Birds of a feather (don’t always) flock together: Critical reflexivity of ‘Outsiderness’ as an ‘Insider’ doing qualitative research with one’s ‘Own People’

Abstract

The article presents self-reflexive elaborations of negotiating ‘outsider’ positionalities as an ‘insider’ conducting a qualitative study of first-and-second-generation Nigerian diaspora communities in London, United Kingdom (UK) and the implications of this for the methodological documentation and interpretation of the research process as well as, the perspicuity of participants’ realities. Within the conceptual framing of ‘critical reflexivity’, this article details the author’s retrospective evaluation of the impact that his positionality – notably his outsiderness, and the biases, presuppositions and awkwardness accompanying this had at each stage of the research proccess. From formulating the research topic, methodological design and participant identification/recruitment, to data collection and analysis, this article reiterates the centrality of researcher reflexivity in qualitative inquiries of one’s ‘own people’. It concludes that while critical reflexivity affords a sensitivity and attention to challenges around methodological rigour and ethical research, ethnoracialised sameness between researchers and their supposed ‘own people’ is not always complementary, ideal and productive. This article makes important and original contributions to positionality debates in its specific application to the Nigerian diaspora advancing Black scholarship in the social sciences.

Keywords

positionality critical reflexivity insiderness outsiderness diaspora Nigerian co-ethnic research

Introduction

Discussions around the membership and implications of insider-and-outsiderness in research, that is, the extent to which researchers share commonalities with or are different from their studied communities, are common for qualitative methodologies (Hellawell, 2006). Ontologically, the insider perspective is often associated with providing an ‘emic’ account of culture, with the outsider providing an ‘etic’ one. Coined by eminent linguist Kenneth Pike in analogy with the contrast between phonemics¹ and phonetics² in linguistics (Pike, 1954:8), both terms refer to different philosophical interpretations about the nature of social reality – what can be known and how. Pike intended for etic and emic to mean for human behaviours what the terms phonetic and phonemic means for language study. An emic description or the insider view of reality focus on the cultural distinctions and behaviours within studied communities that are both meaningful and relational for and from the perspective of their members (Hellawell, 2006). Conversely, an etic account attempts to, and operates from the assumption that it will, provide descriptions of cross-cultural differences from the perspective of a supposed ‘detached’ outsider looking in (Kusow, 2003).

Sociologist Merton (1972:24) cautions against the illogicality of a parochial and isolationist comprehension of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ positionalities by claiming that an overemphasis on either/or and familiar/unfamiliar incompatibility is ‘deceptively simple and sociologically fallacious’. Similarly, the Mertonian criticism is rearticulated by Simmel’s sociological contributions which questioned the assumed credentialism of ascribed status by insiders who are afforded a somewhat ‘monopolistic’ – or at least, a ‘privileged’ access to seemingly authentic ‘truths’ because of their socialisation into the studied phenomena (Simmel and Kurt, 1950). Theorising instead that, the structural detachment of the peripheralised outsider might have certain simultaneously contradicting attributes unpossessed by insiders: ‘one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near’. An outsider’s remoteness to closeness thus facilitates and amplifies their legibility of the researched.

Anthropological and ethnographic contributions are important here, which have long discussed and problematised the paradoxes and challenges of the status and power dimensions of research positionality, and how these are negotiated, ascribed and claimed in interactions within fieldwork (Kusow, 2003). An established field of scholarship reveal the complex boundaries to insider and outsider research explicating the blurred contradictions of the possibilities of knowledge and the limits of accessing it (see e.g. Haraway, 2014, for a comprehensive list). Fayard et al. (2016:11) for example, posed the questions: ‘Who are the insiders? The outsiders?’ and claimed that positionality boundaries are ‘unavoidably blurred and indistinct’. Similarly, Brun-Cottan (2012:166) argued that ‘labelling an ethnographer an insider or an outsider may well depend on the ethnographer’s relationship to the person who is doing the labelling’.

Critical commentaries around the assumed orientation of researcher identities have solicited alternative articulations and consciousness of situational identities as politicised with reference to power relations. As with the anthropological and ethnographic perspectives before it, the development of influential epistemologies around postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism complicate the simplification and fixity of the inherent dualities of insider/outsider (Corbin-Dwyer and Buckle, 2009).

Postmodernism centralise contextual analyses of researcher’s positionality (e.g. ‘race’ gender and class) within narrative interpretations (Angrosino, 2005), which is an epistemological concern given that one’s positionality relative to another constitute the co-construction of knowledge (Griffith, 1998). Relatedly, poststructuralist assumptions decry the researcher/researched contrariety as their roles and attendant functionalities are neither fixed nor sensitised to the extremities of one position or the other (Savvides et al., 2014). While contributions within postcolonialism discourses implore a retheorisation of the insider/outsider divistionist doctrine, especially given that racially minoritised communities such as contemporary African diaspora occupy transformative and progressively hyphenated posistionalities. These diasporic roles and identifications, Hall (1990) advises, are refashioned by intercultural mixture and difference, acculturation processes, hybridisation and the ‘creolising’ influences of their racialised realities.

Within the intellectual framing of these contributions of identity pluralism and re/negotiation, is the idea that assigning researcher/researched positionalities into somewhat ineluctable statues reveals a certain unchallenged amateurism. Appropriately, one cannot overemphasise the importance of qualitative researchers to adopt reflexive methodologies that acknowledge and accommodate how un/conscious similarities and differences between them and their studied populations, are implicated in and constitute the interpretivist research inquiry and knowledge production.

