Conceptualising Black (Co-)Reflexive Feminist Methodologies: Collaboration,Process and Critical Friendship

Abstract

This article situates Black feminist research on race and class as a pre-determined collaborative process, which builds on a plethora of existing scholarship as well as on the relationships and wisdoms of others. We want to pay homage to the way we arrive at our ideas about social life together. We see lived experience(s) as a fundamental aspect of our work as social scientists and Black feminist practitioners, but also acknowledge the pitfalls of this approach. Using Bryel’s transcriptions of Chantelle’s ethnographic research with Black and Black mixed-race families as an example, we aim to bring a fresh perspective to this long-standing approach, while emphasising that this leaves us open to the creation of over-individualised accounts of often-marginalised social lives. We hope to further discourses that acknowledge and celebrate the numerous, complicated and personal pathways taken by researchers as they analyse their data, specifically in methodologically insider–outsider encounters.

Introduction

In this article, we critically explore the challenges of researching individual lives, and how they can become disposed to interpretation as both authoritative and authentic when there is a sense of familiarity with the narratives being interpreted. Furthermore, we illustrate how this can be prevented to some extent by engaging with research through critical friendship, where shared and more pronounced accountability can be taken. Our training and subsequent reflections are primarily situated in the academic terrain of the social sciences and humanities; we contend that individualising tendencies can be a challenge to our (co-)reflexive practice(s).

Our method of analysis involves an empirically focused reflection on Chantelle’s narrative ethnography with nine Black and Black mixed-race families across a two-year period (2017–2019), for which Bryel was employed to transcribe the interview data. Based on the narratives of 22 individual and group ethnographic interviews, Chantelle traced a complex multi-generational portrait of their migration histories from Jamaica and Saint Kitts to Birmingham and Bromsgrove between 1948 and 2019. The research explored how hegemonic whiteness ¹ and cultures of racism in white suburbia affects Black family members’ capacities to talk openly about their experiences coming of age among predominantly white people. Crucially, the research became a site of disclosure, tension and love between family members, where parents and siblings spoke collectively about cultures of racism and their specific manifestations in white suburbia. The themes of race, place and multi-racial parenting revealed by the research help to form the conceptual and methodological contributions of this article, as Chantelle and Bryel both have very similar lived experiences to that which was uncovered in the ethnography. Both authors are Black mixed-race, have siblings and experiences of multi-racial parenting among mainly white people in England. This article contends with how Chantelle came to analyse the process of naming the unnamed with research participants (racism experienced by family members over time), alongside Bryel, amounting to a transformative and methodological politics for examining the various ways race and whiteness are socially and intimately reproduced.

Rather than Bryel merely sending the transcripts back to Chantelle verbatim, we made space for regular conversations where we could co-analyse some of the themes that arose during interviews and consider potential connections to key sociological concepts of identity, location and belonging. By conducting parts of the analysis together, and due to our shared (albeit varying) insider–outsider positionalities with regards to the research data, we could also point out to each other when a specific connection was more personal (individualised) or structural. Through this collaboration we demonstrate how it is possible for social researchers to resist individualising experiences of marginality when interpreting data, and subsequently when writing about race, racism and class together.

Publications focused on themes related to structural inequality are limited in terms of the context of the ‘working out’ phase of research and the foundational knowledge, not merely of those who came before us, but also of those who are currently around us (Lentin, 2021). By reflecting on the process of working together on an ethnography of race, place and families, we contribute and offer new insights to Black feminist methodologies, which grapple with the politics of insider and outsider research, as well as the possibilities and limitations of striving for critical friendship in social research. Emphasising the teachings of Black feminist theory and praxis throughout, we contend that it is beneficial for two key reasons. First, it is inherently collaborative and supportive through sharing ideas and finding solutions, not only scientifically, but also socio-politically. Second, we recognise as a starting point that focusing on the individual is limiting to social research, and that the work always needs to go further to make real changes. The primary contentions of this article involve some political, sociological and practical provocations on the process of naming our reflections about the research and on transcription.

Black Feminist Praxis: Resisting the Individual

Our appreciation of work that seeks to explore and foreground the way our lived experiences and personal troubles become incorporated into strategies of social research and knowledge production is true to the tradition of Black feminist scholarship and praxis. The use of lived experience as a starting point, as stressed by the Combahee River Collective (1977) and the European Race and Imagery Foundation (Parnell-Berry and Michel, 2020), should not be misinterpreted as an overemphasis on individual and/or personalised struggle. It should instead be situated in the need for a structural starting point from which to locate the ways that Black women, in particular, are routinely required to negotiate heightened processes of racialised and classed stratification. But while in our research we might look not only to the unique experiences of our participants but also to our own, we should not lose sight of the social conditions that lead to inequity, especially when we seek to develop theoretical claims (Collins, 1997).

