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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

This article draws upon sociological and postcolonial scholarship of labor and the body to offer a “contrapuntal” analysis of the research process. Contrapuntal analysis, as described by Edward Said (1993), strives to read literature from a different counterpoint: to “reveal their deep implication in imperialism and the colonial process” (Ashcroft et al., 2000, p. 55). In the framework of this special issue on positioning analytic (auto)ethnography, the author seeks to advance the scope of “analytic reflexivity” (Anderson, 2006) through a contrapuntal reading of researchers’ positioning acts to access interviewees and data for their projects. Embracing positioning analysis’ emphasis on self-positioning and positioning of others as mutually bound to each other (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999; Moghaddam et al., 2008), this article considers how researchers’ interview participants place and position researchers’ bodies in particular ways. Instead of assuming researchers’ movements within the research process are self-guided and intentional, this article flips the gaze, to a different counterpoint, to highlight the multiple relations of power that affect researchers’ positioning, movements, and what they access and record as “data.”

This contrapuntal “reading” of researchers’ positioning is based on data from a project on labor relations in the humanitarian aid sector in Jordan, a postcolonial setting that is “over-researched” (Carpi, 2021; Pascucci, 2017; Sukarieh & Tannock, 2013). The latter term refers to the phenomenon in which certain places are saturated with researchers due to their association with hot topics (e.g., refugees and humanitarian crises) and accessibility (notably from the perspective of “Western-based” institutions located in North America and continental Europe in particular). In such settings, managing researchers, including the author, ¹ has become a form of labor that is often normalized as part of aid workers’ jobs. The plethora of procedures and practices that are routinized to handle the sheer volume of researchers in these locations make the multiple relations that inform how researchers “gain access” and “build rapport” hypervisible and explicit. Over-researched contexts subsequently serve as excellent cases to think contrapuntally about global knowledge production processes and the relations of power that undergird them, precisely because they readily contest depictions of researchers as autonomous, self-guided actors.

The author brings attention to this point through reflections on how her interviewees—aid workers—developed particular routines to handle researchers like her both in and beyond the workplace, and how these practices made her feel “in” and “out of place” in unexpected ways. She situates the latter information, how her body was positioned by aid workers, along with her reactions to these placements, as critical data that reflect multiple, social hierarchies of order and power operating in and produced from research as practice. Positioning the so-called “researched” as managing her and other researchers’ bodies as part of their daily work as the starting point of reflexivity emphasizes how bodies’ literal positionings are sites that articulate colonial discourses, but simultaneously reveal resistance and rejection of colonial control and constructions of inferiority (Ashcroft et al., 1999, p. 321). These reflections subsequently demonstrate the utility and complementarity of “thinking contrapuntally” about research relations and power within a positioning analytic ethnographic framework (Greschke, see this issue), and offer one way to mobilize analytic reflexivity “grounded in self-experience” to think critically about postcolonial entanglements and global social hierarchies of power (Anderson, 2006, p. 386).

Background on Case

Jordan, but more specifically its capital Amman, is one of several places located in the so-called global South, often described as “over-researched.” In many cases, these places are associated with particular types of researchers (e.g., representatives of institutions located in continental Europe and North America) and studies for both practitioner and scholarship purposes (e.g., Malawi for AIDS, Lebanon for refugees, Kerala for development, Bangladesh for microfinance and climate change). Research funding and priorities from the likes of the U.S. and U.K. governments partially drive this phenomenon, too (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2019). As one of the countries hosting the highest number of refugees per capita, and located in the region considered the largest producer and host of protracted refugee populations globally, it is not surprising that Jordan has become over-researched in this field. Indeed, it is not only and increasingly a “comfort zone” for researchers (Carpi, 2021), but also other “visitors” such as journalists, to observe the effects of displacement from recent crises (e.g., Syria) and ones that are decades old (e.g., Palestine). Other “trendy” topics have also attracted scholars to the country (e.g., terrorism, Islam, and Arab Spring), and increased security measures “elsewhere” in the region means more researchers now come to Jordan for feasibility reasons, too.

With numerous entities addressing refugee and humanitarian aid-related issues in the country, there is no shortage of people for researchers to speak with and collect data from on this issue. In fact, more than 58 International NGOs were registered in the country at the time of this research, working alongside United Nations organizations and the World Bank (not to mention the plethora of national and local NGOs, civil society organizations, and various private sector companies also involved). In fact, the demand for research on aid and the refugee populations it targets, has created a “refugee-research industry” (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2019), producing new forms of work as a result (e.g., local consultancy firms).

Literature Review

Power Relations in the Research Process: Self-Reflexivity as “Complicit”?