‘Critical Reflexivity’ is interpreted and instrumentalised differently in a variety of publications (see e.g. Temple and Edwards, 2002; Berger, 2015; Attia and Edge, 2017) nonetheless, fundamental to all these iterations is the imploration for researchers to critically and recursively analyse their positionalities with reference to the investigative process. This necessitates more than mere reflection, rather the conscious development and application of an interrogatory practice of transparency, accountability and consideration of ethics in the qualitative inquiry (Zempi, 2016). As Savvides et al., (2014) advise, not only is it incumbent on the researcher to acknowledge how their biases, presuppositions, values, interests and idiosyncratic predilections influence and coalesce with methodological decisions and knowledge claims. They must also continuously challenge these, especially as they are renegotiated and modified during interaction with participants (Temple and Edwards 2002). As such, thoughtful consideration of the epistemological, conceptual, methodological affordances, ambiguities and predicaments of insider-and-outsiderness could foster a certain preparedness for navigating the complexities of producing trustworthy and ethical knowledge.

Appropriately, within the conceptual framing of ‘Critical Reflexivity’ this article ‘aspires to the illocutionary force of an argument’ to borrow from Mariam and Edge, (2017:33), in that via self-reflexive discussions, it intends to provide an argumentative academic statement about the centrality of situated positionality and reflexivity in our comprehension and methodological assessment of the overall execution and outcome of qualitative inquiries. It thus seeks to contribute towards and complicate contemporary commentaries on insider/outsider positionality and reflexivity within the investigative field of qualitative research. It does this by demonstrating the transformative impact and potential of positionality and reflexivity, during critical moments of one’s research journey.

This article presents the author’s personal experiential learning reflections of negotiating outsider positionalities as an insider conducting ‘co-ethnic’, ‘Black on Black’ (Serrant-Green, 2002) doctoral fieldwork with one’s ‘own people’ – first-and-second-generation British Nigerian diaspora communities. Reflexivity documented here are some of the researcher/researched biases, presuppositions, predicaments and awkwardness experienced as an ‘outsider within’ (Smith, 2021) which shaped the processes and representation of this research. Demonstrations of this reflexivity are informed by speculative questions such as: how is an ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ understood and instrumentalised in the researcher/researched interaction? What are the implications of this for negotiating and shaping fieldwork relationships? How might intersectional dimensions of positionality inform and/or challenge the process and re/presentation of research?

This article presents interrelated components that are divided into different sections, starting with a brief review of the burgeoning literature around issues and implications of researcher positionality when undertaking qualitative investigations from an insider and outsider standpoint. Importantly, interspersed in this discussion are empirical contributions by ‘co-ethnic’ qualitative researchers who have shared distinct biographical features with their studied communities. This is followed by a brief contextualisation of the research that influenced the methodological choice of this article and a reflection of my own positionality.

Critical Reflexivity is then applied to subsequent sections which consider the impact and implications of my positionality – with particular emphasis on my outsiderness at different periods of the research process, including: research design, data collection and the analytical interpretation of this knowledge production. While it was seemingly straightforward to speculate about how my conspicuous ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ might playout in the field in terms of its presumed assurances of access and rapport. These sections nonetheless demonstrate a naivety, a certain unpreparedness for how this ‘sameness’ and other ostensibly unimportant situational characteristics such as, age, perceived class, and educational identity, involuntarily shifted the pendulum of my insiderness back-and-forth across the positionality spectrum. This required an exercise of continuous on-and-off-the-field reflexivity to unpack and problematise how who I am, who I have been, who others think I am and ought to be figured at key intervals of the research transition.

The article’s conclusion is twofold. It is at once a clarion call to qualitative researchers and methodologists to acknowledge their positionality on both substantive and practical aspects of the field. And a challenge to normative assumptions of an advantageous and undistanced insiderness centred in shared ethnoracialised biographies.

While there has been much focus across the social sciences on issues of positionality, in this varied literature the specific application of these debates to UK Nigeria diaspora populations appears to have received little attention. The uniqueness of the ‘Black on Black' context of my study, thus makes important and original contributions to a lack of Black British scholarship on methodological reflections of the ambiguities of positionality for co-ethnic community researchers studying a relatively under-researched population.

Though the study is UK-based and centred British Nigerians, its reflexive implications are nonetheless useful beyond these contexts for a broader audience of social scientists and qualitative methodologists interested in and negotiating the complexities of positionality in the research process.

Appropriately, the notion of and reflexive considerations around ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ is not limited to ‘Black on Black’ co-ethnic studies, like this one, but instead has broader relevance and methodological implications for researchers of any race and ethnicity investigating within their own ‘communities of people’. Just as this present article is guided by the methodological reflections and ‘lessons learned’ offered by the innumerable non-Black, largely white-authored positionality literature. As such, while my study’s distinctiveness lies in the foregrounding of the Nigerian diaspora it has the potential to resonate with and have utility to other non-UK Nigerian researchers contending with similar issues and problematisations in the qualitative field.

