Re-searching Margins

Ethics, Social Justice, and Education

Fida Sanjakdar, Gabrielle Fletcher, Amanda Keddie, Ben Whitburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000540772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Identity, power, and positionality play crucial roles in designing and implementing research critically and ethically across marginalized cultures and communities. Through four unique case studies, this book highlights the dilemmas faced by researchers in the field of education, demonstrating how they grapple with the ethics of research and with their role in the process.

Re-searching Margins: Ethics, Social Justice and Education attends to research in four specific marginalized communities, whilst also engaging in a wider dialogue about the complex theories, methodologies and practices of ethical research in communities of difference. This book examines ethical research with cultures and communities as an exchange in which both the researcher and the researched bring complex contextual and biographical factors shaped by their histories, identities, and experiences.

Drawing on the lives and research of four renowned scholars, this book will be of interest to researchers and policy makers in education who seek to engage ethically and justly with marginalized communities.

1Re-searching marginsAn introduction

Fida Sanjakdar

DOI: 10.4324/9780429346286-1

Research unease

The story behind the stories

Good stories often break rules. Like any good story, this book began with a desire to break the rules—rules Fida found that unavoidably enter into the purposes of research and its conduct but often create more conflict and drama than the research ‘plot’ desires. In the 1990s, Fida embarked on a research career and journey she hoped would bring her closer to understanding the Australian Muslim community and Islam. As a devoted and practicing Muslim, she was familiar with the religious and cultural mosaic of the Australian Muslim community, but less so with the accepted ‘academic ways’ of engaging in research with this group. For many years, she trawled through thousands of pages of qualitative research methodology texts eager to learn. Although her enthusiasm and excitement as an early career research—at the time—was unremitting, one incessant question remained unanswered for her: ‘What does a research methodology that values Muslim knowledge, understanding, wisdom, ideas, images, and insights look like?’ Frustrated with the often static and essentialist qualitative research approaches to study marginalized groups, and more significantly, the ascribing of religion and culture as a casual role in people's lives, but unperturbed to pursue a response to her incessant questions, she knew that an answer will require new thinking. So began a tumultuous journey filled with creative thinking, disciplined inquiry and theory building, and examination. She was devoted to not only explore ways in which qualitative research can better represent members of marginal, disempowered, or stigmatized groups like the Australian Muslim community but to create ethical research processes and outcomes to better support research with and about Muslims and to supplement the academic educational discourse about Muslim culture and religion. Required was a concerted consideration of ways to redress this balance. So she began exploring further ethics within research processes and in particular she concentrated on how to reconcile certain institutional procedural ethics with those that emerged from the research field.

Temple and Moran (2006) posit that questions of research ethics often arise when considerations are made about best practices to avoid or minimise the exploitation of participants. Although not an under-researched marginalized group, most research in Western dominated countries, on/with and within Muslim communities and Islam, more broadly ascribe a sense of the unknown (Powell 2018), perpetuate common misconceptions (Elbih 2015) generating fear and suspicion (von Sikorski et al. 2017). Research about this marginalized community often fails to acknowledge the heterogeneity of Muslim communities, or distinguish between cultural and religious knowledges within. This story of seeking new ways to research becomes even more complicated when reflecting on our encounters with institutional ethics committee procedures. Clashes occurred when the traditional, institutional biomedical ethics review models were applied to social science research without careful considerations of the different demands incumbent upon this research paradigm. Addressing the insensitivity to different forms of doing research within cultural contexts rather than a propensity towards a, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to ethical clearance was impossible. These experiences made it abundantly clear that what was urgently required was a reconceptualization of ethical processes, which deconstructs and breaks down a dominant, technicist, hegemonic reinforcement of doing research. Urgently required was a rethinking of an orientation toward research ethics, rather than a set of research methods, grounded in epistemic understanding and appreciation aimed for social justice and one permeating the design implementation, analysis, and dissemination process.

While this book begins with personal themes and Fida's journey, it is the addition of all our stories in this book that arguably add to the important elements that enrich this storyline. While also feeling considerable dissatisfaction with institutionalized and formalized ethical review procedures dictating education and social science research more broadly, our innovative research endeavours in our respective fields create movements and moments that challenge the primacy of hegemonic and traditionally powerful systems of research. Our stories are insights on respectful and creative interactions between the researcher and the researched and demonstrate ethical negotiations that allow for an elucidation of ‘not just what we have discovered but how we have discovered it’ (Etherington 2007, p. 601). In the details of the sequence of our own research experiences, we learn more about the ethical challenges that are faced, such as understanding insider–outsider dynamics, involvement, community participation, about multiple ways decisions were made about selecting and using different research methods. Our stories heighten the importance of ontological awareness in research with marginalized communities. Our moments of reflection and reflexivity enable for greater understandings of community epistemologies. The individual search by each of us on how research ethics can be mobilized to challenge institutional, normative, and at times ossified forms of ethical research within marginalized groups has helped us shape our research processes and encounters.