These negotiations are intensified in scientific arenas that consider themselves too liberal and intellectual to be socio-politically oppressive to marginalised individuals and groups. We are thereby forced to explain and justify ourselves as Black women thinkers and writers, not only for studying processes and structures of discrimination in the first place, but also for doing so in self-protective ways (Ahmed, 2013; Berenstain, 2016; Lewis, 2020; Michel, 2020). The self-consciousness that results from this can go several ways, but there are two in particular that we resist on the one hand and engage in on the other: (1) self-indulgent navel-gazing that unwittingly re-centres the individual or, at least, does not attempt to differentiate between individuals and groups; (2) richer and more robust results due to the use of a standpoint in order to politically frame and position the researcher and research participants. We further assert that collaborative methodological practices can enhance the latter outcome in socio-political research, as well as remedying the former. This is not necessarily about how our analysis is informed by our recognition of our intersubjectivities as Black women doing research, but about how our interventions should be initiated through a recognition of ‘the politics of location’ (Lewis, 2020: 2). While we position ourselves, as the authors of this article, firmly within the tradition(s) of Black feminist scholarship based on how we are situated socio-politically as well as the inherent co-reflexivity of our methodology, we nonetheless contend that highlighting these ways of learning (beyond the scholarly partnerships of Black women) could make various forms of research conclusion more transparent and potentially more robust.

While this article focuses on the collaborative element of all scholarship in the spirit of Lentin’s (2021) instruction to show ‘your working out’, we remain critically informed by the development of our relationship through methods in the Black feminist tradition. Our analyses are infused with the politics of the everyday as well as racialisations of Blackness and womanhood (Essed, 1991; Lewis, 1993; Lorde, 1984; Mirza, 1997), all of which were common in the data gathered and explored in Chantelle’s ethnographic research.

Black Feminist Praxis: Collaborative Knowledge Production and Critical Friendship

This article’s arguments, which are drawn from a small-scale ethnography, have taken approximately four years to make sense of. Our methodological process involved a combined analysis of WhatsApp exchanges over a three-year period. As Black women working within an academy fixated on performative discussions, plagued by an intensely neoliberal terrain and precarious employment (Arday, 2022), to speak about a research project over a period of four to five years and still be unsure about how to come to terms with and discuss the findings is a form of scholarly resistance. The use of social media technology and being purposeful with the time we spend actually discussing the power of conversation and collaboration is a resistant way of doing scholarship.

In the context of Black (British) feminist research and activism, and in response to warnings about excessive and essentialising processes of identity politics (in Black women’s movements of the 1990s, for example), Sudbury (1998) ² contended that in our research and organising, Black feminists should focus on the ‘simultaneity of oppression’ (Combahee River Collective, 1977) while enhancing an intersectional analysis (Crenshaw, 1989) through a womanist methodology, which resists our erasures, but also rejects the adulation of individualised accounts of Black womanhood. This speaks to what Lewis (2020: 2) refers to as the turn in Black feminist inquiry that seeks to uncover how Black women’s positions make them ideally situated to ‘everyday theorising as part of their activism’, stressing that this mode of organising, thinking and collaborating has also helped to address Black women’s differential positions in relation to power structures. Similarly, Reynolds (2002: 596) has noted the balancing act surrounding the increased representation of Black women documenting their own experiences alongside the tendency to exploit and appropriate. With this, Reynolds suggests an intentional engagement with Black women’s specialised knowledge through standpoint theory, which provided us with both language and theory as we conceptualised the methodological contribution of this article. We propose that our intentional use of our lived experience and specialist knowledge, which we see as interdependent, has scholarly credibility. Further, our arguments about collaborative knowledge production are not merely about stating that this is something we all engage in as scholars, but also about how the type of (co-)reflexivity involved in addressing race and class in relation to power is enhanced by collaborative exercises in accountability. We have to remind each other to go beyond the individual.

In this article, we draw on the politics of insider and outsider research through attention to our critical friendship in the development of both research process and findings. Though we are clear about the limitations of this – particularly concerning the more liberal articulations of collaboration – we are guided by the teachings of Noor and Shafee (2020: 6) who stress that: ‘Generally, the roles of critical friends are to ask provocative questions, provide data to be examined through another lens, and offer a critique of a person’s work as a friend.’