Problematising Positionality Debates in the Field and Assumptions of ‘Ethnic Bias’

Notwithstanding Merton’s generally accepted criticisms of assumed status determination and monopolism of knowledge within insider/outsider epistemologies, the impression that insiders are implicitly methodologically advantageous in the research process remains unperturbed, especially among co-ethnic diaspora and migrant scholars (Serrant-Green, 2002; Guevarra 2006; Corbin-Dwyer and Buckle, 2009; Moroşanu, 2015). Sociologist Rumbaut (1999) advised for instance, that American scholars of migrant populations are themselves disproportionately immigrant. The degree of one’s insiderness or their ability to surmount outsiderness, is believed to facilitate some intuitive ease and thinking around the phenomena of inquiry and attendant research questions, the development of interview schedules, access and recruitment of studied populations. As well as the collection and assumed authentic interpretation of informants’ empirical realities (Hayfield and Huxley, 2015). The assumption here is that those who share distinct biographical features with the communities they study are privileged with the credentialism of ascribed status, in which discernment of matters unintelligible to others is omnisciently supplied for the special few or special several who are to the manner born. This researcher/researched relatedness and attendant perspicacity of knowledge can be particularly productive in the field with Black and other minoritised and underrepresented communities whose ‘Othered’ realities have historically been marginalised, simplified or obfuscated within the often-exclusionary etic space of academic inquiry (Beals, Kidman and Funaki, 2019). This is an opportunity only facilitated by, as Corbin-Dwyer and Buckle (2009:58) maintain, the researcher/researched mutual recognition that ‘you are one of us and it is us versus them (those on the outside who don’t understand)’.

Such common ground has the potential to mediate perceptions of researcher trustworthiness, while also affording opportunities for openness and sincerity on the part of the studied population not readily available to perceived outsiders. This is especially true for ‘Black on Black’ studies (Serrant-Green, 2002) because of some tacit assumption of shared distinctiveness. Alakija’s (2016:117-18) study of identity constructions among contemporary Nigerian communities within Peckham, London, for example, revealed that her ethnoracialised similarities and capital ‘as a Nigerian from the Yoruba tribe’ and ‘the impression that I was part of the Nigerian elite’, respectively, facilitated access to the field and engendered fellowship with her studied population in different social situations. Relatedly, such monopolistic identifications and opportunities provided a perceived credibility of assurances that her intra-Nigerian-community positionality would appropriately represent participant’s racialised realities with a certain culturally authentic and ethical articulation (Corbin-Dwyer and Buckle 2009). While Osili (2007), recounts how he was immediately welcomed by a Chicago-based Nigerian migrant community with whom he had no previous affiliation despite him being born and raised in continental Africa.

Similarly, Ergun and Erdemir’s (2010:24) insightful ethnography of state-society relationships in the post-Soviet democratisation of Azerbaijan showed that mutually intelligible meanings attributed to Ergun’s ‘Turkishness’ and participant assumptions around common political enemies, ‘strengthened convictions of a shared identity and further consolidated insider status’. In fact, Ergun’s Azerbaijani informants would often pointedly proclaim that ‘Azerbaijan and Turkey are one nation’ (ibid). Whereas Erdemir’s undistinctive middle-classness and urbanised Turkish accent, aroused suspicions of him belonging to a different social milieu by his migrant informers.

These aforecited commentaries and example publications provide convincing cases for the methodological appropriateness of researcher/researched commonality. Other revelations however, caution against such tendentious accounts of insiderism as normatively advantageous, as this is said to be unsubstantiated in practice, at least partially. Co-ethnic scholarship has shown how assumptions of privileged bias that ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ confers is not automatic nor indiscriminately possessed by all who share characteristics with their studied populations (see e.g. De Andrade, 2000; Kusow, 2003; Guevarra, 2006; Osili, 2007; Chereni, 2014; Moroşanu, 2015). On selecting co-ethnic Somali immigrants under the illusion that, as Somali native ethnographer Kusow states, for instance, ‘my insider status would give me fairly instant access to informants and interview subjects, that my insider knowledge would allow me to see that Somali situation more clearly, and that my local knowledge would transfer to superior interview questions’ (2003:594). Once in the field, however, he surprisingly found himself positioned as the subject of collective suspicion, especially, to his astonishment, around issues pertained to Somalia’s cultural and political milieu, an area of interest, which ironically, he thought himself qualified

Furthermore, despite normative assumptions that experiential emic knowledge about the shared community simplifies access to minoritised societies (Hayfield and Huxley, 2015), Kusow realised that his competence of the complexities of Somali clan dynamics, obfuscated not eased the straightforwardness of access to the researched population (2003:595). A reality which challenges the methodological solipsism of insiderness which submits that intra-community membership or social positioning by co-ethnic scholars reduces conspiratorial questioning and suspicion by participants with whom they share commonalities, and that access is guaranteed (Ochieng, 2010).

As with Kusow, Moroşanu details that while interviewing Romanian Londoners as an insider fostered an ambiance of comfortability and forthrightness in participant conversations, she describes their ‘ethnicised discourses and practices’ and normative expressions ‘we all know’ involuntarily implicated her in a collective ‘We’ and ‘Us’ which triggered outsider ‘moments’ of ambivalence, distance and unrelatedness (2015:10). These commentaries demonstrate that field challenges are indiscriminately experienced across one’s positioning. Shared commonalities are not a prerequisite for understanding participant realities nor does it provide an intuitive interpretational bias any more than it does for one without mutual researcher/researched reciprocity. Reason being that we are not a vast horde of undifferentiated masses devoid of individuality and contradictory features, as such heterogeneity is found in biographical, situational and experiential differences which interact, outweigh and contract the solidity of shared positions (Bridges, 2001).

Accusations which, according to scholars, not only flatten and homogenise the plurality of ethnoracialised identities (Chereni, 2014) but also discounts that ethnicity and ‘race’ are often one of few elements shared by researchers and researched, who might otherwise contrast by age, gender presentation, sexuality, occupation, social class, language, and migration trajectories to name but a few examples. Reflecting on intra-community heterogeneous positionalities, notable academics describe their simultaneous (e.g. Jiménez, 2010; Menjívar, 2000), ‘multiple’ (e.g. Merton 1972; Kusow, 2003), ‘shifting’ (e.g. Parameswaran, 2001) and ‘partial’ (e.g. Ergun and Erdemir, 2010) insider/outsiderness, in relation to their studied populations and general interaction with the field.