Although some common structures of educational research are maintained in each of our research journeys, our joint quest for research that addresses cultural determinism and promotes collective participatory responses is always at the forefront of our work. As we avoid idiosyncratic, subjective and potentially misleading information, our research calls for greater awareness of the subtleties with which we frame our research and ultimately gives meaning to participant experiences and the research encounter itself. Fundamental to achieving this is researching ethically the epistemic understanding and values of our research participants and ourselves. Understanding forms of knowledge and in particular, the relationship between social, political, and cultural (including religious) dynamics, beliefs, and behaviours of participants, enables more pronounced understandings of who they are as people, their realities, and stories. Who we are as researchers also becomes significant learning. This relinquishing of the role of ‘researcher as expert’ is with the aim to identify and where possible, address power imbalances in the research process to create the conditions necessary for ethical research partnerships. An epistemological driver to research, in particular, is understanding how to work with the difficult knowledge embedded within some marginalized groups, like those explored in this book, which can open doors for more ethical processes, such as cross-cultural communication, and the ability to engage in participatory decision-making with community partners. A focus on epistemology invites understanding difficult knowledge and considering alternative knowledge to assist with identifying and analyzing manifestations of power in research practices and policies. This embodies and generates understandings about complex layers and intersections within cultures and communities. Effective ethical research, required for complex and enduring relationships, is negotiated and formed. The precept of our story is therefore that of care, empathy, and humility. We suggest that ethical, competent research within, of, and for marginalized communities needs to engage with a myriad of individual and community experiences.

What is this book about?

Doing ethical research differently: Educational research as an epistemic and socially just project

Educational researchers aim to extend knowledge and understanding in all areas of educational activity and from all perspectives including learners, educators, policymakers, and the public (British Educational Research Association 2011). An important corollary to research agendas with an epistemic focus is always the issue of methodology. How chosen methodologies and data collection methods play out in the conduct of research can be highly problematic. Re-searching Margins: Ethics, Social Justice and Education is a series of interconnected essays, which focus on the research purposes and practices that promote the development of ‘new’ knowledge and understandings significant to designing and implementing ethical research within marginalized communities. In doing so, the desired research outcome is one that aims to illuminate aspects of experience as entry to conjectures about possible research alternatives and developing new ways of ‘doing’ research. With this in mind, we like to call this educational research an ‘epistemic and socially just project’. As demonstrated in this volume, a number of epistemic and socially just purposes inform the conception, conduct, and dissemination of our educational research.

The epistemic views knowledge as the substance of research and positions different knowledge generated from the research field as promoting different understandings, and meaning about the research topic. Another essential element of the epistemic in this book is the ability for individuals to maintain knowledge deemed significant to them in the current generations of the community as well the ability to maintain knowledge, adapt knowledge, and open it to reflection and change if the situation warrants. A focus on research that is committed to a social justice agenda is concerned with the application of different, and at times, difficult knowledge in ways that consciously seek to represent alternative perceptions of experience and ways of being.

With a social justice orientation and concern, this book firmly positions the researcher as fundamental to creating ethical research interactions that unearth new knowledge, capture the rich complexities of lived experiences and their assigned meaning (van Manen 1997). A social justice agenda to an epistemic focus simultaneously informs understanding of unjust structures and practices and invites community-designed ways to question, disrupt or reform agendas. Educational research then becomes a process about getting knowledge or perhaps what Griffiths (1998, p. 129) calls ‘better knowledge for social justice’. In this book, a social justice agenda ensures research integrity secures the relationship between researcher, participants, and research outcome. Recounting his own attempts at ‘emancipatory’ research, Veck (2002), concluded that:

‘In committing to social justice, I was logically bound to the pursuit of truth. If the outcome of my research was to uncover injustice, to pronounce what is wrong, then what I had to say had to reflect the reality of that social injustice with the utmost accuracy’.

(p. 534)

In this book, we suggest that the task of the ethical researcher is to focus on social justice, that is, disrupting prevailing conditions of otherness through their work, whilst simultaneously addressing concerns such as educational systems and structures that present barriers to equitable participation.

In this book, we emphasize the demarcation of the prefix ‘re’ in the word ‘re-searching’ to bring to the reader's attention that although there are many reasons for conducting research, we advocate for research that is constantly in search of, cyclical, and iterative. As researchers in the field, it is inevitable that we will engage in a search of some kind to formulate research purposes and research questions. However, in addition...