Paper: Power and positionality: negotiating insider/outsider status within and across cultures

Power and positionality: negotiating insider/outsider status within and across cultures

20 NOVEMBER 2017

Sharan B. Merriam, Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Ming-Yeh Lee, Youngwha Kee, Gabo Ntseane & Mazanah Muhamad

International Journal of Lifelong Education Vol. 20 , Iss. 5,2001

Reference

Merriam, S. )., Johnson-Bailey, J. )., Lee, M. )., Kee, Y. )., Ntseane, G. )., & Muhamad, M. ). (2001). Power and positionality: Negotiating insider/outsider status within and across cultures. , 20(5), 405-416. doi:10.1080/02601370120490

My Summary

Some research, like feminism and participatory action research, a researcher should understand their positionality as ‘insider and/or outsider’. The positionality will impact on power and accessibility. Being an insider, as female, local people and Islam might give me advantages to build trust, openness, and rapport with HIV-positive women in my country, while being an outsider, an HIV-negative female, and an academics might halt my accessibility to this hidden population, however, as an outsider, I might benefit to learn more, 'to open my ear wider', and 'to listen with an emphaty', because my participants will explain me more about their life as they assume I might not understand how to be an HIV-positive women, mother, and widow. Furthermore, to be an outsider, I will learn to listen and listen to learn from my participants.

In term of power, I believe that ‘power’ will impact on my position during my research process. Power is created and negotiated during the research process.  In feminist research, how I can position myself ‘I and my participants’ have an equal relationship.  In a participatory action research, how I position myself as also a participant in the research process. We work together to construct new knowledge related to HIV vulnerability of HIV among women of childbearing age in Indonesia, for instance.

Experts believed that position yourself as an insider or outsider will impact on what you see and understand related to some condition. A knowledge was generated of different nature. Finally, I believe that multiple roles of a researcher, as an insider or outsider will result in knowledge production, construction, and representation during my fieldwork. In other words, by understanding my positonality will impact on my data generation and data analysis.

Abstract
Early discussions of insider/outsider status assumed that the researcher was predominately an insider or an outsider and that each status carried with it certain advantages and disadvantages. More recent discussions have unveiled the complexity inherent in either status and have acknowledged that the boundaries between the two positions are not all that clearly delineated. Four case studies - a Black woman interviewing other Black women, Asian graduate students in the US interviewing people from ‘back home’, an African professor learning from African businesswomen, and a cross-cultural team studying aging in a nonWestern culture - are used as the database to explore the complexities of researching within and across cultures. Positionality, power, and representation proved to be useful concepts for exploring insider/outsider dynamics.

Conclusion of the journal

What an insider ‘sees’ and ‘understands’ will be different from, but as valid as what an outsider understands. As Lewis (1973: 590) recognized more than 25 years ago, ‘If anthropology is to adapt to the realities of the modern world, it will be necessary to approach the study . . .through a multiplicity of perspectives as these are influenced by different interests and needs. The views of both insider and outsider must be accepted as legitimate attempts to understand the nature of culture’. We would argue that drawing from contemporary perspectives on insider/outsider status, that in the course of a study, not only will the researcher (p. 415)experience moments of being both insider and outsider, but that these positions are relative to the cultural values and norms of both the researcher and the participants. Narayan (1993: 679) captures the interactivity of positionality, power, and knowledge with his discussion of ‘positioned knowledges and partial perspectives’. He writes, ‘To acknowledge particular and personal locations is to admit the limits of one’s purview from these positions. It is also to undermine the notion of objectivity, because from particular locations all understanding becomes subjectively based and forged through interactions within fields of power relations’. Through reflecting on the experiences of a Black woman interviewing Black women, Asians interviewing people ‘from home’, an African scholar interviewing local businesswomen, and a cross-cultural team studying ageing and learning in a non-western culture, we hope that we have helped uncover the intricacies of claiming an insider or outsider status. A closer look at these fieldwork experiences revealed multiple insider/outsider positionalities and complex power dynamics, factors bearing on knowledge construction and representation in the research process. (416)