Sociologist Menjívar’s (2000:245), detailing of Salvadorian immigration in San Francisco, reveals an interesting reflexive account of the situational contradictions of non-shared spaces that co-ethnic researchers finding themselves: ‘I was never an undocumented immigrant, never lived in the neighbourhoods where my informants lived, never held the kinds of jobs they did, and never experienced most of what as shaped their lives’. Admittedly, while she states that these marked differences did not interfere with the sincerity of field conversations (2000:247), simply recognising their existence demonstrates a thoughtful and deliberate consciousness of their potential implications beyond ethnoracialised commonalities.

Similarly, while shared ethno-racial membership disproportionately remains the preoccupation of much fieldwork reflections, considerations outside this circumscription are sometimes peripheralised. We glean from Song and Parker’s (1995) methodological discussion around the dilemmas, dynamics and tensions of interviewing young British Chinese individuals, that gender ‘disidentifications’ sometimes overshadowed dimensions of phenotypic and cultural ‘Chineseness’, despite her marked dissimilarity as mixed-descent Chinese-English. As such, an awareness of the discontinuous attendance of ‘race’ and ethnicity demands attention to the foregrounding and salience of other unracialised categorisations and discourse (Brubaker, 2002).

Besides underestimating non-ethnoracialised considerations, additional issues with pathologised constructions of co-ethnic Insiderness concentrate around the potential inattention to the various expectations, normative assumptions and disproportionate responsibilities associated with an intra-community status. All of which have important methodological implications for research. Kitzinger and Wilikson (1997) advise that some researchers might take for granted participant realities due to their shared positionalities causing over/misinterpretation during data analysis. Some critical issues might not be disclosed or elaborated by participants, or they might strategically employ culturally bounded terminologies and communication styles due to implicit assumptions of shared understanding (Turnbull, 2000). Similarly, researcher/researched relatedness might skew and sensitise an interview guide, process and interpretation towards the researcher’s situational and experiential base and away from the participants (Corbin-Dwyer and Buckle, 2009).

Ostensibly, there are as many rationalisations for outsider research as against, with the same arguments able to be raised supporting insider research, as against it (Serrant-green, 2002). For the numerous ways that being an insider augments the depth and breadth of comprehending a community and (their) related phenomena that a ‘non-native’ outsider is not privy to, Bridges (2001) argues that questions and problematisations of objectivity, reflexivity and authenticity are raised because perhaps one knows just a little too much or is too near to the project and may be similar to those being studied.

‘Outsider’ proponents and epistemologies empathise the perceived benefits of detached and independent objectivity that accompany those without full knowledge of the specific interiorities and idiosyncrasies of their studied population and phenomena. Bridges (2017) maintains that the assumed impartiality of outsiders allows them to make unadulterated observations and draw independent evaluations, through naïve questioning of ‘locals’ without being perceived as such. Considering the complex challenges associated with being an insider during the research process, Merton (1972: 30) even goes as far to suggest that it is epistemologically advantageous and methodologically sagacious to be an outsider who is far from ‘the corrupting influence of group loyalties’.

As Chhabra (2020) advises, outsiders experience more freedom from particularistic expectations and group loyalties, which encourages novel questions and the challenging of accepted or ‘normative’ explanations. Often times, outsiders reduce ‘the presence of the researcher in the research product’ (Griffith 1998: 361). They could rely upon ‘Verstehen’, that is an empathic understanding deployed to more thoroughly comprehend and explicate the social phenomena (Merton, 1972), as such researchers do not intend to forge, as Fay (1996: 24) describes, ‘subjective psychological identification’ with the studied population. Within this frame, the outsider-research is particularly useful as it potentially enriches the understanding of the researcher, marginalised communities like Nigerian diaspora and the wider public (Bridges 2017).

This position is taken by Fay (1996: 9), who addressed the speculative question, ‘Do you have to be one to know one?’ He argued that studying groups we are members of is neither obligatory nor enough to being able to ‘know’ the lived realities of that group. So too, that ‘knowing an experience requires more than simply having it; knowing implies being able to identify, describe, and explain’. (p. 20).

Yet, the ambition to conduct outsider research is a problematic one, as an outsider might have an identity-marker or biographical elements and experience that intersects with the group they study, and thus accomplishing supposed objective distance and value-neutrality might be an elusive, if not a quixotic objective (Griffith 1998; Chaudhry 2018; Corbin Dwyner & Buckle 2009). Relatedly, there is also the question of whether an outsider can remain as such, given that qualitative research requires a level of intimacy between the researcher and the participants that is not amenable to true outsiderness (Corbin-Dwyer and Buckle, 2009). The unfamiliarity and strangeness of the studied community, Hellawell (2006) cautions, may also lead to decontextualised and misunderstood re/presentations of participant experiences which is an incredibly important methodological consideration when researching disenfranchised, minoritised and ‘Other’ communities.

