Written by Vera Spangler (PhD Researcher, University of Surrey)
How we know, inhabit, experience, and move through worlds is shaped by our fluid and intersectional identities, which emerge relationally and situationally. This stance holds that our positionalities are not static, nor are they total; rather, they extend beyond the boundaries of ourselves and are a relational formation of co-constituted nature. The knowledge we produce about our shared worlds is necessarily informed by our position in relation to different social structures. Researcher positionalities are foundational and intertwined with all aspects of doing qualitative (and particularly ethnographic) research, including knowledge production. My intent in this blog post is to argue for a kind of reflexivity that acknowledges the actual dynamics and situational understandings of positionalities when conducting research with international students. Further, I would argue that research with international students must move beyond documenting their challenges and deficits; we must begin to think more comparatively and engage in more multi-sited studies and cross-country collaborations to develop transferable evidence about how specific issues are experienced between different groups of international students. As regards, I will also reflect here on what positionality may mean when conducting research across national boundaries.
Who we are, what we are, how we act, and relate to one another
I came to realise that my academic interest developed primarily because of various chances to experience somewhere different, and so, I shall begin with a spatial, geographic positioning of myself. I am originally from Germany. After I graduated fromhigh school, I spent one year in New York as an au pair. Impacted by this experience, I decided to study a European teacher training degree in English and art. A semester abroad was mandatory as the focus of the degree was on bilingual teaching and learning, intercultural competences, and cross-cultural learning. So, I became, for a brief four months, an Erasmus student in Copenhagen, Denmark. The semester abroad had great impact on my personal and academic development. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I set up home in Copenhagen again. This time as a master’s student within the field of educational anthropology. Copenhagen became my home for the past four years; I worked in different research assistant positions after my master’s, jumped from institution to institution and tried to navigate this very familiar yet foreign place. Now, since the beginning of this year, I am an international postgraduate research student and live in the UK – another world, a different place, new people, same but different me.
Writing about myself, sharing (even just so briefly) my history, path, feelings, putting myself in the centre, feels new and a little uneasy. I suppose, however, this is what it is about; the point of getting to know you, the researcher, better, developing a deeper understanding of how you influence your research, is to create a (more) faithful and honourable portrait about your participants. For example, during my planned ethnographic fieldwork with international students, I may be an insider in terms of, for instance, my own migrant status. Yet, my privileged position of a young white woman with work and travel experiences only in the West means that my insider status does not mean insider to all experiences. I will not be able to claim to truly understand the marginalised or racialised experiences of some of the international students. At the same time, I might be a linguistic insider and may share an ethnic identity with some of the students, which may show as facilitative to seek positional spaces of cooperation and trust, however, for most of the time, I will likely find myself in a position of a cultural outsider to most of the international students as they bring various languages and backgrounds with them. Importantly, I would also like to acknowledge and encourage reflective practices about the kind of ‘emotional heaviness’ research can bring when you share experiences and close knowledge with your participants, especially since in current phases of research with international students, we can see a growing number of (particularly postgraduate) studies led by international students as researchers themselves.
A moving body through time and space
My research project is anchored in ethnographic fieldwork in the UK, Denmark, and Germany and uses different qualitative methods to study knowledge legitimacy and the role of international student mobility in the re/production of global hierarchies. For the span of one year, my work and life will happen across different international locations.
Torres‐Olave and Lee (2020) point out that although the term positionality includes a geographic, spatial dimension, in much research practice, the researcher is presented as disembodied, atemporal, and atopic. Yet, as a mobile international researcher, as a body moving through time and space, I carry memories and histories present as realities in my body, moving along with me. As our bodies move across space and in time, subjectivities shift and evolve, and a transnational dimension in one’s research has certainly implications for what local context means; it requires the researcher, as an essential aspect of (self) knowledge creation, to constantly renegotiate between self and setting, in that one likely beholds the identity norms of the previous context while having to learn those of the new. Moving across different social contexts, a researcher’s self-understanding is context responsive and mutual, and the researcher must position themselves in multidimensional ways. We may, for example, often grapple with navigating the dual position of insider and outsider, or the negotiation of multiple linguistic codes and registers. Torres‐Olave and Lee suggest that particularly comparative education researchers shall add the dimensions of time and space as a living practice to their observations as they interact with others since this would offer the possibility to make concerted effort to attend to and engage with the nuances of positionalities in more multidimensional ways that otherwise can go missing when positionality ignores embodied knowledge.
Positionality is relational, and to move beyond the more or less simple characteristics (e.g., age, gender representation, or personal experiences) of the researcher and challenge epistemological claims about universality, objectivity, and unbiased knowledge, one must engage in situational understandings of positionality which includes to reflect on how one’s positionality has affected the construction of knowledge from planning the study, to data collection, data analysis and the writing up. Critical reflections on positionality thus help to make transparent where the researcher speaks from, and, I would argue, may lead to more comprehensive analyses. Relatedly, as researchers engaging with international students, we must think more innovatively about participatory and creative research methodologies, allowing us to look through different lenses and capture different perspectives. We must involve international students more actively as co-creators and partners in the process of the enquiry, seeking to value and acknowledge their individual capabilities and knowledge.
The Research with International Students book will also include a chapter with critical reflections on international student and researcher positionalities.