Putting “Us” in Place: A Contrapuntal “Position” on Research Access in Over-Researched Contexts

This article centers the labor aid workers perform to manage researchers in the humanitarian aid sector in Jordan. It examines how workers move and manage researchers’ bodies (including the author’s) as part of their daily job routines. Drawing from sociological and postcolonial scholarship on labor and the body to document the latter highlights multiple “knowledge producers” that shape and contest data collection in this context. The goal in describing this process is twofold. First, this article seeks to elaborate understandings of power relations in data collection processes, particularly in postcolonial settings considered over-researched. Second, it aims to broaden the scope and utility of analytic reflexivity through contrapuntal thinking about researchers’ positions in the research process.