This discussion demonstrates the intellectual trade-off between insider/outsider positionalities. Nevertheless, this dichotomous thinking around membership status should itself be problematised and challenged. Individuals and collectivities that claim, are assumed, or perceived to be group-affiliated, are themselves heterogeneous and any lack of acknowledgement to this precipitate delusions of a racialised and cultural essentialism. It is thus an understatement to say that we, as empirical encounters of the field, should be intentionally conscious of the situated and iterative positionalities that shape the processes of inquiry. Importantly, while there has been some general debate in the qualitative fieldwork literature around the two dichotomous of 1) distance as crucial and the epistemological base for all ethnographic activity (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019) and 2) closeness and deep immersion in the field/tuning up your body (Goffman, 1959). The uniqueness of this article lies in the specific application of positionality debates and my own researcher identity politics to the Nigeria diaspora at different stages of the research process. It thus elaborates on the existing body of positionality literature in the social sciences to explicate how challenges, experiences and considerations around positionality are important to and implicated in the research journey for an under-researched population.

Research contextualisation and researcher identity

The study – a comprehensive audience and reception project, examined the interconnectedness of identity construction and relationships with continental Africa among first-and-second-generation British Nigerian communities in Southwark London, United Kingdom. This was studied in the context of their everyday consumption of African representation in the philanthropic marketing campaigns of development INGOs³ (see, Ademolu, 2018; 21). The study is largely situated within development scholarship on the role and implications of visual constructions of global poverty and inequality for Western audiences.

The study utilised qualitative methodologies which included in-depth focus group discussions and individual interviews with 60 adult Nigerian diaspora that is, British-born residents of Nigerian heritage and/or those children of Nigerian immigrants raised in the UK from childhood. The fieldwork was undertaken during 2015–2018. Group discussions and interviews were designed to explore and problematise shared and individual comprehensions, perspectives, experiences and narratives around INGO representations of Africa/ns and the implications of this on their identity-making and relationships with their country and continent of heritage. Essentially, the study was interested in understanding the empirical subjectivities of Black racialised Nigerians who, in the ordinariness of everyday INGO-mediated consumption, are simultaneously ‘seeing’ while ‘being’ the visualised philanthropic ‘Other’ (Ademolu, 2021). The study was approved by the University of Manchester Postgraduate Research Committee of the School of Environment, Education and Development. All participants provided informed consent on the basis of an explanation of the study’s purpose and the expectations of their participation and were assured confidentiality, anonymity and right to withdraw from the research process without prejudice. Participants were assigned pseudonyms.

Regarding positionality, the biographical and situated elements of ‘who I am’ that were foregrounded and salient in the field and which afforded and hindered degrees of commonality, included ‘race’, ethnicity, gender, age, perceived social class and educational identity. Specifically, I am a British-born, partly Southwark, South-East London-raised, male millennial of Yoruba-Nigerian heritage who, at the time, was a doctoral student at the University of Manchester, UK, a Russel Group⁴, Red Brick⁵ institution. According to comments made by various people I have encountered in a personal and professional capacity, I have a rather soft-spoken Estuary-cum-Received Pronunciation (RP) accent. Supposedly, indicative of someone from a solidly professional middle class and/or who attended well-resourced, presumably private schooling, in the UK. This is despite the fact that I attended a relatively under-resourced comprehensive school and understand my social class positioning – in the UK context at least – as rather ambiguous than clearly defined. This is due to the racialised-economic complexities around my diasporic identity as the Black British offspring of a UK university-educated, Nigerian immigrant elite.

Positionality and the Prominence of ‘outsiderness’ at Different Research Stages

The following sections reflexively demonstrate how and with what implications, distinct and interrelated aspects of my positionality are thought to have influenced the research design, participant identification/recruitment, collection and analytical interpretation of data. This discussion and its problematising of issues encountered emphasise the centrality of insider/outsider examinations for the methodological, practical choices and assumptions that we make at crucial intervals of the research process.

Research design

As Stanley and Wise (1993:157-61) advise, ‘One’s self can’t be left behind…Our consciousness is always the medium through which research occurs’. In this doctoral research, personal reflections with the politics of identity revealed that positionings and fixed definitions of insiderness were not always straightforward. What is unambiguous, however, is that my conception, arrangement and preparation of the research conditions was somewhat intuitively informed by an ‘epistemological consciousness’ and intellectualism of the studied phenomenon which facilitated my entry into this investigative field. While I had relatively little prior knowledge of development communications as an academic discipline and applied practice, my broad familiarity with theorisations of ‘race’, cultural representation, signifying practices, as well as postcolonialism and the ideas of cultural theorists in this space, meant I had at least some foundational understanding to work with. This, coupled with my own personal frustrations with the preponderance of culturally insensitive stereotypes within INGO representations of Africa, imbued within me, a certain insider ‘Sociological Imagination’ (Mills, 1959). That is to say, an ideological worldview, whereby I actively and inquiringly asked three interrelated questions ‘Why?’, ‘What if?’ and ‘So What?’ within the realm of ‘INGO Communications’. Comprehensive reading of related empirical and theoretical contributions advanced this sociological imagination and helped situate my speculative questioning within the broad scholarship on philanthropic representations.

With respect to designing the interview and group discussion guide, this was a seemingly straightforward and intuitive activity – until the process proved otherwise. Hayfield and Huxley (2015) maintain that the somewhat indigenist and self-referential lens of insiderness is incredibly advantageous for formulating nuanced and meaningful research questions. In that insiders have the privilege of an accumulated familiarity with the studied phenomenon and of issues that are pertinent to participant’s realities. Thus, unlike outsiders, might be more conscious of and sensitised towards, certain potential questions to ask when preparing an interview schedule. The complementarity of personal reflections and my comprehensive literature review of the investigative topic afforded a certain fluidity in identifying relevant ‘sensitising concepts’ (Blumer, 1954). All of which informed the study’s foundation via interviews and focus group discussions.

