Researching ′Race′ and Ethnicity

Methods, Knowledge and Power

Yasmin Gunaratnam

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761972877, 9780761972860
• eBook ISBN: 9781446229118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

?Gunaratnam?s framework is rich in its examination and synthesis of approaches to the study of "race"… the reward for the reader who does pick up the book is that the author deftly articulates the complicated view of research on "race" first from the quantitative perspective and then skilfully moves the reader to issues of "race" in qualitative research? - Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism

?This is a welcome book for those engaged in policy and empirical work with an active research agenda… there is a level of theoretical sophistication in the text which is often missing from texts concerned with methods in this area? - Race Relations Abstracts

`The particular value of this book to readers lies in the discussion of "race", ethnicity and research issues within a political and social context. The author states her intention to explore some of the theoretical and practical dilemmas of researching "race" and ethnicity. This is, without question, achieved. I recommend it as essential reading for those concerned with increasing their awareness of issues relating to race, ethnicity and research practice? - Nurse Researcher

?This is a thought-provoking and challenging book which demonstrated the fractured and fluid nature of difference and power in the research process. Importantly it offers a guide to the ways in which research can be effectively and productively used in challenging the status quo? - Diversity in Health and Social Care

Researching `Race? and Ethnicity provides an innovative discussion of the methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of doing qualitative research that is informed by questions of `race?, ethnicity and social difference. By identifying and challenging `categorical thinking? and many longstanding assumptions about the meanings of `race? and ethnicity, the author gets to the heart of many of the everyday dilemmas and difficulties that researchers confront in the field, but are rarely theorised or openly discussed.

Yasmin Gunaratnam?s insistence that `race? and ethnicity are a significant part of all qualitative research, and are not the `specialist? concerns of those whose work is explicitly focussed upon `race?, provokes a radical rethinking of current methological debates. How do racial and ethnic categories inform our approaches to research? How does the racialised indentity of the researcher and the research participants affect the research interaction and the knowledge that we produce? What are the assumptions that are made about racialised subjectivity and inter-subjectivity? How can we make sense of accounts in which `race? and ethnicity are silent or are non-manifest? How can we work ethically across difference?

In examining these and other questions, the wide-ranging discussions in the book are animated by examples drawn from the author?s ethnographic research with white and minoritized research participants. Through these examples readers will be able to engage with some of the complexities of research relationships, power relations and ethical concerns about engagement, disconnection and complicity in research. The attention that the book gives to the excluded experiences of minoritized researchers will be of particular value to many readers.

Researching `Race? and Ethnicity is essential reading for students and academics in the social sciences.

PART

Introduction – thinking through knowledge, methods and power

ONE

	CHAPTER
Researching ‘race’ and ethnicity	1

This book is about methodology, the production of knowledge and the politics of doing research on ‘race’ and ethnicity, and their interrelations with other forms of social difference such as gender, class and disability. It aims to address some of the dilemmas and the ‘stuck places’ (Lather, 2001a) of research – not so much in the prescriptive, task-oriented style of many methods books, but in a way that is process oriented and about a thinking-through of some of the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions involved in the process of doing qualitative research that is concerned with recognizing difference and with pursuing social justice. A central concern that runs throughout the discussions in this book is how we produce knowledge about difference, and how what we know (or what we claim to know) is caught up with specific histories and relations of power (Foucault, 1977). A particular aim is to develop a critical and a theoretically informed approach to qualitative research methods, which will bring together ideas and thinking from a range of different fields, particularly post-structuralist, feminist, critical ‘race’, and postcolonial theory.

Put simply, a narrative thread that runs throughout the different chapters in this book is about making connections between research methods, lived experience, knowledge and politics. This theme is itself entangled with a central tension in the study of ‘race’ and ethnicity. This tension concerns the vigorous debates about the meanings of the categories of ‘race’ and ethnicity that have spanned a spectrum of approaches in the social sciences (see Aspinall, 2001; Bulmer and Solomos, 1996; Solomos and Back, 1994). These approaches can be caricatured as ranging from ‘primodial’ models that see ‘race’ and ethnicity as being characterized by ‘core’, inherent experiences with some degree of independence from social contexts, to social constructionist approaches that argue that ‘race’ and ethnicity involve socially produced, heterogeneous and dynamic processes of being and becoming (see Brah, 1996; Omi and Winart 1994).