Turner (2008) draws upon the body to understand the modern world as a “somatic society”; a “social system in which political and social problems are often expressed through or manifest in the body” (p. 514). Scholars have thus “read” the body as representative of social relations of power: a “site upon which a performance occurs delivering a power political statement” (Featherstone, 2000, as cited in Turner 2008, p. 519). People’s particular practices or techniques can therefore be conceptualized as “corporeal expressions of the hierarchy of power” (Turner, 2008, p. 519), and what Bourdieu (1977, 1990) may refer to as part of one’s habitus. “Embodiment” can therefore be understood as “practices [. . .] necessary to function in the everyday world” (Turner, 2008, pp. 516–518).

Many versions of self-reflexivity frame the research process as an embodied one, which reflects, reifies, and produces social hierarchies (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Burawoy, 2003). Anderson’s (2006) analytic autoethnography, for example, centers “analytic reflexivity” as part of “five key features” that contribute to theoretical explanations of social structures: “to use empirical data to gain insight into some broader set of social phenomena than those provided by the data themselves” (p. 387). This approach embraces the multiplicity and partiality of social relations to counteract the “tendency of [ethnography] to favor coherence . . . which in turn contributes to the perception of communities as bounded and discrete” (Abu-Lughod, 1991/2014, p. 391; see also Greschke’s discussion of this point in this issue). “Reflexivities of discomfort” (Pillow, 2003) further calls for not only analysis of researchers’ “problems” and emotions in the research process as indicative of the reproduction of social hierarchies of power, but also their contestations. After all, “ethnography involve[es] at least two, and usually more, conscious politically significant subjects rather than one power on [and] writing about an ‘other’” (Clifford, 1983 as cited by Guhin & Wyrtzen, 2013, p. 250).

Yet self-reflexive accounts that situate the researcher as “in control” of the research process, and research participants as “passive responders” to it, persist (Schulz, 2021, also see Thapar-Björkert & Henry, 2004). This matters because it assumes a unidirectional, coherent narrative of how power operates within research, thus overlooking “the frictional, disputable and contradictory” social relations embedded in this process (Greschke, in this issue). Perhaps ironically, attention to social power as relational is subsequently underwhelming because of how self-reflexivity is articulated as one-way “confessional,” “narcisstic” acts from or about “the researcher” (Pillow, 2003; also see Anderson, 2006, for a discussion).

Important scholarship highlights how even the concept of “the relational” within sociology is embedded in particular social and cultural assumptions connected to power, notably the discipline’s European, Western episteme (Bhambra, 2014; Boatcă & Costa, 2016; Connell, 2007; Go, 2016; Magubane, 2016; Quijano, 2007). Who and what was recognized as someone to be in relation with was premised upon particular and exclusive understandings of categories such as “people” and “society” as well as their physical and imagined locations within the world. The overwhelming lacunae of colonial relations in explanations of this early social thought is indicative, leading scholars to increasingly take up the call over the past two to three decades to “reconnect” these overlooked relations as important correctives and transformations of social thought (e.g., Bhambra, 2014; Go, 2016). The latter shift has had implications for conceptualizing self-reflexivity, too. Steinmetz (2004), for example, suggests “reflexive self-contextualization” along with historicization and anti-essentialism to ensure researchers (ethnographers in particular) account for power articulated in their work and “ward off the most egregious misuses of their research” (p. 274). This means “researchers familiarize themselves with the political conjunctures into which their research will enter and remain vigilant about the possible resonances of their language and analysis with regnant projects of domination and exploitation” (Steinmetz, 2004, p. 277). Similarly, Guhin and Wyrtzen (2013) call for “post-orientalist reflexivity” that takes into consideration not only of essentializing tendencies pertaining to postcolonial contexts, but also of apprehension: “Social scientists should be particularly sensitive to how the knowledge they produce however sensitively collected and presented is used by those in power. . . . and might well be used to consolidate power” (p. 254). The framework of this special issue relatedly calls for centering invectivity within a positioning autoethnographic approach to account for “social and moral (dis)orders of power” expressed through research: the conflicts, problems, and emotions that researchers encounter in data collection processes (Greschke, see this issue).

Combining autoethnography with positioning analysis, the latter of which acknowledges the multiple, ever-changing relations that shape interactions and power in the research process (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), may fruitfully contribute to “reconnecting relations” that shape the research process accordingly. However, and like aforementioned critiques of self-reflexivity (Anderson, 2006, p. 386), positioning analysis in its current articulation may unwittingly center “I” the researcher as its point of departure to account for relations and interactions within the research process: its default “story line” (Moghaddam et al., 2008). This may subsequently limit its scope and potential to account for the multiple relations and positions of power that not only produce and contest particular positions, but also literally drive the research process, too. What this means then is that to move toward a more elaborate understanding of how knowledge is “made” and contested in practice, we need to explore “the relational” coproduction of positionalities not only in more depth, but perhaps from a different starting point as well.