In what follows, the emphasis on recorded virtual conversations to discuss data collection aligns with Sobande and Wells’ (2021) discussion of the poetic identity work and sisterhood of Black women academics, and the scholarly possibilities of documenting private (but collaborative) coping mechanisms during research (and simply in becoming Black women academics). Chantelle and Bryel not only anecdotally shared personal accounts that were related to Chantelle’s research data, they also mused (albeit informally) on the theoretical implications of the findings. For example, Chantelle regularly spoke with Bryel about the challenges of both listening to and then writing about how some of her younger research participants have kept their experiences of racism a secret, with some describing how they had chosen to keep these matters from their (white) mothers ‘to protect them’ (see also Campion and Lewis, 2022). In such a scenario, both authors would ponder their own experiences with their white and non-Black mothers, before reflecting on the wider societal and structural ramifications at play. Owing to the nature of their burgeoning working relationship, the authors considered the methodological insights emerging from their partnership. Sobande and Wells (2021: 473) illustrate how radical sisterhood among Black early career researchers is about intellectual survival as well as maintaining and sustaining our radical modes of doing scholarship, achieved through self-expressive and generative writing over time, which involves a ‘shared duality between our individual reflexive and creative approaches’. They demonstrate that it is vital to be explicit about the networks and relationships that exist for us during knowledge production. In this tradition, our forthcoming discussion of working together is grounded in a Black feminist collaborative methodology.

Situating Our Black Senses of Self

To begin to generate a more critical discussion of how the methodological process in Chantelle’s research intervenes in the possibilities of de-individualising our scholarly practice, we now engage in some partly polemical discussions of Blackness, familiarity and place in relation to wider cultures of knowledge production. This section was developed in recognition of Dotson’s (2011: 253, emphasis added) reminder that in spite of the negatively gendered and racialised formations of social life that Black people in particular endure: ‘Group membership does not automatically indicate testimonial competence with respect to some domain of knowledge.’

Broadly speaking, there is agreement among ethnographers of race in particular that a personal connection to places can provide researchers with heightened levels of understanding of some of the issues likely to occur in the field. This has been shown to be particularly useful when navigating recollections of challenging topics, such as racism (Adler and Adler, 1987; Kanuha, 2000; Knowles, 2008).

Chantelle collected qualitative data in which participants spoke of a range of racist traumas that had remained, for the most part, unspoken among family members. These conversations were transcribed by Bryel; crucially, both of us have lived experience of this combination of silence, negative racialisation and cultures of racism in relation to place making in/suburban places. The primary concern for this type of finding in relation to the discussion in this article was how the Black family members would go on to defend, excuse and at times justify the exclusionary cultures of racism they had intimately navigated in their hometown. We used our collaboration to address, through conversation and reflection, how the above process of navigating an intensification of negative racialisation can in many ways be understood as an inevitability. When there is the perception that few others share one’s lived experience of Blackness, there is a tendency to narrate personal experience as synonymous with race. Put simply, the limited racial literacy or lack of engagement with the micro-cultural projects of anti-racism (Chávez-Moreno, 2022; Twine, 2004) recorded by many of the participants correlated with both authors’ lived experiences of being raised as Black girls and women in predominantly white places. The conversations we were able to have during and following the transcription of the interviews meant that Chantelle especially could disentangle impressions from the data that were caused by her own personal experiences, versus sociological theorising about institutional and structural exclusionary practices. Our standpoint in this research allowed us to share expressions of understanding and empathy that coalesced with a politics of authentic engagement with the subject matter. In short, dealing with our own experiences and intersubjectivity together gave us the vessel to begin to tease out feelings and individuality.

Epistemology and Methodology: The Endurance of (Collective) Black Scholarship

For generations, our fore-parents mitigated otherwise debilitating circumstances as valuable knowledge producers by centring technical and scholarly expertise alongside lived experiences of matters under study (Lorde, 1984; McKittrick, 2006; Mirza, 1997). As Collins (2000) notes, issues of citational inclusion manifest in the production of knowledge requiring Black women scholars in particular to become hyper-aware of how our positions as ‘knowers’ are consistently under threat. Further, these processes of systemic exclusion rely on what Dotson (2011) calls epistemic violence. The social reproduction of the idea that the true knowledge bearers are white and male is so systemic, naturalised and normalised that it manifests through a combination of silencing and boundary keeping (Bacevic, 2021; Dotson, 2011; Mills, 1999). In spite of continuous exclusion, along with co-option and plagiarism of the work of those on the margins, our argument is that as people who work within this system we are ourselves still susceptible (in spite of systematic marginalisation) to reproducing the systems and structures that have excluded us. At times, our complacency on these matters can do the work of excluding those we wish to include.

Working in collaboration can help to grapple with the complexities of what Ademolu (2023: 347) stresses as the micro-politics of ‘Outsiderness’ as an ‘Insider’ in our qualitative inquiries into our ‘own’ people. More specifically, on the heterogenous nature of Black Britishness, Ademolu attests that critical reflexivity is integral for researchers in the presence of intersecting identity-markers or biographical elements between the researcher/researched. While we centre Black feminist interpretations throughout, we also contribute to these fresh and critically reflexive perspectives, such as Ademolu’s, on the challenging terrain of ethno-racialised sameness while contending with the locational particularities of Black Britishness (see also Beoku-Betts, 1994). Put simply, our emphasis on collaboration provides some routes into addressing the simultaneity of the ‘ethereal, adjunct, and sometimes simply difficult’ process (Ademolu, 2023: 362) of Black reflexive praxis, while at the same time interpreting the differing Black subjectivities of individuals who express limited comprehension of the structural nature of race. There is strength in numbers when producing critically reflexive praxis of one’s ‘own’ people.

