What is in a name? Applying critical race and feminist lenses to make knowledge production processes visible

The ‘positionality paragraph’ is a ubiquitous part of many a doctoral thesis and journal paper. It tends to list a series of identity attributes that cover the gender, age, nationality and possibly race of the author. The meaning coded into these represent an assumed shared understanding between reader and writer, whereby there is an unspoken invisible communication that suggests one’s gender (for example) affected access to respondents, influenced data analysis and in turn affected the claims one makes of data. The invisibility of epistemological reflexivity drives these bland assuming paragraphs and hides the insidious workings of gender and race particularly in the production of knowledge.

In my paper, What is in a name? How caste names produce situated knowledge, published in Gender, Place and Culture last week, I make visible the reflexive process that reveals the role of gender, race and caste in creating partial and situated knowledge of housing tenure in India. Through the use of three vignettes, two on fieldwork encounters and one on comments from an anonymous reviewer, I examine expectations of knowledge coded in my name and their effects on access to respondents, the disclosure of data and subsequent claims to validity. The paper utilises Bourdieu’s concept of doxa – a pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge – to untangle the effect of names on the research process and on knowledge production. It also applies a critical race lens to problematise the separation of epistemological reflexivity from discussions on positionality.

While I hope all readers will gain something from the paper, it is written for feminist researchers of colour who conduct research away from ‘home’ to help guide us to think through the ways in which we are situated as researchers and the identities to which we are subjected within research that services the western academy. The position from which I reflect and the conclusions I draw are largely absent in the field of critical feminist work on positionality, which is overwhelmingly written by and for white western feminists.

As I write in the paper, “The central purpose of the article is driven by Aisha Giwa’s (2015) critique that most discussions on positionality in research centre on the western academy and the positionalities of white feminist western researchers, and her subsequent call for epistemological reflections on methodology from scholars of colour which might provide different ways of thinking through positionality in fieldwork. Giwa’s discussion touches much larger points that I try to engage with through this article though not directly in this article: the positioning of black and brown bodies in geography research particularly, as research subject in a place and rarely research producers; and for those black and brown bodies that produce knowledge, discouragingly limited conversations about race, culture, epistemology and positionality in social science research, including an acknowledgement that a relationship exists between them and what this relationship might look like.” My paper is a small contribution to a large challenge.

References

Giwa, A. 2015. ‘Insider/Outsider Issues for Development Researchers from the Global South.’ Geography Compass 9(6):316-326.

Patel, K. 2017. ‘What is in a name? How caste names produce situated knowledge.’ Gender, Place and Culture. Doi.10.1080/0966369X.2017.1372385