Thinking Contrapuntally About Research Relations

This article therefore takes one more step to address the latter: to think “contrapuntally” about positioning in the research process by considering how “the researched” (i.e., aid workers) place and pace the movement of researchers in particular ways. Borrowing from musical terms, Said (1993) is often credited for coining “contrapuntal analysis” as a way to situate literature as embedded in colonial relations of power. It is “a way of reading texts of English literature so as to reveal their deep implication in imperialism and the colonial process . . . enabling the emergence of colonial implication that might otherwise be hidden” (Ashcroft et al., 2000, p. 55). For Said, contrapuntal reading is critical because English literature is produced from and for the Western gaze, or position of power. One key example that he offers in this regard is the case of Mansfield Park, where he brings attention to references of sugar in the characters’ teacups to “reveal” the intricate connections between the characters’ wealth and Britain’s extractive practices in its colonial territories.

Similar to positioning analysis, which has been extended beyond its original linguistic focus, postcolonial scholars in sociology have mobilized contrapuntal analysis to re-“read” social theory and explanations, including accounts of knowledge production as articulating the colonial division of labor. During the colonial era and continuing into the present day, the metropole was associated with “producing theory” and knowledge, whereas the periphery was constructed as the “supplier” of data and testing ground for theory (see Connell et al., 2017, for an overview). This created and perpetuated mind–body divisions, academic dependency (Alatas, 2003), and a hierarchization of intellectual workers premised on physical and social meanings associated with their location (e.g., Europe, Middle East, and Asia; Connell, 2014; Hanafi, 2011). Why the latter matters is because it continues to create particular expectations and relations of power pertaining to how one can and should engage in the research process as a result.

These divisions also matter because they undoubtedly shape who is even recognized in scholarship and positioned in analyses as an “intellectual worker” in the first place. In this case, for example, many aid employees operating in crisis contexts, particularly those referred to (and who also position themselves) as “local workers,” ² are not necessarily recognized or even conceptualized as intellectual workers in the literature: folks that inform and drive the production of knowledge. At worst, they are cast as part of “the researched”: a monolithic category that “the researcher” accesses and builds rapport with (i.e., the data objects). At best, they are cast as “brokers” or facilitators to researchers (e.g., Swidler & Watkins, 2017), but not necessarily producers of knowledge themselves. These identifiers may be attributed to location associations like the “periphery” versus “metropole” or global South versus global North; or because their institutional affiliations are not readily identified as “knowledge” (e.g., academic) ones. As Connell (2014) reminds us, intellectual labor is often collective, performed in multiple institutional settings and combined with other forms of work. Multiple and various forms of intellectual labor and workers are therefore unrecognized and rendered invisible even when they make substantial contributions to and within the research process.

Scholarship on the global demand for research in postcolonial settings demonstrates this (Pascucci, 2017; Sukarieh & Tannock, 2013, 2019), which heightens the absurdity of constructions of “the researcher” as the sole knowledge worker, especially in over-researched contexts. Moreover, categories such as “global North,” “periphery,” and “metropole” may not necessarily capture the multiplicity and full array of social relations that inform the organization and configuration of the global production of knowledge in the contemporary era. Accounts that identify “specific forms of social labor . . . embodied in particular forms of work” involved in data collection and research processes are therefore direly needed (Connell et al., 2017, pp. 21–24).

Thinking about how aid workers quite literally move and manage researchers’ bodies to perform their jobs, is therefore conceptually productive for revealing these overlooked and “hidden” relations and power dynamics embedded in the research process in ways that are connected, rather than abstracted from, their living contexts (Ashcroft et al., 2000, p. 183). In so doing, thinking contrapuntally about the dynamics that produce the positionalities of researchers from the starting point of “the researched” (and problematizing these distinctions and labels along the way) may simultaneously enrich the utility of positioning autoethnographic analyses for accounting for social relations of power embedded, produced, and contested through research processes as well.

Method

Most of the data discussed in this article were collected during the period between August 2017 and March 2018 for a project on local aid workers in Jordan in the form of interviews and ethnographic observations from rural and urban areas, as well as one refugee camp setting (Zaatari). Instead of the researcher (“I”) using cold call outreach, key informants (whom “I” knew from previously living and working in Jordan), or snowball sampling, a more appropriate reading of how research access was obtained is to emphasize that it was these workers (what literature might position as “the researched”) who made these arrangements. They called and met with me at their convenience in response to my inquiries, and referred their colleagues and contacts for this study when they felt compelled to do so.