Important direct quotation:

• Critical and feminist theory, postmodernism, multiculturalism, participatory and action research are now framing our understanding of insider/ outsider issues. In particular, the reconstruing of insider/outsider status in terms of one’s positionality vis-a`-vis race, class, gender, culture and other factors, offer us better tools for understanding the dynamics of researching within and across one’s culture. (p.405)
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• The purpose of this article is to explore issues of power and positionality when conducting research within one’s own culture and across cultural boundaries. To anchor this discussion in actual practice, we first present four short ‘tales from the field’ (Van Maanen 1988) in the voices of the researchers as they negotiate their insider/outsider status. (p. 406)
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• In the following cases, a Black woman interviewed other Black women, two Asians in the US interviewed others in the US from their homeland, an African woman studied businesswomen in her culture, and a cross-cultural team investigated ageing in a non-western culture. In each case, researchers were challenged to examine their assumptions about access, power relationships, and commonality of experience. (p.406)
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• The participants and researcher held similar views on race and gender issues. ‘There were silent understandings, culture-bound phrases that did not need interpretation, and non-verbalized answers conveyed with hand gestures and facial expressions’ (Johnson-Bailey 1999: 669). All of the women in the study possessed an understanding of societal hierarchical forces that shaped and determined their existence. They identified racism as the specific dominating factor, and while race was never raised as an issue in the interview process, race and the knowledge of living in a race-conscious society was a factor that researcher and participants shared. 
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• It is an understanding of race, albeit through different means and at different ages, that unites the black women studied and provides a common ground of understanding and analysis that benefited me as a researcher who shared the same racial background . . . There were several main areas of similarity that linked the participant and researcher narratives: self-esteem, self-doubt, guilt concerning time spent away from the family . . . It was a shared issue of womanhood that the respondents and I spoke of in synchrony. (p.407)
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• Interviewing ‘my own people’: Asians interviewing Asians away from home--> As part of their graduate work in the United States, Drs. Youngwha Kee from Korea, and Ming-Yeh Lee from Taiwan interviewed people from their own culture also living in the US. While access was assumed to be relatively easy due to a common language and culture, other factors, including certain cultural values, created problems in collecting and interpreting the data. (407) When interviewing ‘away from home’, the mutually perceived homogeneity can create a sense of community which can enhance trust and openness throughout the research process.-->Ming-Yeh found she had an endless list of potential interviewees referred by acquaintances. Many told her ‘it’s my pleasure to help out another person from the homeland’, or ‘this is the least I can do for a fellow Taiwanese Chinese’. Youngwha did not have such easy access to Koreans living in the US, perhaps because she was studying their reasons for not participating in adult education. Also, compared to her, the respondents were from a lower economic status and had relatively low levels of education; a few were illegal immigrants. In the rigidly hierarchical Korean culture, Youngwha’s status as a doctoral student in the US was perceived as more prestigious than that of her respondents; several refused co-operation and some treated Youngwha as an outsider to their community. Her ‘outsider’ status was further underscored by being a Christian; gaining access to non-Christians, especially Buddhists who represent Korean traditional religion, proved difficult. Finally, Ming- Yeh feels that her years of overseas experience and feminist identity had compromised her insider status, requiring her participants to provide additional persuasion or instruction to assure her understanding. (408) --> Some of her female participants often began their stories of gender discrimination with caveats such as ‘You may not see this, but in the isolated village I used to live in . . .’ or ‘You may not understand but many families in my community . . .’. Ming-Yeh concludes that she had ‘oversimplified the binary power relationship between the researcher and the researched, and overlooked the multi-dimensional power relationship shaped by the prevailing cultural values, gender, educational background and seniority’. As one woman said, ‘switch off the tape because what I am going to say is just woman to woman talk’. (p.408)
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• Being an insider was not without problems because of the interlocking nature of culture, gender and power. For example, the use of cultural understandings through language, proverbs and non-verbal expressions to explain new business concepts was assumed to convey meaning to the researcher. But as Kondo (1990: 300–301) observes, ‘these cultural meanings are themselves multiple and contradictory . . .. They cannot be understood without reference to historical, political and economic discourses’. (p.409)