Nonetheless, the ethnographic data contained challenging conversations about the interpersonal and structural challenges of racism, which were routinely intensified by white places. Being Black feminist researchers means we are trained to bring a combination of criticality and compassion to how we come to understand, make sense of and frame lived experiences of marginality. This commitment is particularly important when these challenges in scholarship present narratives that are familiar to us. Chantelle’s very particular research study demonstrates how a lack of contact with people who experience racialisation in a similar way becomes caught up in the aforementioned processes of individualising race. The bridge between compassion and critique in how we understand these kinds of data is the point at which some more telling issues about scholarship on race emerge. This is where meaningful engagement with the process of collaboration is required.

Conceptualising Our Methodology through Collective Reflexivity

The collaboration between Chantelle and Bryel drew on a relationship built through knowledge production combined with our shared and similar lived experience of Black girlhood and womanhood in the context of white suburbia in England. We make a novel contribution to Black feminist methodology having learnt about our similarities with each other and the research under study during the fieldwork. It was a process of recognition and research in tandem, which was facilitated by conversation and transcription throughout a three-year period. Our positionalities as Black women academics raised in predominantly white towns became central to our standpoint as the research was interpreted and analysed (Reynolds, 2002).

We met while collaborating on another research project in 2018, which also coincided with Chantelle’s need for support with data collection (a transcriber) due to her dyslexia, dyspraxia and attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Chantelle was especially motivated to hire Bryel due to her research background in qualitative analysis, her specialism in race, class and families and their shared lived experiences of Blackness and mixedness in English suburbs. As well as their scholar-activist credentials, Bryel is an accomplished moderator, editor and transcriber, who had completed her PhD in 2013. Meanwhile, at the time of their meeting, Chantelle was a co-researcher for Brexit Brits Abroad presenting and producing The Surviving Society podcast (Lewis and Ofori-Addo, 2022–present; Lewis et al., 2017–2019, 2019–2022), as well as developing and promoting the programme for the Leading Routes (n.d.) educational campaign for Black African and Caribbean students and staff in UK academia. Chantelle had also learnt about Bryel’s life during the Brexit Brits Abroad project, and had a sense of familiarity that induced a strong motivation to invest in her services as a transcriber. Bryel’s maturity was balanced out by Chantelle’s broad platform as an academic podcaster, in turn avoiding the potential for ego-based power dynamics. While Bryel was indeed employed by Chantelle, the former’s longer background in social research meant she felt secure enough to disagree and assert different approaches accordingly. Similarly, Chantelle’s prolific research outputs meant she did not feel threatened by the exchanges or different perspectives Bryel presented. Both authors felt this collaboration was an opportunity to mutually grow and uplift, and continued their reflection work and developed new projects together after the official ending of the researcher–transcriber partnership. Moreover, we each brought rich knowledge and expertise to the other’s table, fuelling much of the methodological decision making that would ensue. Although it began as a working relationship – specifically to produce transcripts – quite quickly the collaboration became one of making sense of each author’s relationship with Chantelle’s field of research: Race, place, love and family: Narratives from Black mixed-race families in a semi-rural/suburban town in England (Lewis, 2021). While Chantelle’s research used a narrative ethnographic approach (with recorded interviews), the methods used to present the arguments in this article are concerned with the conversations we had about the research during and after the fieldwork. Therefore, it is our intention to demonstrate, in a very practical way, that scholarship is collaborative, that our ideas do not come to fruition in isolation and that this is beneficial to the theoretical messages we promote based on our findings.

Three primary yet intertwining points of analysis inspired our empirically informed reflections. First, on the interpretation of data, that follows the lived experiences of racialised and classed marginality; second, the fluid, yet politically informed traditions of Black feminist scholarship; and third, the practical process of making sense of interview transcripts and findings from Chantelle’s ethnographic research. The third point demonstrates a working example of resisting individuality in scholarship on race and class, at the same time as showing one’s working out. During the two-year field research, the full range of recorded and unrecorded conversations we had about the themes in the research was integral to the practical process of Bryel’s work of transcribing the interviews. A Black feminist praxis of collective care and (co)-reflexivity was present both during and beyond the research in this multifaceted process of dialogical knowledge production.