‘Conceptually, “race” is not a scientific category The differences attributable to “race” within a population are as great as that between racially defined populations. “Race” is a political and social construct. It is the organizing discursive category around which has been constructed a system of socio-economic power, exploitation and exclusion – i.e., racism. However, as a discursive practice, racism has its own “logic” (Hall, 1990). It claims to ground the social and cultural differences which legitimize racialized exclusion in genetic and biological differences: Le., in Nature. This “naturalizing effect” appears to make racial difference a fixed, scientific “fact”, unresponsive to change or reformist social engineering.

[…] “Ethnicity” by contrast, generates a discourse where difference is grounded in cultural and religious features … [however] … the articulation of difference with Nature (biology and the genetic) is present, but displaced through kinship and inter-marriage.’ (Hall, 2000: 222–3, emphasis in original)

Readers who are familiar with the different debates and approaches to what concepts of ‘race’ and ethnicity mean, will have noticed that in the discussion so far, I have used the terms together and interchangeably. This is not due to a failure to recognize any important analytic distinctions between the terms. Rather, where I use the terms together I am indicating and working with the dense interrelations between the categories (see Hall, 2000). The much used, general conceptual distinction between ‘race’ and ethnicity is that ‘race’ evokes a biological and genetic referent, and ethnicity refers to cultural and religious difference and kinship (see Hall, 2000; Mulholland and Dyson, 2001). However, such distinctions are being challenged and re-thought. Stuart Hall has argued convincingly that contemporary diasporic ways of life, and multiculturalism in particular, have served to disrupt the binary opposition between the biological and the cultural in the meanings of ‘race’ and ethnicity. He is insistent that:

Biological racism privileges markers like skin colour, but those signifiers have always also been used, by discursive extension, to connote social and cultural differences … The biological referent is therefore never wholly absent from discourses of ethnicity, though it is more indirect. The more ‘ethnicity’ matters, the more its characteristics are represented as relatively fixed, inherent within a group, transmitted from generation to generation, not just by culture and education, but by biological inheritance, stabilized above all by kinship and endogamous marriage rules that ensure that the ethnic group remains genetically, and therefore culturally ‘pure’. (Hall, 2000: 223)

The important point that Hall makes is that processes of biological and cultural differentiation through the categories of ‘race’ and ethnicity are not two separate systems of meaning (‘discourses’), but are ‘racism’s two registers’ (2000: 223). This recognition is very important politically. It acknowledges the interrelations between the two ‘registers’ of biology and culture in processes of giving ‘race’ and ethnicity meaning and bringing them to life in the social world. And it can enable analysis and empirical research to examine how biological and cultural discourses might be variously ordered and identified with by different groups within specific social contexts.

The recognition that there can be some degree of overlap between the meanings of ‘race’ and ethnicity, and between the very different theoretical approaches to the categories (Smaje, 1997), is not unproblematic for empirical research. As researchers we need to be able to address and to account for the specific relationships between our analytic categories and subjective, social and material relations. Key questions here are: can we have an empirical approach to ‘race’ and ethnicity that is not reductionist and does not reify (concretize) the dynamic, interrelated and situated meanings of lived experiences of ‘race’ and ethnicity? How can we make decisions about the points at which we fix the meanings of racial and ethnic categories in order to do empirical research? How can we make judgements about the epistemological and the political repercussions of such decisions? How might we use empirical research to challenge and transform, rather than to reproduce, racial thinking?

