Unmastering Research: Positionality and Intercorporeal Vulnerability in International Studies

Abstract

This article argues that in order to understand how bodily impressions shape ways of knowing and being, researchers need to enhance claims of positionality through a language of intercorporeality. The notion of positionality is used to indicate the inherent situatedness and partiality of knowledge, but positionality statements also risk affirming a hierarchical narrative structure, leaving out how knowledge is indelibly and dynamically impressed by bodily others, thereby reinscribing researcher authority. Strengthening attempts to resist mastery in doing research, this article theorizes the intercorporeality of research practice on the basis of the bodily experiences of being there, being moved, and being vulnerable. These insights into the intercorporeality of research practice emerge from fieldwork across the West Bank, the Naqab desert, and alongside the Gaza fence. This article argues that intercorporeal vulnerability is at the core of cultivating knowledge, which emerges not only through willful action, but also through nonintentional rapport with objects and (non)human others. Understanding this vulnerability restores a sense of openness and uncertainty by appreciating research practice as always “in excess” of established categories and always just beyond the researcher's positional mastery.