Nevertheless, the justificatory logic of my insider positionality capitulated to uninterrogated dimensions of my outsiderness, as demonstrated in the normatively presumptive framing and esoteric phrasing of interview/discussion questions. This was rightly brought to my attention during an iterative back-and-forth process of re/drafting and revising questions in response to participant feedback following a preliminary reconnaissance of the field. I found this to be an incredibly productive developmental activity, as it revealed hitherto unquestioned presumptions that my familiarity and ‘cerebral localness’ of the studied phenomenon somehow corresponded to the ‘appropriateness’ of questions. A number of central questions were approached with an evaluative-cum-normative-imposition (e.g. ‘Why is it that you/we…find this problematic?’ ‘What should be our …?’, ‘When you/we …?’), as if, I already knew, was anticipating or prognosticated how participants will or ‘ought’ to respond to questions. Importantly also, this process of re-phrasing and re-framing of questions provided opportunities for me to observe how participants sought to influence and assert local/situated meanings vis-à-vis academic/textbook framing of the phenomena of interest and my decontextualised framing of the research instrument.

On further critical reflexion, some important lessons are learned. Notably, that I had unintentionally aggregated all participants into some sort of undifferentiated Nigerian diaspora collectivity, whose ‘way of thinking’ about philanthropic representations speciously mirrored my own. In fact, with the inclusion of ‘we’ and ‘our’ in the questions, I found myself, much like Corbin-Dyer and Buckle (2009:56), ‘writing…myself into my research’, reinforcing my outsiderness due to unbracketed, unfiltered assumptions and predilections. So too, I realised that I had personified Merton’s (1972:11) accusations of ‘de facto forms of insiderism’ levelled at co-ethnic Black intellectuals. Whereby, my perceived ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ with my studied community, thoughtlessly became both the object and unit of inquiry, which ironically, revealed an outsiderness that discounted the situated heterogeneity of my participants' positionalities.

Furthermore, outsiderness manifested in the question phraseology which demonstrated my predisposition to bureaucratise. Some questions were esoterically phrased with academic vocabulary. In fact, early pre-participant-feedback iterations of the interview/discussion schedule included conceptual terminologies: ‘subalternity’ and ‘symbolic resistance’, as if ordinarily comprehended. Language is more than its technicality, it is necessarily a signification of different frameworks of ‘meaning making’ that are, via critical reflexivity, constituted in prevailing discourses of marginalisation and asymmetrical researcher/researched power relations (Hayfield and Huxley, 2015). The unintelligibility and pretentiousness of my phrasing thus constructed and was implicated in, a communicative site of socialised ‘difference’, reinforcing the outsiderness of my otherwise assumed intra-community positionality. Not only might this language-bounded-outsiderness be conceived as my pedestaled positioning in the ‘ivory tower’ looking down at the laity, but it also reveals that I had subconsciously adopted and ventriloquised the tacit collocational norms of the academe in language expression. A practice so-often committed by Black scholars precariously ‘edgewalking’ the supposed emic space of their inquiries and the institutionally etic academic territory (Beals, Kidman and Funaki, 2019).

Participant recruitment

Accessing the field was relatively straightforward. My ‘on the ground’ familiarly with the London Borough of Southwark’s substantial Black West African settlement functioned as a methodological and geographically opportunistic metro/cosmopolitan space. Moreover, my historical relationships and affiliations with professional, community and Black African-majority religious organisations, were capitalised on to cast a ‘wide-net of admission’ into participants’ everyday environment. This critical insiderness granted me access to key community stakeholders who gave their intra-community ‘seal of approval’ by an invitation to publicise my project in their bulletins, noticeboards, websites and on a few occasions, via congregational pulpit. In practice, participant recruitment involved making phone, email and in-person contact with these key individuals and organisations requesting their voluntary participation in the study and/or recommendation of other suitable informants.

What was particularly interesting, and which amplified my perceived insider positionality, was some participants’ discriminant evaluations of my phenotypical facial features which automatically identified me as Nigerian and specifically, of Yoruba ethnicity, and thus was assumed prima facie trustworthy. As such, my ‘co-ethnic capital’ favourably induced homophily by ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ among both the Southwark Nigerian laity and more influential intra-community ambassadors. This was an advantage equally observed by Alakija (2016), with respect to the supposed ethnic ‘authenticity’ that her surname conferred among other Nigerians.

Notwithstanding these important researcher/researched rapport-affirming connections, certain scenarios and spaces of interaction revealed the conditionality and impermanence of my insider status. This was demonstrated through participants' perceptions of my societal rank with respect to the markedness, or otherness of my ‘accent’. This was further compounded by attendant presumptions of my traditionally ‘Conservative’ political orientation, which was racialised in particular and problematic ways. Following a contact’s recommendation for instance, I recall on one occasion, attending the private establishment of a historical Working Mens’ Recreational Club mainly frequented by working-class elderly residents and their families with the intention to ‘crowdsource’ suitable candidates to participate in the study. During introductory discussions about philanthropic representations, I was confronted by the impudent drunken jeers of some unwelcoming individuals, who questioned the supposed ‘whiteness’ of my ‘posh-ish sounding voice’. While another, with a quizzical expression on her face, pointedly said ‘No offence but …why you interested in this African image stuff when you sound like the Queen and that’s the furthest from Black?’ These statements which seemed to suggest that, in their opinion at least, there are commonly understood racialised determinations around how UK Black people (like myself) studying obstensibly Black (African)-related matters, should speak. With the view that the more ‘white-sounding’ their pronunciation or ‘manner of speaking’ is perceived to be (e.g. an overly formal and educated articulateness problematically racialised as ‘white’ and classed as ‘middle-upper’) (Coleman, 2014), the less convincing they are of their racial compatibility to study a presumedly ‘Black subject’ like Africa.

