘in-between-ness’ of us that I feel that I embody.

Clinical psychologist Okay.

Researcher And as a PhD candidate, I didn’t really explicitly talk to others about how to navigate the complexity of positions, roles, stakes, interests, feelings and so on that I guess most researchers experience.

Clinical psychologist So, instead you converse with yourself.

Researcher Yes, I guess so. {Laughs}

Clinical psychologist Well, as a clinical psychologist, I think that talking about things, even with yourself, is usually better than being silent about it. So what will be the topic for our current conversation?

Researcher You know my doctoral research on variations in sex characteristics (see Lundberg 2017).¹

Clinical psychologist Yes, I know. What about it?

Researcher Well, I have this feeling of discomfort, which haunts me. That I wasn’t reflexive enough during my doctoral research. I mean, I didn’t write anything about reflexivity in my thesis and I just can’t let that go. I feel like a bad qualitative researcher.

Clinical psychologist Okay, so do you mean that not including reflexive sections explicitly in your thesis suggests that you were not reflexive at all during your PhD project?

Researcher Well, drawing on ideas by scholars such as Skeggs (2002), I think I was doing some kind of reflexivity even though I didn’t make my reflexive self explicit in the text? Today, I am quite inspired by Alvesson’s and Sköldberg’s (2017) idea of reflexivity as happening when ‘thinking is confronted with another way of thinking’ (p. 384) – that reflexivity can be about challenging our thinking. And I think I was doing that. However, the research process just felt like a mess and, by the end of it, I was just so happy to have a thesis to hand in at all.

Clinical psychologist So, by challenging your thinking, one interpretation is that you actively reflected during your research at least?

Researcher Maybe. I guess I was doing ‘reflection-in-action’, to borrow Schön’s (1995) words. Schön’s thinking informed the way I reflected on my practice as a clinical psychologist. I guess I just used what I had and went with it? However, I feel that this reflexive practice could have been more theoretically informed; that I should have ‘grounded’ myself in a reflexive perspective earlier.

Clinical psychologist Yes, well, that is always part of a process, isn’t it? That you are where you are and it is hard to be somewhere else, especially to be more knowledgeable than you are?

Researche...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: The Critical Methodologies Collective
• Chapter 1: Becoming ‘Unstuck’ Among Positionalities, Terms and Disciplines via Conversation (With Myself): exploring potentials for affective reflexivity in critical intersex studies
• Chapter 2: ‘To say no wasn’t something we could do’: reflexive accounts and negotiations of the ethical practice of informed consent during the research process and beyond
• Chapter 3: Creating knowledge through community theatre: No Border Musical and the making of representations
• Chapter 4: Waiting: the shrouded backbone of ethnographic research
• Chapter 5: Middle-classness: research object and fieldwork performance
• Chapter 6: Dilemmas of representation in a study of social workers: analyzing non-evident forms of social transformation
• Chapter 7: The ethics of renaming: on challenges and dilemmas of anonymization in a study of anti-Muslim racism
• Chapter 8: Caring encounters in ethnographic research: unlearning distance and learning sharing
• Afterword
• Epilogue: what the collective has meant to us
• Index