SOCIAL DISCOURSES AND EXPERIENCE

In this chapter I want to give specific attention to these questions by engaging with some of the different ways in which ‘race’ and ethnicity have been approached in research, and the implications that such approaches have for methodological practices and the production of knowledge. Most often the differences between conceptual approaches are represented across a series of divides, such as that between the pursuit of race equality and the recognition of difference, and between theory and lived experience. I have become particularly frustrated with the often-cited opposition between social constructionist approaches and those materialist, realist or empiricist approaches that are said to be grounded in ‘real’ experience, as if experience somehow has a life of its own (see Brah et al., 1999; Wuthnow, 2002; Hemmings, 2002).

Alongside those such as Stuart Hall (2000), Avtar Brah (1996) and Gail Lewis (2000), I believe that social constructionist insights, particularly those influenced by post-structuralism, can be put to valuable use in understanding how experience is brought into being and has effects in specific social and interactional contexts. I also believe that to fail to recognize the contingency and the ambivalent complexity of lived experience maintains an essentialist view of ‘race’ and ethnicity, where experience can be seen to be wholly (pre)determined by racial and ethnic categories, that are themselves construed as unchanging ‘essences’, cordoned off from social, material and emotional relations (however, see Smaje, 1997 for a critique of social constructionist approaches).

In broadly similar terms, Hemmings makes a forceful case for the importance of post-structuralist epistemologies (or theories of knowledge) in making sense of the lived experiences of bisexual subjects. She argues that:

the failure to develop models of experience as partial, fragmented, and contradictory limits our ability to make sense of and thus transform gendered social reality. A feminist epistemology that maintains a priori assumptions about what constitutes gendered or sexual experience, and thus subjective location, is necessarily attuned only to dominant gendered and sexual subject formations, and is ill-equipped to produce ethical research on subjects whose knowledges are produced from a variety of different social locations. (Hemmings, 2002: 38)

Hemmings’s argument in relation to the need to recognize experience as partial and contradictory and to produce ethical research that is responsive to subjugated knowledges, is clearly relevant to research concerned with ‘race’ and ethnicity. Yet, there can also be difficulties with using post-structuralist insights in research that is concerned with social justice and with challenging racism (Alexander and Mohanty, 1997; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). For example, in the present context of postcolonialism and multiculturalism, ‘race’ and ethnicity are significant categories of meaning and of experience for all individuals. It is also the case that self and group identifications among minoritized people have been, and continue to be a necessary and politically valuable tool in resisting racism and in collective mobilization (Clifford, 2000). In this regard, Alexander and Mohanty make an important point in drawing attention to how post-structuralist attempts to pluralize and disrupt the stability of categories of ‘race’, class, gender and sexuality can:

foreclose any valid recuperation of these categories or the social relations through which they are constituted. If we dissolve the category of race, for instance, it becomes difficult to claim the experience of racism. (Alexander and Mohanty, 1997: xvii)

The conceptualization of experience and of social location have been the subject of intense enquiry and debate among feminist and postcolonial theorists (Lewis, G., 2000; Mohanty, 1992; Scott, 1992). While these concepts have constituted significant challenges to the use of post-structuralist ideas in research, there are researchers who have demonstrated how post-structuralist critiques of essentialism can be used in empirical research to generate more complex insights into the production of social location and experience (Brah, 1996; Lewis, G., 2000). Such work, in demonstrating the ways in which experiences of ‘race’ and ethnicity (among other social differences) are mediated by the continual negotiation of personal, interactional and social dynamics, show how social discourses can have effects upon experience and can also be questioned and contradicted by experience. As Wuthnow suggests: ‘While hegemonic representations may categorize and define, there is always resistance to these definitions, and it is the subjective agency embodied in this resistance which constitutes the possibility for oppositional discourses’ (2002: 194).