The awkward unpreparedness for these encounters unequivocally challenged my assumed co-ethnic relatedness with some constituents of the studied population. This ‘othered’ me as some spectacle of their contumelious inquisitions and curiosity, irrespective of phenotypical resemblances. Accent, and specifically my standard British English pronunciation and intonation, featured prominently in the field. From the sincerity of participant interrogations about my upbringing during informal conversations, to the more playful insults around perceived private schooling and my ‘properness’. These interactions perhaps suggested that it (and I) was at odds with the colloquialisms of the largely multicultural urbanised English accent spoken by several of my twenty-something-year-old participants. Which, while found in the speech of many Londoners, is often problematically racialised as a characteristically Black British ‘way of talking’, similar to the tacit association of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) with (all) Black people in the Northern American, USA context (Coleman, 2014).

Relatedly, my accent’s outsiderness dwelled in participant assumptions of my political conservatism. One community leader for instance, offhandedly remarked during a conversation about arranging a potential interview that I reminded her of ‘one of them Black Tories when you first approached me’. Later referencing me as ‘British version’ of the preppy, overly couth, genteel and politically conservative fictional character ‘Carlton Banks’, in the American sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. While no malice was intended in her comments, which I humoured, this nonetheless marked my difference in a space of an intra-Nigerian-diaspora-otherness. That is, the racialising of my assumed political orientation, necessarily spoke to a perception of my ‘Blackness’ as abstracted from my supposed ‘own people’, which is informed, in part, by legitimising myths, misconceptions and stereotypes about Black Conservatives (Black Republicans in USA context) as approximating, or performing their honorary ‘Whiteness’ (Warmington, 2014).

Such field scenarios and conversations encouraged an acute self-consciousness regarding my presentation, comportment and pronunciation which I played down or turned up, as and when appropriate, in my attempt to recalibrate the misalignment of my insiderness. This is despite the fact that I knew these modifications of intra-community palatability were illogical exemplifications of one’s class stratification, politics or identification as ‘Black’. Nonetheless, my somewhat ‘chameleonic’ adaptation in the field amounted to a deliberate but oftentimes subconscious compensatory behaviour of shifting back and forth along the continuum of my insider-outsiderness, to counteract moments of ‘difference’ and alienation from the studied communities.

Ethnologist Michel Perrin (1987) argued that moving back and forth between positions is methodologically advantageous as one ultimately benefits from the critical analytic potential of distance and the interpretative potential of closeness. While this might be true, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that benefiting from the epistemological complementarity of adopting both an insider and outsider position was a calculated pre-planned intention of mine. Rather it was a situationally driven affective response within the fieldwork environment, to manage and allay the perceived peculiarities of my presence, potential questioning of my trustworthiness and personal insecurities surrounding this.

Important reflexive lessons are learned from these experiences, not least that, particular features of one’s positionality, whether thought pertinent or irrelevant, may transfigure themselves as, or into, metaphorical eligibility criteria in participant recruitment processes. Such criteria, or a portion thereof, become the normalising discourse against which participants make certain intentional and unconscious evaluations of a researchers’ meritoriousness to claim rightful, socially sanctioned access, and intimate proximity, to their lives. The truism of congruous co-ethnic Insiderism is thus challenged in the locus of participants’ role reversal of power and self-determination in facilitating or foreclosing rapport in the field, even in the face of ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ (Chereni, 2014). Within the critical reflexivity lens, researcher’s sociocultural situatedness is, like the field, never independently neutral or depoliticised but has an instructive and performative role in the ‘web of relationships constructed in the field’ (Ergun and Erdemir, 2010:18).

Data collection

Co-ethnic academic Johnson-Bailey (1999:669), maintains that, whilst productive interviews can be undertaken between researchers and participants from different backgrounds, there are ‘few margins to mitigate’ when there are similarities in biographical and situated positionalities. Indeed, the aforementioned proponents of insiderism substantiate the plausibility of this statement, nevertheless, my observation is that it is less about the combinatorial enumeration of mitigated margins – whether there are fewer or greater itemised margins of proximity. Rather, within and across these axial and dialectical terrains of researcher/researched situatedness, exists simultaneous tonal gradations of dis/similarities offering a site of a politics of negotiated meaning, confrontation and counterintuitiveness. The interviews and focus group discussions thus revealed an ambiguous and contradictory environment reflecting both perceptions of intra-community relatedness, and incongruity of ‘race’, ethnicity, age, educational identity and gender.

There was a sense of implicitness in the mutual intelligibility of unvoiced understandings, and unproblematised familiarities of culturally bounded locutions that avoided unpacking. So too, in non-verbalised reactions conversed in facial expressions and gesticulation, all of which suggested a certain transpersonal ‘knowing'. However, the fabrics of a shared closeknitedness became untethered at the seams of our assumed ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ in critical moments during which some participants used the following unelaborated, racially-normative/rhetorical statements: ‘You know what I mean?’, ‘As Black folk we all know that we hate…’, ‘I’m sure as a fellow African you already know this but…’. when in reality, I often did not know but was presumed I did and if not, ought to. Simultaneously, teenage and twentysomething-year-old participants resorted to ethno-regionalised colloquialisms, ‘casual talk’, and Black and Nigerian-specific, popular cultural references, while older individuals spouted an assortment of proverbial expressions. All of which were not always, immediately translatable and computed by my limited interpretative repertoire indicative of an intra-Nigerian-diaspora semiosis of difference. As Riessman (2007) cautions, though some scholars have adopted a somewhat bland acceptance of the ‘truism’ that much can be learned and gained from the researcher/researched commonalities of co-ethnic studies. A lack of shared cultural norms and unfamiliarity with the cultural themes of a participant’s narratives can barricade appropriate understanding and interpretation of those narrations.