From the earliest days of transcripts being sent from Bryel to Chantelle, this working relationship between scholars with very similar lived experiences and research interests transcended communication about the findings of Chantelle’s research. It is our contention that a uniquely co-reflexive process of dealing with broader issues of the structures of race, place and social life emerged through our relational method of both doing and transcribing social research. Our similar backgrounds (discussed above), aided us in our capacity to delve deeper into both reflective and reflexive conversations. As Shehata (2006: 246) suggests:

Consciously autobiographical and explicitly personal, these works abandon many of the traditional conventions of academic writing . . . The ethnographer appears not as scientist but as human. Here, reflexivity means being self-conscious about fieldwork and the role of the ethnographer in the production of knowledge . . . about fieldwork as method and the ethnographer as ‘positioned subject’.

Thus, in line with Shehata’s take on reflexive ethnography, Chantelle’s approach to fieldwork was indeed ‘self-conscious’ regarding her direct role in the interviews she conducted and how her own interactions would also lead to ‘the production of knowledge’. Additionally, as we worked together to develop the transcripts, both authors were increasingly aware of our shared auto-ethnographic contributions to the scholarship, leading to either of us checking in with the other when traumatic incidents were discussed on tape: an iterative method of reaching forward with a warning (Chantelle), or reaching back for an emotional check in (Bryel). Owing to our shared lived experiences, Bryel was able to intuit key themes as she transcribed Chantelle’s interviews, which would lead to both of us exploring certain discursive threads and their theoretical implications. Hence, a caring and collaborative working environment was established between us over a sustained period of time.

There were several particularly significant moments during the fieldwork where Chantelle contacted Bryel to talk through some of the conversations she had witnessed with the families. One evening in May 2018 Chantelle called Bryel to talk through a group interview she had just conducted with siblings Tara and Craig and their father, Eric. During the group interview there were several moments of disclosure where Tara and Craig spoke very openly about the racism they had endured at school. They described in unison how this interview was the first time they had spoken openly about these experiences, as they described there being limited space in their family to talk about race. Their father Eric was shocked, consistently stating he had thought that these types of incidents did not occur in their hometown and were a thing of the past. This type of conversation felt familiar to Chantelle, and something that she felt needed unpacking with someone who had a lived experience of what had occurred. Upon hearing the incident, Bryel described a sense of familiarity with Tara and Craig. We would like to draw attention to the way talking about how race is silenced in Black families situated in white suburbia – as something both authors understood – allowed for the emergence of a framework that went beyond individuality. As social researchers studying matters incredibly familiar to us personally, sometimes we simply need a sounding board; someone who understands but can also help us return to our objective of structural analysis.

More than a year after the final transcripts were sent, we recorded video conversations with one another about how we had made sense of working together on a research project about race, Blackness and white places. The iterative nature of our reflections on our progress through the process of collaboration cannot be viewed as entirely linear. As is often the case with ethnographic approaches to research, there was considerable overlap in our reflections on how the data spoke to some of our concerns (outlined above) about scholarship on race and class (Goodall, 2000; Yanow, 2006). Comprehending the key themes of the research together, both during and after the research, produced critical conversations between us about how we both relate to and understand why Black people find themselves defending, and at times excusing, racism in predominantly white places (or even among their own family). Further, the collaborative nature of talking through our familiarity with the data before identifying what some of the Black participants were engaging with was clearly informed by our critical engagement with the individualisation of race and racism. Some fundamental features of the digital and multimedia tools we used to conduct and later analyse our discussions crystallised the possibilities of this process. These mechanisms were of course essential, as we were working in different countries throughout the research period. On this, Lomax and Casey (1998: 124) note that multimedia methodologies and particularly video methods provide more instructive possibilities for reflexive approaches to sociological enquiry: ‘The facility of video to record, albeit partially, a version of the research process is unique in that it enables an analysis of the contribution of that process to the production of the data.’ The rapid changes in communication technologies have affected our expectations around data collection, as well as our epistemologies of all types of research, but have especially strengthened the possibilities for collaborative projects. A key point here is that this technological evolution occurred in the immediate aftermath of a boom in the publication of ethnographic, reflexive autobiographical works, often synthesised in various edited volumes by the likes of Meneley and Young (2005), Reed-Danahay (1997) and Yanow and Schwartz-Shea (2006), as well as in textbooks such as those by Aull Davies (2008) and Coffey (1999). Strikingly, the rise of more robust theoretical pathways for auto-ethnographic research and use of advanced communications technology in the field has culminated in calls for a valorisation of voice-note research, particularly because it enables the reflexive (Mazanderani, 2017). In the spirit of both collaborative and dialogical knowledge production, our process is part of a tradition of methodological enquiry, which makes use of collaborative and multi-model ways of recording and documenting social life alongside a practical engagement with social research (Collins, 2012).

