Segregation and researcher's positionality: Challenges of conducting policy ethnography in Southern polarized settings

Abstract

Researchers conducting policy ethnography in conflict environments are faced with a valuable ethical dilemma – is there an ethical standard to determine how a dataset should be pursued in the field? What if the method of pursuing data carries the potential of possibly disrupting one's rapport with the community and being perceived as a partisan ideologically driven researcher with ulterior motives? This question becomes more pronounced in socio-legal, conflict and public policy research in spatially polarized settings of the South. In these settings, knowledge is co-produced through one's own positionality and the nuances of grey areas that do not often feature in aggregated datasets. Scholarship on positionality has questioned whether scholars should explicate their position on the field by pointing towards the intentional or unintentional perpetuation of hierarchies. This paper situates itself in the positionality debate with reference to castelessness in socio-legal research through nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Southern spatially polarized setting. It grapples with an emerging contrasting view of whether researchers should at all engage in explicating their positionality. The paper argues that data is a socio-spatial product. It is to suggest that the production of data in conflict settings is informed by the spatial dynamics of social relations that emerge in the co-production of knowledge, and the researcher's reflexive positionality that itself impacts the outcome of data that emerges.