Questions in Qualitative Social Justice Research in Multicultural Contexts

Anna CohenMiller, Nettie Boivin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000461541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Questions in Qualitative Social Justice Research in Multicultural Contexts take readers on an accessible and inspiring journey to critically self-reflect on current or future research practices to encourage and facilitate greater equity, inclusion, and social justice in qualitative research.

In a diverse world, "doing" qualitative research needs unpacking and developing awareness of interconnected perspectives and challenges. However, as researchers, there is not always a chance to fully prepare or self-reflect on the processes and experiences. This book raises awareness of key multidimensional aspects of social justice, such as power, privilege, trust, insider-outsiderness, ethics, arts-based, co-produced, and decolonial research. The authors connect theory and conceptual constructs with practical in-field realities, guiding researchers through the dynamic, evolving steps to give voice to and promote social justice practices in research.

The book includes the following features to guide thinking for researchers and students:

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• Bolded key terms and questions for self-reflection.

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• Boxed case studies from both top international scholars and emerging scholars.

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• Glossary of key terms.

This foundational book can be used as a jumping-off point to engage and critically self-reflect about research moving us towards decolonizing research practice, creating more inclusive, equitable, and socially just research. It will be suitable for upper-level and postgraduate students and all researchers interested in qualitative methods in education and the social and behavioral sciences.

1Owning our power

DOI: 10.4324/9780429285691-2

What exactly is my power in a research study? How can I negotiate and mediate it in the research process? Many people haven’t thought about these questions directly. As researchers, we are powerful. Therefore, we can reflect on the notion that the choices we make involve consequences for those we work with. For instance, have you ever filled out a survey and wondered what would happen with your answers? Maybe you have feelings of worry, curiosity, or general interest. Have you ever wondered if somebody might share the information you post online in ways that make you feel uncomfortable or vulnerable? Our potential participants could be feeling the same way. So, what do we do about that? How do we help our participants feel better, feel as relaxed and comfortable as possible, feel okay to participate in a study with us? The answers come from building a relationship based on a space of agency and voice that is not one-sided. Instead of researchers taking information from participants, we can work with participants. In critically self-reflecting, we have opportunities to conduct research differently – to enter into a socially just process involving, for instance, a dialogical process that is a two-way reciprocal relationship of co-creating, co-implementing, and sharing knowledge.

As socially aware qualitative researchers, it’s important to be mindful of power imbalances. For instance, Western researchers have institutionalized embedded colonial power. The institution of academia contains embedded power structures. English-speaking Western academics maintain greater status than non-Western institutional researchers. And non-academic researchers, such as social justice artists or Indigenous researchers, are marginalized outside the institutional machine and the direct access to funding, policy makers, and other forms of power typically embodied in Western academia. So, we can work toward becoming more aware. Despite our decolonizing or social justice–minded intentions, the invisible hierarchy of universities still binds us (Bell & Pahl, 2018). As we increase our awareness and critical self-reflection, we can better adapt ourselves to the communities we seek to serve.

Thus, we can also improve our understanding of participants and community needs, in contrast to applying external ideas and assumptions. Imagine this scenario about making assumptions. One day you walk out of your home and trip, falling gently to the ground. It just so happens that when you lost your footing, you put your hands down and got dirt on them. As you are brushing the dirt off your hands, someone sees you with dirty hands and now clothes that are a bit muddied. What might they think of you at that moment? Maybe they can deduce you had just fallen. Perhaps they offer to help. Or perhaps they think you don’t know how to keep yourself clean, or that you don’t have enough money to buy new clothes, or – more extreme – that you don’t have clean water to wash with.

While this is a hypothetical story, we as researchers may enter a new environment and make assumptions about the community. We have an idea of what they need. Yet, the goal is to become aware that we make assumptions and inferences all the time. These are based on embedded normative values, beliefs, and practices from growing up in specific cultures and societies. So, how do we see assumptions and listen instead to the voices of those we want to work with? This chapter can enable us to become proactively aware of these assumptions to avoid them.

Fieldwork in itself is personal, and our positionality (e.g., gender, class, ethnicity) plays a role, as external and internal experiences shape who we are (Palaganas et al., 2017, p. 428). By moving away from the traditional role of objective investigator, we can embrace our position in the academic institutional structure and address any “conflicting responsibilities as researchers/protectors and activists/exposers” (Baez, 2002, p. 36). For instance, Foucault (1982) reminds us that power is not an object of possession that can be traded or given to individuals or groups; instead, it exists within relations, including those between individuals and groups. Power is an inherent aspect of researching in a multicultural, globalized context. It’s not just the power of the policies, laws, ideologies, and practices but the relationship between the researcher, community, individual participant, and the intent of the research aim and objectives. Therefore, being aware of power differences between individuals and communities, organizations, institutions, cultures, communities, and societies is central when researching multicultural contexts.