Researching Race and Racism: Collaboration and Data Collection

One of the key findings of Chantelle’s research was that Black families in predominantly white towns experience an intensification of the workings of race and whiteness on both a structural and interpersonal level. Crucially, this was an empirical finding that was primarily situated in the fact that few of the Black people within the families had spoken about their experiences of racism with their parents growing up. We stress that the analysis of the intimacies of race and whiteness found in Chantelle’s work was enhanced by the methodological process that was embedded in her Black feminist praxis alongside Bryel.

A substantial amount of the empirical data collected during Chantelle’s interviews contained very intimate narratives recalling the way Black and Black mixed-race people negotiate both micro and macro forms of hegemonic whiteness and cultures of racism, which play out in very particular ways in rural and suburban places in England (Nayak, 2010; Neal, 2002; Knowles, 2008; Ware, 2022). Thus, the interviews transcribed by Bryel contained a significant number of conversations focused on how Black families managed a combination of interpersonal and structural racisms while living among the mainly white population of their shared hometown. These stories included accounts that ranged from physical violence and teachers’ racism in schools, to conversations about white parenting and its impacts on Black mixed-race people’s sense of self. Crucially, these social reproductions had remained largely unspoken among families and peers throughout their child- and adulthoods. Thus, we regularly spent time discussing how the negotiations of racism brought to light by the transcriptions were both particular and familiar to us. For instance, on one occasion (10 March 2021) we were in touch with each other to discuss some of Chantelle’s conclusions on the theme of ‘internalising and individualising racisms’. Notable points of discussion included how to sensitively contextualise some of the experiences participants described, while situating the commentary in ‘race, place, love and family’ (Lewis, 2021).

Transcription as Political

The combined process of recording, transcribing and interpreting the data from Chantelle’s research was a fundamental aspect of the project. In other earlier instances, care, caution and consideration in how the data were shared between us translated into a cathartic process of talking through the material. This part of the collaboration usually involved warning one another about the potentially challenging nature of particular bits of data, a dialogue concerning the relatability of the subject matter and then critical discussions about how the research questions were being answered. When Chantelle notified Bryel of an incoming recording, this would be followed by a voice note or message to prepare Bryel that the subject matters covered during the conversation might be challenging and, at times, emotive to listen to. Further, the process of transcribing these ethnographic interviews should be understood through notions of practicality and efficiency, but also through demonstrable examples of handling such challenging data with a combined ethics of care (Oakley, 2015). Sending a memo such as this could be considered merely best practice when handling sensitive and emotionally disturbing data. However, in this case, it became all the more pertinent as both researchers had personal experience of the subject matter and would undoubtedly be affected by listening to the conversations. An example of this process occurred when Chantelle sent Bryel a WhatsApp voice note about a particularly challenging conversation that centred on whiteness, racism and social services:

Hi Bel! I hope you’re good? I just wanted to give you a pre-warning that the second lot of interviews that I did were very heavy. So, when you’re coming to do some of them, particularly those that feature [research participant], just come to it when you’re in a good place . . . They’re quite sad. (Chantelle reaching out to Bryel on 4 July 2019)

Chantelle is clear with Bryel that this interview should be approached with caution; she urges her to only start listening to the audio when she is ‘in a good place’ to avoid causing emotional distress. This type of collaborative process speaks to Lewis’ (2020) contention on the turn in Black feminist methodologies where Black women’s differential positions in relation to power become integral to how we make sense of the scholarship we are seeking to produce. To produce a coherent and accurate transcript that can be properly analysed by another researcher, one needs to be able to convey the emotion and intention of the speaker. By this we mean, not merely the words that they say, but also the art of textually conveying the tone in which the words were uttered. An effective use of punctuation is of course essential in this, although for the moments of speech barely captured on a recording, because the participant is either laughing, crying or whispering, more intuitive skills are required. If a transcriber has an intimate understanding of the experiences being described (either because they actually conducted the interviews or because they share the experiences being described), they can anticipate things that might be said, even at emotionally heightened moments at which the audio might otherwise be unintelligible. When forewarned, the transcriber is able to prepare themself mentally, and thus be less distracted or distressed by the content, even as they might relate personally to the details. This ensures that the quality of the transcript, and ultimately the analysis and conclusions, are less compromised than they might otherwise be.