Most of the individuals the author positioned simultaneously as “aid workers” and “my interviewees” described themselves as “local” (n = 75). Local was a term that interviewees used to describe multiple dimensions of their employment and work status economically, socially, and culturally. For example, “local” connoted one’s nationality or residency status in relation to the aid organizations and employers they worked for and described as “international” (e.g., a Jordanian working in Jordan for Oxfam). Studies on aid work in other “global South” contexts highlight a similar pattern, emphasizing how “local” is often conflated with the category “national staff” to describe the significant portion of the personnel working for these aid organizations (Roth, 2015). However, in this study, not all “locals” agreed with this conflation, noting that they were not “national staff.” For example, interviewees who positioned themselves as “consultants” in the aid industry and who were temporarily contracted to write reports and evaluations for aid organizations and their projects considered themselves as “local” but not national staff (because they were not working on a full-time contract for any organization). Approximately, 51% of the local workers in this study also identified as women, reflective of the transnational aid sector globally (which tends to have more women employees and leadership compared with other transnational sectors). However, this figure is perhaps “exceptional” in the context of Jordan, where women’s participation in the labor force is quite low (around 15% ³ at the time of this research). Most interviewees were between the ages of 20 and 45 years and had worked for at least two (if not three) aid organizations within the past 5 years.

“Expat” worker, on the contrary was used by local aid workers (and those identified as “expats” themselves) to refer to employees working in Jordan based on a different citizenship status (e.g., an American working for Oxfam in Jordan). However, in most cases, local workers exclusively associated the “expat” label with White staff from North America and continental Europe (although not all “expat” staff were White), indicative of the racial hierarchies within aid work in Jordan and elsewhere that transcend nationality (Benton, 2016; Bian, 2022). Although this latter “expat” group of aid workers do not figure prominently within the context of this article, it is important to note these distinctions between aid staff because, as local workers described and as previous research confirms, these categories organize and hierarchize aid personnel in terms of contracts, salaries, benefits, and employers’ expectations (Farah, 2020; Pascucci, 2019; Roth, 2015; Ward, 2020).

The ways in which these workers “moved” and managed meetings, interviews, and other observations on researchers’ behalves encouraged me to approach these organizational logistics as a form of data in itself. In the spirit of positioning ethnographic analyses, their actions influenced me to make note of how meetings were organized (e.g., through phone calls, WhatsApp, or through another interviewee), the meeting location (which interviewees always chose), and the dynamics that occurred before interviews officially started (i.e., did we meet “on time,” did we order anything in a café, who paid, how was “I” identified by the interviewee at our meeting location, and what was discussed). How workers managed our interactions after the recorder was turned off (when it was clear that the official interview was “done”) posed as interesting data, too, particularly in terms of learning who constituted “the researcher” in an over-researched environment such as Jordan. Interviews lasted between 30 min and 2 hr. However, there were several occasions in which aid workers scheduled interviews back-to-back in certain work locations. The latter provided unanticipated opportunities to observe aid work dynamics over the course of entire days. Workers described their daily work routines, relations with other workers, and their future work plans in response to my questions. Both Arabic and English were used to communicate during these meetings. The author speaks and understands most Arabic dialects from Jordan and Southern Syria, but relied on translators on several occasions.

How the author’s body was managed and moved as a “researcher” by aid workers (“the researched”) in an over-researched context, and the emotional reactions the author experienced in response, pushed her to proceed inductively in this study (Mears, 2017; Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). Given the limited data and scholarship available on the role of local workers in the aid sector (especially from the local standpoint), the author’s previous research experiences in Jordan, and scholarship on labor processes and localization in other transnational industries, further inspired and validated the direction of data analysis for this study. As the following Findings section describes, workers’ perceptions of the author as a White, young, and heteronormative woman researcher in a context overwhelmed with many researchers “like her” not only seemed to undoubtedly shape how they (“the researched”) positioned, but also literally managed and moved me, as part of their daily labor. At the same time, the author’s emotional responses, feelings of being “in” and “out” of place in response to how they placed her body as part of their work routine, were indicative of the multiple relations of power shaping the research process beyond static articulations of these statuses.