So, what do we do? How do we embrace our research while appropriately recognizing our power? And how can we best negotiate and mediate the effects of our power? Let’s take a step back to understand what it means to negotiate and mediate power. Here’s one way to define these concepts for research:

• Negotiating our power as a researcher is an ongoing process of critical self-reflection to understand ourselves relating to those we work with.
• Mediating our power as a researcher is an iterative process (one that occurs again and again) to try to reduce adverse effects of an imbalance of power.

While negotiating and working to mediate our power between the expectations of funding bodies and participants’ needs in diverse contexts, it’s useful for qualitative researchers to purposefully critically self-reflect and push for participant agency and voice to overcome power structures. Until recently, qualitative researchers have struggled with who owns the knowledge from research (Lepore et al., 2020; Court & Abbas, 2013).

Overall, this chapter deals with concepts stemming from the idea of owning our power. Power relationships change as we relate to other stakeholders, whether with other researchers, participants, community members, or institutional members. Other topics within the chapter highlight trends in emancipatory research and decolonizing knowledge to facilitate participant voice in multicultural contexts (Mertens, 2020). For example, when researching with children, there are necessary steps to consider to avoid imposing adult concepts and theories, thus impeding children’s voices (Robson & McCartan, 2016).

As you read, you can learn about power as a concept and how disciplines have explored it from theoretical and practical approaches. In an era of globalization, transnationalism, and multiculturalism, we want to develop skills to not inadvertently use our power against others, whether in face-to-face or online interactions. You will hear from researchers about their negotiation with power and ownership of it. Overall, this chapter explores how we, as qualitative researchers in multicultural, multilingual, and diverse contexts, can confront our power head-on. One such direction involves learning to critically reflect on our positionality and address our own power ethically.

1. How can we understand the changing nature of power?

Power infiltrates research and our lived worlds, affecting each of us and our interactions with one another. So, what is power?

Power is a concept, a cultural construct, and a process that affects interactions and relationships with others.

Most academics study within a particular discipline that provides ideas and definitions about the world. In anthropology, for instance, the field associates power with two different schools of thought: one stemming from Franz Boas’s concept of cultural anthropology in the United States and one from British social anthropology. Power is an inclusive part of the cultural construction of society and was often not discussed systematically (Duranti et al., 2003). In the British concept of social anthropology, power focused on “social order and this implied a special interest in social forces like political power” (Schoenmakers, 2012, p. 49). And yet, we can move beyond a purely disciplinary perspective in how we define and understand power in qualitative research, as Bhattacharya (2020) suggests in “hybridized interdisciplinary work.” (We will further discuss crossing disciplinary boundaries in Chapter 5.)

Power is particularly noticeable when we are confronted by difference. For instance, a researcher conducting a study with young children who are also homeless would immediately notice an age difference and status difference. Other differences, though, may be less noticeable. One of our first steps as socially just researchers is to become aware of our power. We can ask ourselves what our relationship is to other people and institutions. We can ask ourselves what our relationship is to the communities we participate in and research within. For instance, you can think about your own life and ask yourself, do I have a role where others look up to me? In my family, school, or workplace?

Now think about stereotypes about where you live (e.g., region of the world, country, city, area of town). Are these stereotypes positive, negative, neutral? In what ways? You can think about how you present yourself. What do other people tend to think when they see you? Think here about how you present your gender, what your height suggests, or your skin tone as some ways to start thinking about your positionality and power within a community. By continually asking ourselves questions relating to the concept of power, we are taking steps in understanding, negotiating, and meditating challenges of power in qualitative research.

2. Do we understand ourselves?

Our background, the purpose of our research, and our agenda, affects our research. Another way to say this is that our positionality influences inquiry and those we work with. For qualitative researchers, particularly those working in multicultural, multilingual, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• How is social justice foundational in qualitative research? An introduction
• 1 Owning our power
• 2 Unpacking the meaning and practice of trust
• 3. Uncovering the spectrum of insider-outsiderness
• 4. Awareness in social justice and transformative research
• 5 Crossing disciplinary boundaries within the research team
• 6 Moving between face-to-face and online engagement
• 7 Integrating the arts with collaboration and co-production
• 8 Applying social justice in research and practice in multicultural contexts
• Glossary
• Index