Conversing about and transcribing these interviews about racism could not have been undertaken in this instance, and across our research partnership, without an emphasis on who we are as researchers, but also as Black women who are all too familiar with the subject matter. Our point here is to show that the caution and warnings from one researcher to another about the nature of the data being shared should be considered fundamental to the research process itself. It aids the transcriber to prepare themself for the topic and to consider the best way to listen to and recapture the conversation. Ethically, to take for granted a colleague’s intimate knowledge of unpleasant topics, such as racism, in order to receive an effective transcription, is exploitative. This speaks to already existing collaborations in social research. Both of us had spent time during the fieldwork talking through how the data reminded us of our own personal experiences. The combination of care and friendship through voice notes helped to ease the engagement with these challenging data. This can be linked to Oakley’s (2015) notes on the turn in feminist research that centres the importance of care and friendship, where she contends that feminist scholarship, or how we relate to each other in feminist research and praxis, has become increasingly guided and informed by the gift of friendship between women researchers and the people they research. This emphasis on care and friendship also became integral to how Chantelle prepared Bryel for the interview data. The use of voice notes rather than written messages or emails made this possible. Following an audible warning from Chantelle, Bryel responded with the following:

Thanks so much for thinking of that, and for being transparent and explicit in that way. I actually already started [****] and I’ve already had a bit of a cry [laughs]. I think it shows how intuitive and perceptive you are, like, to give me that kind of a warning. (Bryel, WhatsApp voice note)

Chantelle knew that the interview data contained subject matter that could be challenging, both to listen to and to transcribe. Bryel’s voice note above demonstrates what Mazanderani (2017) notes about the feminist and reflexive possibilities of voice notes for ethnographers. Naming these challenging and emotional micro-processes of producing knowledge about racisms in this instance clearly demonstrates that our relationship transcended and stretched the idea of a working relationship; it emphasises that for Black scholars these matters are intensely political, emotional and challenging. The characteristics of friendship provide a route to showing how this practical process of transcription was crucial to the findings of the research. This was also demonstrative of the power of voice notes, as ‘they carry something that no written entry can fully achieve – tone’ (Mazanderani, 2017: 85).

While our analysis is aligned with a critically reflexive process of collaboration, care and friendship we also want to draw attention again to the politics of the subject under study and our familiarities with these matters. Working together on the data still warrants caution around our own susceptibilities to overemphasising our personal experiences of race. Because of this, to first understand why – and to later transcend – how individualised accounts of race and racism appear in the field is seldom attainable by co-researching and nurturing our professional bond (or being friends). The merits of our working relationship, which help to make sense of these racialised micro-processes in the field, are clearly to do with a dual process of accountability, but with this we want to pay attention to another version of hyper-individualisation that can appear in our own journey of collaborative reflexivity. These issues relate to the fact that our process of collaborative reflexivity through dialogical knowledge production must be distinguishable from a type of ‘groupism’. The ambition is that naming this process and showing one’s working out through practice (and praxis) supports us in our future endeavours to demonstrate accountability and critical friendship, rather than simply becoming a way of gaining more support or being emboldened by shared interpretations of social life. The care and friendship dynamics we present here are always in a process of becoming; they are part of a journey that requires us to ‘check in’ in ways that demonstrate how care involves critique and holding each other to account.

Reaching Reflexive Dialogues about Race and Class through Collaboration

In this section, we return to our previous discussion about how ideas are always already formulated in collaboration and the importance of this. These collaborations are signified by the number of people who help us to understand and make sense of the social world around us. From the scholarship that inspired us to become academics in the first place, to our peer groups, colleagues, family members and friends – our ideas are never formulated in isolation. This is even (and perhaps especially) the case when we feel as though we are alone in our experiences and observations. Specifically for this article, we address the relationship between the researcher and transcriber as one that became integral to how Chantelle made sense of the narratives and stories concerning race, class, place, whiteness and family. This process of discussing together the emergent themes, as scholars with very similar experience, meant that the conversations became focused on how we could both relate to, but also resist, some of the dialogues about race shared by participants. The emphasis on lived experience when it comes to matters of race and class is of course important. As we argued earlier in this article, to present a formulated idea about one’s lived experience on matters concerning race – and in this case, Black mixed-race – can predispose both academic and non-academic writers on race to reproduce the very ideas we are looking to resist and contest. By centring this methodological relationship, we are able to show that dialogical knowledge production can take us beyond lived experience to a more structurally reflexive conversation – a conversation about what data on the interpersonal functioning of race can tell us about society more broadly. We think these stages of methodological reflection demonstrate the sorts of interactions that can help us to engage practically and embed dialogues about social life, which seek to address but also erase race:

I think that as social researchers, particularly researchers who think about race, place and class, we bring a lot of ourselves into the research and that means that we kind of find it, well I sometimes find it quite hard to remove my own subjectivities from how some people talk about race who aren’t necessarily ummmm fully engaged in racial literacy for example. . . do you know what I mean? So I think that a really important part of our working together was you helping me to understand and make sense of when sometimes like sometimes fellow Black people would say stuff that was slightly reductive, but it comes from a place of. . . that isn’t to do with ummm I don’t know how to word it but it comes from a place that we need to understand in social research. (Chantelle)

And so I was pushed to be more reflexive and more responsible for how I situated myself in my research because it was easier to identify me. So I think we also have to be mindful of how that pushes us towards thinking about our work in a certain way. Even if we might already be the kind of researchers that would take that responsibility – and I think all researchers should – there are environmental factors as well pushing us in those directions too. (Bryel)