Findings

Researchers as Labor Objects

The frequency with which I experienced feeling (and quite frankly was physically) at “the whim” of others while conducting research on humanitarianism in Jordan made me realize very quickly that moving and managing researchers’ bodies such as mine not only to and from aid offices, but also project sites and refugee camps were part of aid workers’ daily grind: the routine labor that “the researched” performed as part of their jobs. The repeated disinterest and lack of surprise my presence presented in office spaces already began to point me to the latter realization, but it was the workers’ subsequent routinized patterns for dealing with researchers that also made me aware that I was positioned as part of their daily work grind. Upon arrival to these office spaces, conversations with aid workers almost always started with orders of coffee or tea amid encouragements to sit in a place of their choosing (“What would you like to drink? . . . black coffee? Do you want sugar? Light, medium or sweet? Please take a seat here”). While offering drinks may have been a typical welcoming gesture for any visitor, researcher or otherwise, these introductions were almost always followed with interviewees launching into what I perceived as well-rehearsed scripts about their organizations’ missions and activities, the refugee situation in Jordan, and telling me it was okay to record them if I wanted—without me even asking in most cases. Many interviewees also had materials (e.g., annual reports) prepared for me in advance.

The familiarity and routinization with which workers approached researchers as part of their daily work was also evident in how they shuffled me on “tours” of organizations’ facilities, particularly in what they referred to as “field” offices, places that were conducting projects with refugee and host-community beneficiaries. These “tours” sometimes only lasted a few minutes. Nonetheless, workers’ scripts were all too rehearsed. Each room or space would be described in terms of specific kinds of information: the type of activities held there (“this room is for our livelihoods programs”), the number of beneficiaries targeted (“More than X number of beneficiaries are participating”), and who funded the activities (“We are also receiving funds from UNHCR and WFP for this program”). I sometimes felt awkward on these tours with aid worker interviewees, thinking that it was “not my place” to be there during their busy workdays or beneficiary events. Yet workers’ routinized scripts and the unsurprised gazes that met these interviewees and me on more than one occasion (from their colleagues and beneficiaries alike) suggested that our interactions were familiar and (had long been) “in place” after all. In fact, when I asked an interviewee to describe his typical workday, he noted, “There is no typical day [for me]. . . . but you are [often] part of it . . . you are part of the story” (SUH, 2018). This was a “you” that was not about “me” explicitly, but pertained to what I as “a researcher” represented for aid workers: a major part of their daily labor.

This positioning of researchers, as part of aid employees’ daily work, was particularly noticeable on my visit to a refugee camp setting as well:

On the way to the camp, one of the aid workers in the car asks me about my research. I tell her a little bit, and then she asks me what I am hoping to do at Zaatari today. I tell her that I am hoping to just observe what is going on at the center and, if possible, to interview some of the Syrian volunteer workers who run the center on a daily basis. She asks me (as several people have asked already today) if I am planning to take any pictures. I tell them no (as I am not), and then she asks about notes and audio. I say yes, I am hoping to record the interviews in some format to which she replies, “Well I might say not to record . . . it makes the Syrians nervous.” I tell her that I will only use notes then . . . if that is okay. To this, she says yes. She also asks me if I want some background on [Organization X]. I know a little already, but I want to hear how she narrates the story of [Organization X], so I say yes. She tells me the history of the organization, about their activities with refugees living in the camp, etc. . . . As we continue down the road, she takes a few phone calls coordinating activities for her work with colleagues in Amman and elsewhere. The other two guys in the car and Zain (the driver, another local worker) are relatively quiet. We exchange basic greetings, and I learn that the two guys, other “ajaneb” (foreigners) like me, are photojournalists doing a photo training in Zaatari that they previously did in the Congo and in the states in Brooklyn. When we [eventually] get out of the car [after processing my clearance at the camp border, facilitated by Zain and another local worker back in Amman], Zain introduces me to a woman named Reem. She greets me and looks to Zain for directions about “what to do with me.” Zain tells her to take me around the center to show me the facilities and to take me out into the camp as well for a tour of the main market streets in Zaatari. Reem proceeds accordingly without much hesitation. . .

Similar to office spaces in Amman, the researcher’s body was an all-too-familiar object subsumed to be part of the daily labor in refugee camp settings in Jordan. In fact, and amid so many other (predominantly White) researchers, I found myself feeling oddly “in place” in a space, a refugee camp, that was literally constructed to reinforce the notion that one is indeed out of place. The woman worker’s questions on the way to Zaatari about how I planned to record my data and her assumption that I would want and need to know information about the organization for my study is indicative, and reflective, of expectations of researchers as “there” to “get something” in the form of data (e.g., stories, photos, and information), what Garbe (see this issue) similarly describes in terms of researcher extractivism. Specifically, aid workers expected that I was going to the camp to observe and record “refugees” and “refugee life.” Otherwise, why would I be there? Zain’s instructions to Reem to take me on a tour of the camp emphasizes this point because the “tour” was designed (as Reem shared on our outing) for me to “see beneficiaries” (i.e., refugees in their everyday settings). In fact, Reem was surprised when I asked her if we could talk more about her everyday routines working in the camp, the focus of my project. ⁴

