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This article analyses the implications of qualitative research on migration in terms of reflexivity and positionality. In particular, it presents research as care, revolved around three main critical nodes of reflection: the epistemological importance of emotions, intersectional positionality and the ethics of care. Drawing upon the insights concerning a qualitative research on migration in Italian shrinking areas, the contribution underlines the importance of conceiving research as a process of negotiation. Moreover, it shows how positionality in qualitative migration research is not static but flexible, and is conditioned by different emotionalities emerging during the fieldwork. In this sense, the continuous negotiation that exists between researchers and participants can imply affectivities and kinship that valorises the relationships created during the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Viewpoint, we consider the importance of positionality in research 'gone wrong'. We focus on the intersections of age, gender and appearance. Reflecting on two doctoral research projects involving young people (one about alcohol consumption practices and another about community radio), researched by us – young female researchers, we reveal unanticipated ethical dilemmas from the field. These include: being fancied by a male participant; a young male participant asking if he could stay at the researcher's home; and being asked to buy alcohol for young participants. Now established academics, we feel able to reflect critically on such complex and unanticipated research situations. We hope being candid about these ethical quandaries will inspire the next generation of children's geographers to consider the importance of reflexivity around positionality as they embrace the inherent messiness of research ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers' reflections on narrative inquiry is a growing area of interest for the qualitative researchers' community (Beuthin 2014; Bruce et al 2016; O'Grady, Clandinin and O'Toole 2018). Furthermore, the relationship between the insider and outsider, researcher and participant, in narrative research conducted in social sciences, including nursing, health sciences, and education, has been extensively explored (Berger 2015; Darwin Holmes 2020). This paper reports on a project in which life story interviews with former prisoners were conducted in Ireland and Greece. The aim is to contribute to our understanding and knowledge of narrative inquiry by providing insights into the methodology employed, along with the challenges faced and steps taken to address those challenges during the project. The paper begins with a reflective account of the author's experience as a researcher engaging in narrative inquiry, focusing on the rationale behind choosing this method and issues of design, positionality, ethics and access. Then the focus shifts to how the fieldwork in two European countries allowed the author to explore the cross-cultural boundaries of narrative inquiry. Finally, the paper concludes with a persuasive argument on the value of narrative inquiry, drawing upon the insights and findings from the research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photoelicitation is a creative and multidimensional visual methodology used to stimulate participant subjectivities and situated knowledges. International development research documenting this method often amounts to methodological 'how-to' discussions around procedural ethical considerations (e.g. of consent, confidentiality, anonymity and dissemination). Notwithstanding their instructions and recommendations, scholarship is almost exclusively concerned with ethics with respect to participant produced photographs. Less considered are elaborations around unanticipated 'ethically important moments' that occur unexpectedly in the here and now dynamic of researcher-supplied photoelicitation. Appropriately, this article presents a methodological reflection of the author's unpreparedness for participant confessional stories and emotional responses about identity and racism evoked by INGO fundraising photographs of Black African poverty in a qualitative study with British African diasporic communities. It concludes with a two-pronged recommendation of critical reflexivity as an ethical safeguard whereby researchers 1) interrogate their positionalities, and 2) assess the ethical appropriateness of using photos with audience groups who share racialised identities and relationships with those featured in the fundraising imagery. Here, critical reflexivity is defined as the process through which researchers examine who they are and their role within the research context. While ethical safeguard refers to a certain ethical discernment and responsiveness that guards against some of the potentially harmful implications of ethical unpreparedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based upon a collaborative research project with a group of eight second-year students studying on an Early Childhood BA at a Midlands (UK) University. The empirical research project emerged as a response to the concerning levels of disengagement demonstrated by this group post-pandemic. Because the focus of their module was research approaches, as module lead, I took the decision to engage the students in 'real world' research. I reasoned that if the stakes were raised, they might feel more compelled to interact with the content in a meaningful way. An anonymous survey, exploring student health, wellbeing and motivation, was the result. Although the survey added little to the existing discourse concerning the drivers and barriers for Higher Education students in 2023, the process provided an extremely rich learning