We were not merely aware of how our identities connected us to the data. In the spirit of a truly auto-ethnographic, reflexive praxis, we strove to critically engage with what it meant for the two of us to work together methodologically on such a project, utilising this as an analytical framework and situating the process firmly within the sociological Black feminist context(s) outlined above. Thus, the work produced becomes more robust. Furthermore, the contributions to knowledge production are meaningful rather than exploitative because the arguments we make engage with (the dismantling of) ongoing discourses of power, authority and belonging. Regardless of whether we have already arrived at more critical engagements with race, conversations conducted like this are a way to reflexively reiterate and resist individualism. Our collaborative dialogues transcend an engagement with simply showing one’s workings out. Our process of working together on an ethnography about Blackness corresponds with the possibility of critical, yet emancipatory dialogues about race. The starting point was the generation of spaces to talk about how we came to see our own experiences of negative racialisation and racism through the narrations of others. Critically reflecting, with others, about race can provide the dialogical tools to contextualise intimate and interpersonal experiences of racism that demonstrate the existence of wider structures of society.

Conversations over Time

Even after all the research interviews, we still don’t have the vocabulary to explain our feelings and experiences that emerge from the field. (Chantelle, video recording).

We need to explore and question in the paper how difficult it is to establish those vocabularies and coin phrases and terminologies without the support and collective brainstorming from these virtual, scholarly communities. (Bryel, video recording)

In the above quotations, we are talking about the importance of collaboration, making sense of social life in community, but also the possibilities of intentionally engaging with the unknowing of social life. Our final reflection concerns the power of conversation over time.

Crucially, the emphasis on building ideas together, sharing and collaboration also adhere to the earlier contentions in this article that go beyond the terrain of academic scholarship. Put simply, these empirical reflections are not restricted to the findings of an ethnographic project about race, place and class. Like the Black feminists we cite throughout, these reflections demonstrate the importance of recognising and making clear others’ contributions to our politics. For the broad coalition of scholars committed to work that seeks to make clear how social reproductions and technologies reproduce inequality (Lentin, 2020), one of the most exciting aspects of reflective scholarship that centres these collaborative elements is the opportunity it presents for critical friendship. We also need to state here that the privilege of time, space and community is integral to these reflections. Our scholarship is a combination of so many relationships and people who enter our lives, and intentionally maintaining collaborative practices helps us to unearth how and when this occurs. How we become and relate to each other is an omnipresent part of our analysis (Wekker, 2016: 26).

Conclusion

Research and writing about race, class and identity can be exceptionally challenging for scholars with lived experiences of the matters they study. In this article we have centred the way a plethora of Black feminist thinking, organising and writing guided our reflective process as we worked collaboratively on the development of Chantelle’s research findings. This mode of working has since guided other intellectual projects for both of us.

We have stressed the importance of collaboration when discussing, researching and reporting on matters of race and class. We see our commentary as embedded in a politics of scholarly accountability on subjects that have become infused with an overindulgence of individualism. Collaborative production of knowledge(s) requires an ongoing and reflexive engagement with accountability; and it is this robustness of relationship building in social research that we see as illustrating the science of working together. Taking into account all the different social and environmental factors, you get to the point where the working relationship is robust enough to present critical reflections and development together. Further, our approach is embedded in locating ourselves as scholars who are part of the same social world we seek to examine, research and write about (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; O’Reilly, 2012).

Our Black feminist fore-parents have offered us so much in terms of both knowledge production and theoretical enquiry; we used these tools to recall the practical process of learning and thinking together about ethnographic findings that were both personal and political for us. Our reflections are thus embedded in the collaborative process of working with familiar data together. To name, detail and begin to characterise this endeavour together we offer evolved threads of analysis on subject matters and systems that have been used to marginalise our Black senses of self, as well as our scholarship. Our reflections locate our personal narratives as starting points rather than as a final destination. The possibilities emerging from such reflection contribute to Black feminist methods and thought, which offer emancipatory perspectives on how we grapple with the very real process of reconciling our own histories of racialised and gendered harm and trauma, as well as recognising how others experience it, but ultimately ensuring that how we communicate takes account of the systems of power that sustain marginality.

As we begin to see Black and mixed-race scholarship more widely published, we therefore need to be mindful, purposeful and political about how we take up these spaces, with viewpoints that are only now perhaps becoming recognised as authoritative. Put simply, the endurance of our siblings to create, produce and write on the margins or in the shadows of, dominant (white) epistemologies should be at the forefront of our fresh perspectives on the heterogeneity of the Black experience. These matters (or reminders) are as true for materials produced within the so-called ‘academic domain’ as well as for the more mainstream trade non-fiction sector.