However, I soon learned that it was not only researchers who were managed by workers in this way, but also (to a certain extent) journalists, donor representatives, and other “camp visitors” (similar to the two guys in the car with me) as well. The link between us being that, workers positioned our motivations and goals (get information about camp life), desires (see and hear refugees and their stories), and duration in the camp (temporary) uniformly. The assumptions of these latter links were inevitably based on workers’ repeated encounters and episodes with multiple, overlapping conglomerates of “visitors” in an over-researched context such as Jordan (or Zaatari more specifically). In turn, workers learned to develop particular strategies to manage (our) movements to fulfill the responsibilities associated with their jobs: walks around the camp to satisfy our “eyes,” followed by refugee stories to satisfy our “ears,” and a prompt departure from the camp in a few hours’ time. Perhaps visitors’ desire for data, which included the likes of donor representatives who had real power to decide the future direction of projects, and thus workers’ contracts, is what simultaneously motivated, but also made it necessary for workers to manage us in similar ways, too, as it was not always clear what our relations as “researchers” were to these other “visitors” as well. After all, some researchers wore “two hats,” conducting evaluations for aid organizations, as well as scholarly projects at the same time. From this perspective, it is once again evident how the research and labor process were intertwined: successfully moving and managing researchers and their satisfaction were understood as “good” job performances that produced “good” workers. Yet the latter statement also alludes to the fact that “good” workers had to make sure beneficiaries’ bodies and stories were visible and audible to researchers and other camp visitors in particular ways as well. Performing the “good worker” was not solely premised upon physical exertion (e.g., the movement of bodies), but also the relational work “good workers” performed between these various bodies. Collectively, these various acts of “work” ultimately shaped the scope, insights, and positions the researcher and the research process reflected (what was “seen,” “heard,” and collected as data).

There Goes the Neighborhood? “White” Researchers Outside the Workplace

A significant number of interviews for this study were conducted “after” or “off” work hours “outside” the physical workplace (e.g., evening, holiday, or weekends). In many instances, these meetings were in cafés over coffee or tea. What is surprising is that most of these interviews were in the same neighborhoods and even in the same cafés. These cafés were physically distinct from the workplaces, but workers conceptualized them as extensions of it: spaces informally designated to finish their jobs, including meetings with researchers.

The atmospheres and vibes of these cafes were telling in this regard. Bodies huddled over laptops, chairs crammed around small tables, and loud conversations in quick question-answer cycles were understood as “usual” café activity. At least to my mind, these “leisure” spaces, seemed to foster more frenzied affairs that indicated how work transcended the aid workplace and affected the daily, overtime (and often unpaid) labor routines of aid workers. Indeed, café interviews were often manifestations of the overwork workers experienced because managing and moving researchers to and from spaces and places to collect data for their studies was part of their explicit, but also informal tasks (“duties”) associated with their jobs. Yet, and similar to the aforementioned refugee camp visit, café interviews also revealed the many ways in which these workers were directing and managing the scope of researchers’ data: the narratives that researchers would ultimately “tell” about Jordan in their studies.

How aid workers “grouped” researchers in these café settings, for example, is indicative. At first glance, I assumed that this was simply because there might not be any more “tables for two.” Yet this grouping revealed two important issues. First, there were simply too many of “us.” Workers often described my interviews with them as just one component of a whole array of meetings they had with other researchers that day or week. In other words, I was part of their typical, busy schedule. In oversaturated research environments, such as Amman, grouping researchers together seemed to pose as one strategy to save workers’ time (i.e., two interviews for the price of one). Second, these groupings emphasized that while managing researchers was perhaps time-consuming, it was perceived less so in terms of content. Workers often assumed that researchers, similar to the “visitors” in the camp, were “there for the same stories” anyways, so grouping researchers could save them not only time, but also the energy required for repeating the same story over and over again (cutting down on the labor they must engage in without compromising their job performance). Moreover, without the props offered in office spaces (e.g., facilities to be “toured,” beneficiaries to be “seen”), workers relied on their own oral narrations to provide this information and perform their jobs accordingly. Articulating their position in this way was arguably a form of power, too, given that workers ultimately decided what researchers “heard” and did not hear; what they learned, observed, and recorded as data for their studies.