experience for the students, particularly in relation to the complexity of the ethical decisions required for research and researcher positionality. This article focuses upon the process of the research and the barriers encountered, but it also considers the ethics of using the incidental data that resulted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some of the ethical considerations about researching language, gender, and sexuality studies. In particular, it focuses on the potential risk posed to researchers from the perspectives of physical and mental health, especially as caused by conducting critical linguistic research into violent online misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia. I argue that there has been an increase in hate-based incidents related to gender and sexuality, and that while scholars are doing high-quality research in language, gender, and sexuality studies, these incidents might dissuade others from entering or remaining in the field. I also argue that there is some hostility towards scholars challenging gender-based hegemonies, which has real-world impacts on researchers. I highlight that there is a lack of support systems in Higher Education Institutions, and that sometimes the frameworks provided by these organisations are not conducive to safe research into the language of online gender/sexuality hate. I also argue that some of the frameworks, goals, and guidelines provided by Higher Education Institutions can misalign with norms of the discipline. As such I highlight where there are systematic shortcomings, in the hopes that affirmative action might be taken to better facilitate the continuation of high-quality research into language, gender, and sexuality studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I document my fieldwork struggles in Kolkata India, to propose some common guiding notions of flexibility in the field. I argue that in moments of uncertainty, ethical judgment of the researcher should be a central guiding force while figuring out what flexibility looks like in the field. By detailing how I improvised research methods and ethics in the field based on the context of place, everyday lives of people in global South, and the political moment when the research was conducted, I offer two insights in the paper. First, I suggest that, apart from focusing on the prospects of information collection, it is important to be mindful of the daily practices of the potential research participants and the context of place while choosing qualitative methods, if the place is known to us prior to the fieldwork. However, having this awareness might not ensure that all methods choices will work in the field. Therefore, second, during the process of adapting to challenges and (re)strategizing research methodologies, I argue that being flexible should be viewed as more in line with being ethical and maintaining good practice in the field. In doing so, this paper calls for a broader ethical understanding that prioritizes compassion towards participants as well as oneself, which might necessitate going beyond institutionally defined regulations, to create a more inclusive geographical knowledge production process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflexive account of fieldwork with disaster-affected communities in Kerala, India, recounts the researcher's engagement with positionality and ethics. A participatory method was adopted—enlisting local field guides who mediated the researcher's interactions with participants. Apart from offering pragmatic solutions for accessing participants, the method enhanced the researcher's contextual/cultural insight, and facilitated a relationship of trust. The researcher-guide dynamic is explored as a co-constructing and relational method that minimizes harm and maximizes benefit for participants. Ethics of care is elucidated as a practicable ethical framework for thinking and doing disaster research, illustrated with reference to the present method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers' proximity to their field of interest can make it difficult to create what Bourdieu called "the strange point of view" needed to look beyond the field's implicit beliefs when producing new knowledge. Based on a Bourdieusian approach to reflexive sociology, this article discusses proximity and distance when conducting research on and with one's own students. To problematize proximity and distance in a research project, this article discusses a case in which a teacher/researcher conducted research on and with her own students in a bachelor's degree program in sign language and interpreting as part of a project focusing on the students' development of professional characteristics as interpreters for individuals with deafblindness. This article argues that student participation and input created an epistemological rupture and represented the strange point of view that became a counterweight to the researcher's proximity to the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biogeography has its origins in European colonialism. The legacies of colonial relations are evident in the distribution of practicing biogeographers, the direction of flow of biogeographical data, and the language used when describing and interpreting our studies. Biogeographers can address these legacies through increasing access to research data and publication outlets, improved recognition of collaborative relationships, and critically reflecting upon how our assumptions and perspectives might perpetuate colonial attitudes. Achieving these goals will improve not only inclusivity and equity within our field but also increase the diversity of insights and validity of our findings. If biogeography is to be a truly global science then decolonisation is a collective responsibility.