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• During fieldwork the researcher’s power is negotiated, not given. Gabo’s academic status was not a threat to the women who had comparatively low levels of education. In fact, her being at the university was perceived as less rewarding than being a small businesswoman. Age was also a factor. Often older businesswomen offered suggestions on how she could best talk to the younger ones and what information was important for the ‘book’ about their stories. Similarly, those younger than the researcher expected her to spend more time giving them advice on unrelated topics. The businesswomen also felt that Gabo’s questions were trivial – as a middle-aged woman in their culture she should already know these things. This led Gabo to step out of her ‘insider’s boots’ and emphasize that her professors at the university in the US where she was studying knew little about their culture, and their explanations were for them, not her. (409)
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• As an insider then, Gabo was expected to accept group interviews. As one sewing businesswoman stressed, ‘I can not answer questions for the other person when they are here. I am the owner of the business and general manager but other people are responsible for other things in this business’. Group interviews have a direct impact on translation and interpretation. With group interviews, the researcher has to determine if responses from other people are part of the interview; if so, whose ‘story’ is being told?  (409) ‘Do all these people have to be here?’; collecting data as a cross-cultural team
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• As a cross-cultural team, we learned to draw on the strengths of insider and outsider positions, minimizing, we hoped, some of the drawbacks. As an insider, Mazanah could utilize her knowledge of this status and hierarchy-conscious culture to negotiate access through village elders, work supervisors, and revered family members. At the same time, my outsider status rendered me something of a curiosity and some agreed to be interviewed so they could have a close encounter with a ‘white lady’. (409)
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• Positionality, power, and representation
• It has commonly been assumed that being an insider means easy access, the ability to ask more meaningful questions and read non-verbal cues, and most importantly, be able to project a more truthful, authentic understanding of the culture under study. On the other hand, insiders have been accused of being inherently biased, and too close to the culture to be curious enough to raise provocative questions. The insider’s strengths become the outsider’s weaknesses and vice-versa. The outsider’s advantage lies in curiosity with the unfamiliar, the ability to ask taboo questions, and being seen as non-aligned with subgroups thus often getting more information. However, as the above scenarios demonstrate, these characterizations of insider/outsider are far too simple. (411)
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• Recently, Banks (1998: 5), arguing from a multicultural perspective, points out that we are all members of cultural communities where the interpretation of our life experiences ‘is mediated by the interaction of a complex set of status variables, such as gender, social class, age, political affiliation, religion, and region’ (411)
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• power is something to not only be aware of, but to negotiate in the research process’ (p. 413)
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• POWER--> More recent analyses have exposed the power-based dynamics inherent in any and all research and have suggested that power is something to not only be aware of, but to negotiate in the research process. In particular, feminist scholars are concerned with foregrounding women’s experiences, with participants having an equal relationship with the researcher, with the research experience being empowering, and with a more interactive relationship with the reader/consumer of the research (Lather 1991, Cotterill 1992, Reinharz 1992). Participatory action research also focuses on the political empowerment of people through participation in knowledge construction. Participants are colleagues in the research process, equally in control of the research (Merriam and Simpson 2000).  (p.413). -->The insider, it was thought, had better access to ‘the introspective meanings of experience within a status or a group’ (Merton 1978: 41). The outsider though, could see things not evident to insiders, and render a more objective portrayal of the reality under study. (414)
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• Constructivists argue that knowledge/reality/truth is constructed by individuals and by human communities, while postmodernists assert that there is no single truth or reality independent of the knower. Paz (1992: 154) captures how a postmodern view of knowledge construction is underscored in the many truths in iterations of the same text:
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• On the one hand, the world is presented to us as a collection of similarities, on the other as a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it. Translations of translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely original because language itself in its essence is already a translation first from a non-verbal world, and then because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase. (415)