However, unlike my physical presence in these café settings, which was positioned as “familiar,” my research topic on their work routines and aid labor relations was often met with “surprised” faces. This was true in almost all of my interview encounters (“So you mean you do not want to talk or learn about the refugees?”). Workers’ usual repertoires to manage researchers and their expectations—their rehearsed scripts, performances, and tours—did not “fit” accordingly. Why the latter is so important to highlight is because it revealed the ways in which interviewees (“the researched”) orchestrated a particular, and to a certain extent uniform, narrative of “what was going on in Jordan” by how they literally moved, placed, and interacted with researchers based on particular assumptions of who researchers were and what they wanted in terms of data. Why this poses as so interesting is because first, it shows how conceptualizations of researchers as the same type of “body” satisfied with the same formula shaped the research process. Second, it offers insights into the similarities in which “the researcher” and “the researched” contributed to flat perceptions of one another to perform and produce the “good” researcher and worker simultaneously.

Variations

How researchers’ bodies were placed and moved deviated in some cases from these aforementioned patterns. The location of meetings, for example, fluctuated. Workers invited me to their homes in several cases, or asked me to join them on outings with their friends during off-work hours. From certain perspectives, this could be “read” as a researcher having strong rapport or trust with interviewees. However, it was also an issue of convenience. For aid workers, it was often easier, less time and “work,” to have me come meet them in their house or while they were already out, especially considering the traffic in some areas of the country. Similar to grouping researchers in cafes, they combined me with their leisure activities as they only had so much spare time, or so they did not have to make another trip for our meeting. Workers’ family obligations and roles (e.g., children to care for) or class status (e.g., going out in places such as Amman can be quite expensive, so it could be more affordable to meet at home) were also given directly or indirectly as reasons to meet at the home. In some parts of the country, such as some villages in the south, there were few options to “go out” to meet in the first place, too. Not all workers cited these explanations directly (although some of them did), but our conversations alluded to all of them on multiple occasions.

It should also be noted, however, that home invitations were by no means less work either. In fact, they required more time and labor for interviewees in some cases than meetings in café settings (e.g., cleaning the house, providing more than just coffee or tea to the researcher as a guest, and emotional labor). Recognizing the extra labor required beyond their jobs to have me over for an interview made me often feel like I was “imposing” on them in ways similar, but also distinct from my impositions in office spaces: extracting more time and energy than what I—and they—signed up for. Yet I soon came to realize that these performances and home invitations were not necessarily about “me,” “researchers,” or even workers’ jobs per se. Rather, these performances were to position themselves in relation to their colleagues or friends who introduced or connected me with them in the first place as dependable, loyal, and trustworthy. Some workers, for example, made references to how “Ali” or “Sara” gave them a call before our meeting to make sure they “take care of me”: shifting the language and position of “me” as another researcher to be “dealt” with to a person or friend to be “taken care of.” While I was perhaps understood as more than just another labor object (body) to be “managed” as part of the daily work grind, I was positioned as a body to be managed to satisfy interviewees’ social (and sometimes intimate) relations. Such dynamics and exchanges therefore revealed, and like café settings, the various ways in which research processes were intertwined with workers’ relations in and beyond the workplace. Moreover, they emphasized the significant emotional labor that research processes entail to manage not only researchers, but also their relations within and outside their work roles, too. As positioning theory predicts, multiple “story lines” shaped researchers’ positionality and the meanings associated with “the researcher” in Jordan (Moghaddam et al., 2008).

It is also important to note that even when I was present in the workplace, I was not always positioned as a familiar labor object. In one rural town setting in the South of the country, for example, aid workers were surprised by my physical presence in their office. The looks and direct questions exchanged between workers pertaining to “what to do with me” were markedly different than those I encountered in Zaatari and in the capital. Eye exchanges that suggested “here we go again” were missing, and several workers directly stated to me that they never spoke to a researcher before. One even asked why I was there in the first place and why I wanted to talk to them. Workers also asked whether I wanted coffee or tea and checked in a few times to make sure I was comfortable sitting in their conference room for the interviews. Their questions and hesitancy about my comfort revealed that routinized performances were not established to meet with folks like me in the ways I experienced in other offices spaces in Amman. In other words, my position was somehow unclear; not yet defined within the parameters of their jobs. However, it also became apparent that this hesitancy related to their concerns about their ability to meet with me outside the office because of the limited number of cafes and public space options in this area as well. How I was moved as a researcher seemed to therefore reflect broader resource distribution patterns in the country between rural and urban settings. Tracing where researchers were concentrated and understood as labor objects was subsequently indicative of these broader socioeconomic inequalities within the country, as well as the aid industry’s—and researchers’—complicit status in their production and perpetuation.