Management of biosecurity threats to forests and indigenous trees needs to address the legacy of colonising practices that have prohibited diverse knowledges from being included. This work is urgent and challenging in the context of mobile tree pathogens, investment in climate mitigation through tree planting and greater legal recognition of Indigenous rights and those of trees. While a transition towards shared, collective responsibility for trees and treescapes is compelling, its conceptualisation in practice remains underdeveloped. This is particularly the case when considering tree-biosecurity relations. This paper shows the positioning work a team of social scientists undertook to enable polyvocal imagining of biosecurity possibilities, which trees so urgently need. Situated in Aotearoa|New Zealand and Cymru|Wales, this team of social scientists engaged with colonising forces (of which social science is also a part) to position research for biosecurity and with trees. Presented here are their reflections informed by literature and document reviews as well as research team discussions. Released somewhat from the constraints of displaced ways of knowing human dimensions of trees by means of connecting with Indigenous (especially Māori) scholarship, the research project became more capable of connecting other relations too, between people and nature, knowledge and action, science and society, research and management. The relational approach developed widens the potential for tree-human relations and supports the creation of biosecurity knowledge, systems and practices, not through one but multiple worldviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the US-led and Pakistan-allied "war on terror", residents in Northwest Pakistan have faced inconceivable structural and physical violence, in ways that pose ethical challenges in ethnographic writing and research. Over the last few decades, militancy, banditry and overall insecurity have hampered relief efforts in the area and significantly weakened basic infrastructure. In this article, the author illustrates how an initial security plan to undertake fieldwork research in this "volatile" region proved somewhat irrelevant because of her positionality, gender and race/ethnicity. The author explores the implications of these dynamics in contexts characterized by unequal gender relations and strict gender segregation. In addition, undertaking empirical work in the context of epistemological frameworks in a region that has been subjected to active conflict, militarised operations and a singular representation in the global and local media, poses other ethical challenges for anthropologists searching for new areas of study and decolonised models of representation. This paper reiterates the importance of a reflexive approach of ethics that acknowledges the interpenetration of race, gender and the thick web of relationships in the production of knowledge and is, at the same time, respectful of cultural specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is written with the recognition that, as higher education studies evolve as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, there is a need to reflect on the theoretical and practical concerns emerging from conducting higher education research. This is especially the case for early-career researchers who enter this relatively new field of study. This article attempts to explore the fieldwork component of the research process considering our experiences as early-career researchers conducting PhD studies in four universities in southern and eastern Africa. The article focuses on issues related to ethics, gaining and negotiating access to the field, and dealing with positionality during fieldwork. While reflecting on these experiences, we also attempted to explore if there are any fieldwork dynamics that are peculiar to the African higher education context that may be considered during data collection. Reflecting on our experiences, we have argued that, in some institutions, necessary procedures for researching higher education need to be in place, while with the ones that have institutionalised mechanisms the procedures adopted need to be aligned with contextual realities and should focus on ethical considerations rather than protecting the reputation of universities. Our fieldwork experience has also made us realise that the advice given to early-career researchers both in the literature, seminars and courses they attend may not adequately prepare them for the unpredictable fieldwork dynamics. In that regard, we have suggested that there is a need to prepare emerging researchers to be open-minded, flexible, reflexive, innovative and adaptable when going out to the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece introduces and recreates a critical dialogue which occurred in the summer of 2021 among educational practitioners at the University of Rhode Island (USA), during an interdisciplinary teach-in retreat on Intercultural Competence Development for Teachers and Learners. The authors were among the participants who collaborated on this project led by Anna Santucci; here, they offer a snapshot of the exchange that took place on the final day of the retreat. The themes that emerged throughout the teach-in, summarized in that closing conversation, significantly resonate with the RISE Manifesto (Cañas, 2015). These themes include salient values, skills, and behaviors of interculturally competent educators and scholars whose understanding of ethical practice is grounded in empathy, and whose work strives to embrace radical creativity in envisioning possibilities for co-creation among all participants in the teaching and/or research experience – enacting education through and for "action" via human act-ivation and, therefore, act-ivism.