My approach to ‘race’ and ethnicity in this is book works with these tensions in the application of post-structuralist insights to qualitative research. It is concerned with using post-structuralist critiques of essentialism in research, whilst also seeking to legitimate the everyday ‘situated voices’ (Lewis, G., 2000) and experience of research participants and researchers as grounds for political action. In very broad terms, this approach recognizes the dynamic constitution of the meanings of ‘race’ and ethnicity through social discourse and through the subjective investments of individuals (see Brah, 1996 and Hall, 1996). It recognizes that social discourses are enmeshed in lived experience and institutional and social power relations that have emotional, material and embodied consequences for individuals and for groups. In this sense, I do not theorize social discourses as being outside of experience, subjectivity or bodies; rather, I suggest that social discourses and lived experiences are co-constituted – they intermingle and inhabit one another.

This recognition of the mutual constitution of embodied experience and social discourse can be problematic for qualitative researchers, particularly if we are concerned with breaking out of circular arguments and those arguments in which researchers are positioned as being outside of the flows between experience and discursive contexts. Drawing upon feminist research, I will argue for a radical reflexivity in research that involves rigorous attention to explicating the ways in which research participants and researchers are socially situated (Haraway, 1988), at the same time as making our research accountable to the past (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999). My argument, in relation to this latter aspect of reflexivity, is that researchers have to examine and trace how research is entangled with wider social and historical relations, and involves the ideological construction of the subject of its enquiry (Burman, 1992). The idea that research is a part of social and historical relations, and produces rather than simply reflects what we are researching, is encapsulated in the conceptualization of research as a discursive practice.

The significance of conceptualizing research on ‘race’ and ethnicity as a discursive practice is that it opens up analytic opportunities for researchers to interrogate our current understandings, interests and research practices, and asks how these might be a part of what Levine has called ‘epistemology as political control’ (2000: 17). This process of interrogation is important for three reasons. First, it challenges radically a view of research as an unlocated and transparent reflection of some pre-existing, stable ‘reality’. Second, it makes our analyses more complex as the research task becomes one in which we need to make sense of knowledge as an emergent property of the interactions between and among differently constituted and located individuals, who include the researcher (Hemmings, 2002). And third, it situates our knowledge claims in relation to historical and social relations.

CONTEXTUALIZING RESEARCH ON ‘RACE’ AND ETHNICITY

In developing my argument about the value of understanding research on ‘race’ and ethnicity as a discursive practice, it is important to put research into an historical context, so that we might understand something more about how the categories of ‘race’ and ethnicity can be thought of as social constructs. As several theorists have shown (Bonnett, 1998; Gilroy, 2000), there are close connections between the nature and aims of research concerned with questions of ‘race’ and ethnicity, and the social contexts in which research is conceptualized, developed and practised.

‘Race’ as a concept based upon notions of biological difference, and ethnicity as connoting cultural difference and kinship, have taken on particular, interdependent and plural meanings throughout history. Although certain approaches to researching ‘race’ and ethnicity have been dominant at particular historical moments, this dominance has never been all encompassing (see the pioneering work of Du Bois, 1899; 1903). The field of research on ‘race’ and ethnicity therefore is – and has always been – a contested and variegated one (Bonnett, 1998), and there is still considerable work to do in excavating marginalized, oppositional scholarship that has challenged and interrupted, and has also sometimes ended up being complicit with oppressive and racist forms of knowledge production.

In mapping the historical topography of research on ‘race’ and ethnicity, four main ideas underpin the arguments made in the following sections. These are that:

• ‘race’ and ethnicity are not ‘objective’, stable, homogenous categories, but are produced and animated by changing, complicated and uneven interactions between social processes and individual experience
• colonialism, and the ‘idea of Europe’, was a founding moment of racial categorization (‘racialization’) and of classifying and reducing ways of being to visible, embodied and hierarchically ordered forms of difference (Hesse, 1997)
• contemporary approaches to qualitative research on ‘race’ and ethnicity are marked by these colonial legacies of racial categorization that we need to examine, recognize, challenge and undermine
• postcolonialism, as an allegory for a movement beyond the centring of the West/No...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Recognitions
• Part I: Introduction – Thinking Through Knowledge, Methods and Power
• Part II: Debates and Dilemmas in ‘Interracial’ Research
• Part III: The Doings and Undoings of ‘Race’ – Researching Lived Experience
• References
• Index