Resisting Researchers

Perceptions of researchers’ temporality and ephemerality in the country particularly shaped how and why workers could and did manage and resist researchers accordingly. Similar to workers’ repertoires to deal with the content researchers sought from them, workers also developed particular logistical repertoires to manage researchers based on their familiarity with researchers’ short-term data collection periods in the country. That is, researchers coming and going rather quickly; staying in Jordan just long enough to obtain the data they needed for their projects. In one case, for example, one worker scheduled back-to-back interviews with eight people for me in one day, because she assumed I would only be coming to the field site for that scheduled date and would be leaving Jordan soon. I remember feeling overcome with exhaustion at the end of that day, unaccustomed to the pace of work that these interviewees (“the researched”) dictated, but who simultaneously experienced themselves on a routine basis, given the scope and expectations associated with their aid worker jobs.

In other cases, workers would delay our tentative meetings, suggesting to “be in touch again next week” or “after the weekend” when they would have a better idea of their schedule, but also perhaps in the hopes that I would leave, too. Sometimes, meetings were rescheduled in what became a familiar pattern because of the “unpredictability” of their work schedules or because they “had to go to the field today.” Such delays often led to feelings of not only frustration, but also hesitation on my end: I felt shy to ask to reschedule in many cases, especially given that their “other work” was the reason we had to delay our meeting in the first place. Yet the reactions I received to follow-up calls and emails to arrange meetings with workers for these delayed or rescheduled meetings were telling of perceptions of researchers’ ephemerality, with responses such as “Wait, you are still here?” or “I thought you would have been gone by now. . . .” Similarly, when workers asked how long I planned to be in Jordan during our meetings together, they were in some cases surprised by the length(s) of time I had lived and been in the country as well as my plans for staying there longer.

From this perspective, workers evidently were the ones who paced and produced the schedules pertaining to when, where, and how researchers could and would meet with interviewees, managing researchers’ bodies based on particular understandings of them as short-term labor objects who could be “dealt” with through temporal strategies. It was also through these temporal strategies that they articulated local aid workers’ social worth and power: their critical role “in the field” helping those “in need” juxtaposed to researchers, a task, and whose work that could ultimately “wait.” “The researched” thus leveraged the ephemerality of researchers’ bodies as a form of resistance to manage their daily work and to avoid overwork, while continuing to perform the “good” worker.

Discussion

By thinking “contrapuntally” about conceptualizations of researchers’ positions as self-directed and intentional, and flipping the point of departure to “the researched” as “controllers” of this process, this article has revealed important, often unacknowledged relations and dynamics that shape the production of knowledge. As Pillow (2003) describes, to be reflexive is not only about “contribut[ing] to producing knowledge that aids in understanding and gaining insight into the workings of our social world, but also provides insight on how [emphasis added] this knowledge is produced” (p. 178). By embracing contrapuntal thinking to approach the research process from the point of departure of “the researched,” this article begins to shows the various and multidirectional forms of exploitation, extraction, and resistance that knowledge production entails, and how it coproduces and reconfigures the positions and performances of “good” workers and researchers in society simultaneously.

In an over-researched context such as Jordan, managing researchers is part of the daily labor that many local aid workers experience. The researcher is often an all-too-familiar object, and, in this particular case, part of workers’ routinized labor. How workers in some cases positioned me as a “favor for a friend,” however, points to a need to look beyond labor relations to understand how they connect and produce other relations and social inequalities in and outside the workplace as well. Variations in workers’ familiarity and interactions with researchers as part of their daily work, whether for a friend or otherwise, reiterate how aid not only mitigates but also perpetuates inequalities in ways that expressions such as “aid as neocolonialism” already assert. The intrastate inequalities that were especially evident in this research, for example, suggest that multiple and various forms of power in postcolonial settings require more consideration, too (Hanafi, 2020; Ward & Abudalu, 2022).

Future research could subsequently explore these contradictions in more depth and in contexts beyond Jordan: using reflexivity “as a methodological tool to get better data while forefronting the complexities of doing engaged research” (Pillow, 2003, p. 175). As scholarship pertaining to colonial and imperial strategies emphasize, pinpointing the locus of control is difficult because they were (are) multiple and contradictory in form. Centering this variation and ambiguity in future research, and how it shapes the material movements of bodies in the research process, may subsequently advance understandings of the multi-directionality of power and resistance operating in and through the production of knowledge. Drawing upon autoethnographic positioning analysis may be therefore and particularly useful for identifying these multiple relations and directions of power that shape global ethnographic landscapes, especially in terms of their spatial manifestations and articulations. While this is only one attempt to think and mobilize reflexivity differently, it brings attention to the extensive opportunities for utilizing reflexivity, analytic or otherwise, to reconnect social relations, (dis)orders, and power.