This article re-conceptualizes the highly ambivalent relationships between researchers and research participants in conflict zones, with a focus on recognizing respondents' multiple and fluid positionalities. Standardized and dominant approaches to qualitative research are largely based on essentialist and infantilized portrayals of research participants and neo-colonial assumptions regarding the research relationship: informants are presumed to be inevitably vulnerable and in need of external protection, while the researcher is positioned as the omnipresent expert in control of the research process. In reality, however, research participants rarely exclusively occupy the 'oppressed victimhood' axis of identity and frequently take on active roles in the research and data collection process in a myriad of ways. I elucidate how especially in (post-)conflict zones, research participants frequently re-shape power dynamics by exercising agency over the researcher and the research process. While previous studies have considered how informants' agency can shape processes of knowledge production, in this article I expand this focus by examining how key-informants can, and frequently do, facilitate the researchers' safety and security. I specifically draw on personal experiences of empirical research in Northern Uganda. I demonstrate how in a particular moment of post-conflict insecurity – while being trapped in-between the exchange of gunfire between the Ugandan police and an armed group – one of my key-informants ensured my physical protection and safety, thereby exercising power over me and the research relationship. The key-informants in this context thus occupied multiple positionalities – ranging from informant to protector, evidencing that research relationships are never static but rather contextual, shift and fluctuate. Such ambivalent and fluid power dynamics are more reflective of the lived realities of qualitative research and can influence the research process by positioning researchers and research participants on more equal terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occasionally, events occur that disrupt ongoing fieldwork, forcing researchers to deal with, and adapt to, new realities. In this paper, we discuss how the 2015 Nepal earthquake – which occurred while we were conducting fieldwork in one of the affected areas – forced us to reassess our research agenda, profoundly affected our relationship with the community we had been working in, and evoked challenging ethical questions in respect to our obligations to our research participants. Fieldwork often takes place in dynamic, uncertain environments. This is especially true of fieldwork in developing countries. Occasionally events can occur that have significant repercussions for ongoing research involving human participants. For example, political and social unrest, terror attacks, economic crises, epidemics, and natural disasters all have the potential to derail fieldwork plans and to radically alter the circumstances in which researchers operate. However, literature on how to anticipate and navigate these repercussions is limited. While a number of papers have reflected on the difficulties of conducting post‐crisis fieldwork, few have discussed the rather different challenge of dealing with, and adapting to, events that occur during ongoing work. In this paper, we discuss how the 2015 Nepal earthquake – which occurred while we were conducting fieldwork in one of the affected areas – forced us to reassess our research agenda, profoundly affected our relationship with the community we had been working in, and evoked challenging ethical questions in respect to our obligations to our research participants. Based on our reflections, we suggest eight issues that researchers who are engaged in fieldwork in high‐risk or post disaster locations should give consideration to. The issues include matters relating to research design, fieldwork risk and ethics assessment, interaction with research participants, and researcher support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the value of social justice as a shared ethical ground for social workers worldwide. Constructions and interpretations of social justice are deeply affected by different perspectives, contested positions and unequal power dynamics. As societies become ever more diversified, these may hinder the centrality of social justice as a core value. Drawing on data collected from participants in a binational interprofessional seminar on social justice in multi-cultural societies, this qualitative study is based on interviews and visual analysis with 16 American and 15 Israeli social workers and social work students. Findings suggest that social justice remains a core value although it is both an organising and disorganising, unifying and dividing concept. The study explores the positive contribution of positionality to help gain a broader understanding of social justice and navigate challenges in implementation, practice and education in diverse and conflicted settings. Practical implications for social work practice and education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with the question: 'what is involved in studying small international migrant groups in rural areas?', this article makes a methodological contribution to the literature on international migration to rural areas. The article takes as its starting point the 'ethically important moments' (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004) experienced by a researcher with a migration background during ethnographic fieldwork among Polish labour migrants in a rural municipality in Norway. Four interwoven aspects of the fieldwork will be discussed a) cooperation between the researcher and gatekeepers, b) the effects of the visibility of the local community, c) blurring the positionalities of the researcher; and d) the problematics of recurring encounters with the participants. The article introduces a concept of 'relational claustrophobia', which denotes a climate of dense, visible, overlapping and sometimes burdensome social relations in the local migrant community and illustrates its impact on the ethical conduct of the researcher. It concludes that studying small international migrant communities in rural areas may highlight the ethical concerns of a) confidentiality and the privacy of research subjects, b) the management of trust and c) the positionality of the migrant-researcher. • Studying international migrants in rural communities may involve specific ethical challenges. • Social visibility appears as an important feature of rural migrant communities. • Trust management and confidentiality are among the challenges. • Rural social contexts may affect the positionality of the migrant-researcher. • The article postulates a need for further methodological reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The new walls of Europe reflect crises in Europe's relation to itself and the world' (Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, preface to the 2017 