FURTHER READINGS AND SOURCES

Video of Positionality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9wVgU9Ppk8

Title: Insiders and outsiders: A chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge

REference: Merton, R. K. (1972). Insiders and outsiders: A chapter in the sociology of knowledge. American journal of sociology, 78(1), 9-47.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/225294

Abstract

The social relevance of perspective established in the sociology of knowledge becomes evident during times of great social change and conflict. Conflict makes for a total functionalizing of thought which is interpreted only in terms of its alleged social, economic, political, or psychological sources and functions. Deepened social conflict today renews the relevance of an old problem in the sociology of knowledge: socially patterned differentials in access to new knowledge. As groups and collectivities become more self-conscious and solidary under conditions of social polarization, their members tend to claim unique or privileged access to certain kinds of knowledge. This can be described as the doctrine of the Insider, which includes the correlative claim that the Outsider has a structurally imposed incapacity for access to such knowledge. Outsider doctrine involves complementary claims of access to knowledge grounded on the assumption of socially based detachment. The rationale of the Insider doctrine is examined, with special references to the advocates of a "black social science," a case taken as prototypical for other Insider doctrines based on sex, age, religion, nationality, etc. Structural analysis in terms of status sets indicates that Insider and Outsider doctrines based on affiliation with a single collectivity or occupancy of a single status are necessarily unstable and inadequate. The paper concludes by examining the distinctive interactive roles of Insiders and Outsiders that involve interchange, tradeoffs, and syntheses in the formation of social knowledge

Bank, James A, 1998, The lives and values of researchers: implications for educating citizens in a multicultural society.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X027007004

p.7-8

Race and gender also interact in complex ways to influence knowlege production. Collins (1990) discusses ways in which gender interacts with race to provide African American women with a unique standpoint, which she calls the ‘outsider within” perspective. Collins (1995) argues that African American women “as a group, experience a different world” than those who are not black and female. Second, these experieces stimulate a distictvve black feminist consicousness concerning that material reality” )p.33). she states that marginalised groups not only experience a different reality but interpret that reality differently.

Depending on the situations and contexts, we are all both insiders and outsiders (Merton, 1972). Also a researchr’s insider-outsider status may change over the course of a life-time, either because the institutionalized knowledge and paradigms within the studied community change or because the researchr’s value commitments are significantly modified. This typology is not ncessarily a general description of a researcher over the course of hero r his career. P 7

A typology of crosscultural researchers

Merton’s insider-outsider and Collin’s outsider-within conceptualizations help to clarify and add needed complexity to the ideological debates and discussions about whose knowledge is authentic, who can know what, and who speaks for whom. Another important dimension of these questions is the relationship between knowledge and power. For example: what factors determine the knowledge systems and canos that become institutionalised or marginalized in mainstrema instituions.

Type of researcher	Description
The indigenous-insider	This individual endoreses the unique values, perspectives, bahaviors, beliefs, and knowledge of his or her indigenous community and culture and is perceived by people within the community as a legitimate community member who can speak with authority about it
The indigenous-outsider	This individual was socialized within his or her indigenous community but has experienced high levels of cultural assimilation into an outsider or oppotional culture. The values, beliefs, perspectives, and knowldege of this individual are identical to those of the outside community. The indigenous is perceived by indigenous people in the community as an outsider
The external-insider	This individual wes socialized within another culture and acquires its beliefs, values, behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge. However, because of his or her unique expereinces, the individual rejects many of th evalues, beliefs, and knowledge claims within his or her indigenous community and endorses those of the studied community. The external-insider is viewed by the new community as an “adopted” insider.
The external-outsider	The external-outsider is socialized within a community different from the one in which he or she is doing research. the external-outsider has a partial understanding of and little appreciation from the values, perspectives, and knowledge of the community he or she is studying and consequently often misunderstands and miinterprets the behaviours within the studied community.