edition). In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as elsewhere, populism has been on the rise, and far-right discourse has altered the political landscape. Should we respond with a re-thinking of community or is 'community' itself part of the problem? Can an ethics of alterity (which we find in Levinas) help re-define what we understand by community? As early as 1924, in Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, Helmuth Plessner warned that 'too much' community, far from being positive in an egalitarian sense, can foster aggressive identity-based 'us-versus-them' political sentiment. Plessner, in his major work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) develops his idea of 'positionality' and what we might describe as looking at human beings as 'in-between' creatures, bordering on other animals, connected to each other socially, culturally, politically, but also separate. Plessner is searching for a new way of looking at 'borders' — boundaries between connectedness and separation. Almost one hundred years after Plessner's publications, I will argue that they still offer a valuable perspective on the theme of 'border' and one which may help counter the aggressiveness of contemporary western discourse on borders. In my contribution, I will also draw on thinkers from the phenomenological tradition ranging from Bernhard Waldenfels, who has written of the merits of what he calls the 'Stachel' of the other, to Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some of the ethical issues encountered when involving refugee children in research. It draws on a study that aims to investigate how young Syrian refugee children experience Early Education, in one English local authority. This small-scale qualitative piece of research was developed in response to the deepening refugee crisis outlined by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in August 2013 which suggested that as a result of the conflict in Syria, 740,000 refugees were under the age of 11. The study involves four children and their families – who were resettled in England through the Syrian Vulnerable Person Resettlement scheme (2017). Also involved are four Early Childhood and Education Care settings. The research field is complex and the 'customised methods and methodologies' which have been adopted, to respond well to the challenges of the field, are described. Ethical issues concerning the conceptualisation of refugees, a narrative of trauma and location of positionality are expanded. The researcher has developed power-sensitive ethical research practices to help manage issues of positionality; negotiate access in the field; develop authentic relationships; address issues of cultural bias in self and others, and navigate the challenges of researching with very young refugee children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores ethical issues in researching 'intersectionality', focusing in particular on: positionality in relation to topic and research relationships; and the relationship of intersectional positionality to 'insider/outsider' status. I argue that reflection on intersectional positionality is a key ethical consideration of social research, and propose some guiding questions for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of asymmetry and positionality of the researcher-research participant relationship is important for research ethics in international development. However, discourse should take into account instances where 'reverse asymmetry' may exist, and consider developing different strategies and concerns for researchers to consider in this context.

What does it mean to conduct ethnographic research in a context where inequalities are pervasive? Drawing on experiences conducting research with poor migrant Qur’anic students (almajirai) in Kano, northern Nigeria, this article explores the challenges of establishing productive and ethical research relationships with informants whose social and socioeconomic status is significantly lower than that of the researcher. The article argues that large socioeconomic and educational inequalities demand a rethinking of the subject positions available to researchers in such contexts. In the article, I consider in turn my roles as an ‘accomplice’ of exclusionary elite behaviour, as a ‘patron’ for my informants, and as a ‘go-between’ facilitating access for them to otherwise inaccessible ‘social microworlds’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a platform for geographical reflection on the hidden struggles ethnographers face working in the area of religion, addiction and drug treatment. Specifically, it examines the complex ethical and practical dilemmas involved in residential ethnography inside a faith-based therapeutic community working in the area of addiction and rehabilitation. Residential ethnography provided valuable insights into social life in therapeutic community, and more broadly, offers an ethical and participatory approach to research in closed institutional settings. Residential immersion in faith-based therapeutic environments however raised significant challenges around identity management; access and consent; and the dilemma of ‘mixed loyalties’ – a term that describes a set of ethical practices characterised by ethical conflict, compromise and negotiation in which the researcher, by nature of their participation, is expected to conform to certain values, practices, and procedures that may contradict their own personal ethics. To ground discussion on the variegated and contested nature of mixed loyalties, this paper examines the exercise of religious power and the ways ethnographers become enrolled in, and must negotiate, a series of power-dynamics that are unclear, uncomfortable, and potentially exclusionary. By illustrating the difficult decisions ethnographers must make when negotiating pressures to uphold – or challenge – religious beliefs and practices in faith-based addiction treatment settings, this paper calls for greater critical reflection on the ways geographers are implicated in the field and the practical ethics of engagement used to navigate ethical tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Searle is convinced that phenomenology is inadequate to face social-ontological problems. Despite his opinion, collective intentionality in its positional effort can be explained through phenomenological reductions. Clarifying how Husserl comes to the evidence of the background within the exercise of the transcendental reduction, it has to be shown how the frame of primordinal reduction could make an inner description of the plural firstperson perspective possible. Finally, some of the reasons that left Husserl to be completely overlooked in the contemporary debate on collective intentionality are exposed. The suspicion that is aroused by Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology could be dispelled if one only considers the social-ontological value of the structure of collective positionality that Husserl claims to be the condition of possibility for the experience of objectivity.

This reflective paper explores gendered experiences of fieldwork encounters with farmers. Specifically, the paper considers how the particularities of farmer interviews - including the geographical remoteness of many farm holdings, the strength of tradition in farm families and the male-dominated nature of the industry - pose a unique and challenging prospect for the young and relatively inexperienced female researcher. Drawing on a number of the authors' own fieldwork experiences, we consider some of the ethical and safety challenges we have faced, and offer some practical strategies for addressing these. The paper also reflects on the implications of our positionality - specifically the intersection of our age, gender and non-farming status - on our own, and participants' interview performances. Although, as we discuss, we found these aspects of our identity broadly advantageous in securing and conducting successful farmer interviews, we also recount how they invited a number of unwelcomed behaviours, and often left us vulnerable to emotional risk. In sharing such experiences, we raise a number of questions concerning the ethical responsibility of negotiating or conforming to the identities conferred on us during farmer interviews and hope to prompt further discussion around these challenges. The paper concludes that young female researchers face a number of ethical and safety challenges during fieldwork in the rural and farming context and highlights the need to consider the impact of researcher positionality on the researcher, the participant(s) and the overall research process. By stimulating such a debate, we aim to bring the issue of gendered experiences of rural research to the fore, and hope to provide some reassurance and support to others working in similar areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 25 years, the mining sector has become an important field of investigation and controversy for anthropologists. As an object, the ‘mine’ itself poses specific problems that make it particularly fertile ground for the exploration of inextricably linked theoretical, methodological, ethical, and political issues. In this paper, I explore the issue of the positionality of anthropologists within the mining arena. The analysis of positionality is taken beyond an individual perspective focusing on ethics, engagement and responsibility, to additionally include discussions of networking, alliance-building and institutionalising processes. I shall begin by dealing with the problems posed by the anthropology of mining and the various perspectives that respond to it. In the second section, I narrow the focus to the case of New Caledonia. In the third section, I present the context and challenges associated with the discussed cases. I portray the cases in question and, in particular, the new arena represented by the National Centre for Technological Research (CNRT) ‘Nickel and its Environment’, an agency established in 2008 to fund research on nickel in New Caledonia. The analysis in terms of a ‘hybrid’ forum of this arena will be complemented by the consideration of the social demand for the anthropology of mining. In the concluding section, the paper outlines options for further research while stressing the need for a balanced, ‘symmetrical’ approach of the multiple actors’ agendas constitutive of the mining arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a Western feminist supporting and researching gender equality in education in postcolonial contexts, I often wonder: Am I doing more harm than good? The privilege of my social location means that my efforts to support education in postcolonial contexts risk being patronizing, insulting, threatening, imperialist, and recolonizing. Yet neglecting and ignoring postcolonial contexts similarly reflects and reproduces a privileged position. I provide a tentative framework designed to address positionality, power, and privilege while creating an ethical research process for working in a postcolonial context. Beginning with an identification of positionality, the objectives of research, and guiding theoretical frameworks to situate the research in relation to the participants and context, I proceed to establish a methodology designed to minimize the negative effects of power and maximize participants' empowerment. I position myself as a bricoleur, layering feminist standpoint theory and postcolonial theory, and propose the collaborative data collection and analysis techniques, with particular attention to ethical and cultural sensitivity, using a social constructivist approach to grounded theory. This article highlights the need for Western researchers to reflect upon the power dynamics of their research in postcolonial contexts and develop a strategy for conducting empowering research that prevents the misrepresentation and exploitation of participants. Observations from my doctoral thesis data collection provide examples of how these concepts were operationalized in practice as well as reflections on the disconnect between theorizing and conducting ethical research in postcolonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For graduate students and other emerging qualitative researchers, the ever-evolving and sometimes conflicting perspectives, methodologies, and practices within various post-positivist frameworks (e.g. feminist, critical, Indigenous, participatory) can be overwhelming. Qualitative researchers working within postmodern contexts of multiplicity and ambiguity are tasked with working through challenges – related to methods, interpretation, and representation – throughout the research process. Through examining related literature and incorporating my own experiences, I explore ethical dilemmas that social justice-oriented qualitative researchers may encounter as a result of conflicting multiplicities of difference among researcher(s), participants, and readers. Such dilemmas include incongruent interpretations between participants and researchers, and participants’ and researchers’ conflicting desires about what should be shared, intercultural (mis)interpretations, rapport issues, and conflicts between research life and home life. I consider how combining the practices of attending to assemblages, engaging in critical reflexivity, and centralizing communion may be useful in navigating relationships and ethical dilemmas in qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fat studies has recently emerged as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship; it aims at challenging dominant, negative and medicalised discourses about fat bodies. Despite the growth of scholarship in this field in human geography, there has been limited discussion of the methodological and ethical issues involved in undertaking such work. This article draws on two research projects on body size - the first about expatriates in Singapore and the second about young people in the UK - in order to discuss some of the methodological and ethical considerations involved in using interviews to research the sized body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances the conversation on conducting ethical research with children by examining the process and products of a longitudinal ethnographic study about the implementation of a new bilingual policy in one midwestern school district. Framed by “procedural ethics” and “ethics in practice,” and drawing from earlier considerations of power and representation, this re-analysis considers the following: What activities were designed to elicit children’s perspectives on the policy? How did the researcher and children relate to one another? How was children’s knowledge ultimately represented? The discussion concludes thus: As researchers address power imbalances, they must examine when and where real power shifts are ethical and desirable. Researchers must also create an “ethics-post-practice” to ensure ethical representation of children’s knowledge at the end of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I discuss the fact that doing "anthropology at home" involves the same core anthropological methodology as undertaking research abroad. This implies that while doing anthropology at home may have some advantages concerning field practicalities but is equally challenging. There are certain ethical and methodological essentials involved in every anthropological research undertaking. Through my personal experiences of conducting ethnography in Pakistan, I explain that doing anthropology at home does not make exceptions for the researcher in terms of these ethical and methodological aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case for interviewing students as an effective yet complex way to integrate reflexive practice into teaching and research. Even though many human geographers are accustomed to conducting qualitative interviews in various contexts, it is not straightforward to interview one's own students. This paper addresses three issues: implications of doing insider interviews; ethical issues of interviewing students where power relations are at stake and using visual co-constructions as a means of levelling the analytical power of the insider interviewer. We show how student interviews have enhanced our reflection-on-action and give recommendations for prospect student interviewers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given the increased attention in cultural anthropology and geography to positionality, ethics and reflexivity in conducting fieldwork, there is surprisingly little discussion about the concerns and constraints inherent in researching activities operating on the margins of the law. In the Philippines, although a 1966 law bans importing used clothing for resale, the legal sale of second-hand clothing once it is in the country, provides work for hundreds of men and women. In this article, I use Philippine women's entrepreneurial work in the Hong Kong– Philippine second-hand clothing trade to discuss the pragmatic side-roads I have pursued to responsibly situate work that straddles what the state considers to be illegal, but what traders consider to be their ‘licit’ right as cultural citizens to viable livelihoods. Analysing such edgy commodity networks, I highlight the logistical and practical limitations of researching a multi-sited illegal trade, the important role of research assistants in enabling, and sometimes redirecting, access to respondents and data collection, my efforts to support local livelihoods perhaps in opposition to state laws, and I question through what channels one can ethically document confidentially obtained data. I conclude that the challenge is not to retreat from doing such research in a constrained political setting, but to create it such that it ultimately contributes to social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]