My academic identification as a doctoral student from a reputable university, both resonated with some similarly credentialled individuals and epitomised my marginality among ‘unhabituated' others who had different socialised educations. One older gentleman, for instance, disclosed among fellow participants that he had ‘thoroughly read the pages of the encyclopaedia’ and visited a cultural community centre to get information about Britain’s humanitarian campaigning around the Nigerian-Biafran war, Ebola crisis and ‘the recent kidnapping of them Chibok girls’, in preparation for his focus group discussion. While others expressed some reservations and anxieties around ‘not sounding smart enough’, having ‘nothing interesting to say’ and ‘feeling intimated by someone like you’.

Attempts at allaying these apprehensions were made by reiterating expectations of their participation and reassuring them that I was not there to ‘catch them out’ or assess their intelligence rather hear their thoughts, stories and experiences concerning African representation by charities. Relatedly, a few others called me ‘Doc’, ‘Prof’ and even, more awkwardly ‘Sir’, despite my polite insistence on being called by my given name. This eagerness for participants to impress and be impressive is equally noted by Tuhiwai-Smith’s (1999:138) reflexion of negotiating insider-outsiderness as an academic studying within her own Maori community. When interviewing women about their educational experiences within their homes – which she had hitherto visited as a friend, she noticed that the ‘homes were extra spotless’, ‘everything was in the kind of order which is solely for the benefit of the outsider’.

While used endearingly, a critical reflexive reading of my ‘expert’ moniker by participants, indeed their preparedness planning, demonstrate the centrality of researcher/researched power dynamics. Particularly, how one’s privileged academic status as some ‘Sensei’ of unremitting authoritative knowledge is constituted within and regurgitates, even if unknowingly, hierarchical interpersonal structures of actual and imagined ‘difference’ in knowledge production, authority and influence. All of which have important implications for whether, how and to extent generated data is richly descriptive, forthcoming and authentic, including the processes of interaction from which this knowledge derives.

It would be remiss of me to not note that participants’ preoccupation with and behaviours in response to my education was acutely gendered. Feminist and ‘gender’ scholarly contributions to positionality in fieldwork have not only spotlighted how gender is central and marginal to research in terms of access and process (see e.g. Oakley, 1981; Merriam et al., 2001; Labaree, 2022; Lee, 2008; Gair, 2012). They have also cautioned that social norms and behaviours are not just descriptive; they are also material. As such, the situational and contextual appreciation of the role played by gender in the negotiation of fieldwork relationships reveals a certain dynamic of how gender including bodily appearance, presentation, performance and actions, intersects with other social and cultural categories and considerations germane to the research (Okely, 2007; Zubair et al., 2012; Ellingson, 1998; Galam, 2015).

Within this frame of understanding, I wonder then, whether participants would have shown as much deference to my academic status if I had been (perceived as) a woman. Would participants have been so keen to please, impress and assign unsolicited reverential titles if I was not male and ‘masculine'-presenting? It is not beyond my comprehension to consider that participants’ behaviours might have been informed by prevailing norms and expectations that continue to surround perceived differences in relative power, privilege, ‘intelligence’ and authority along the gendered axis of academic representation (Warmington, 2014).

Relatedly, it is also not lost on me that the particularity of, or perhaps their ‘curiosity’ surrounding my presence as a Black (male) academic relative to the ‘normalcy’ of white academic representation in everyday public imagination and discourse, might explain how (and why) participants regarded me with much reverence and lively admiration more than I regarded, or considered myself. Beyond my own personal impression or speculative opinion in this context, this was evident in certain complimentary statements and laudatory expressions made by participants that were racialised in particular ways and which alluded to their perceptions of my supposed ‘Black (male) exceptionalism’ and their pride in (or because of) this. From one version to another a few participants notably remarked: ‘you don’t come across many Black PhDs every day, do you? Well, I don’t …you’re doing us proud’, the ‘us’ here presumably some amorphous ‘Black community’ or Black people in general. Similarly, at the end of one focus group discussion another participant took me aside and enquired about whether I would mind ‘offering words of wisdom to my son who’s toying with the idea of applying for his master’s degree’ as, according to him, I was ‘a suitable role model as a fellow young Nigerian’. Perhaps the most ‘fervent’ of these examples, was one participant in his fifties, who during a focus group discussion, unexpectedly announced: ‘do you know you’re representing Black men positively? Well-done my boy’, and then proceeded to rise from his seat and extend his arm for a congratulatory handshake.

These ceremonial displays of an ‘uncapped too-muchness’ – for want for a better description, by participants resulted in some internalised awkwardness and embarrassment on my part. Needless to say, while well-intended, their preoccupation with my academic standing and the racialised ‘optics’ and significance surrounding this, reinforced my outsiderness as some sort of imperilled or mythologised species unduly held to a different or elevated status.

Yet again these methodological issues reveal the mendacity that ‘ethnoracialised sameness’ tacitly equates reciprocity of understanding. If anything, a tensioned chasm of familiarity-estrangement is created between what co-ethnic researchers think they (ought to) know and the experiential dimensions of participants sociological imaginations.

These reflections also broadly speak to the importance (and limitations) of pre-testing in qualitative research and reflecting transversely on the field. While I had trialled and modified my interview and focus group schedules and problematised my ‘Sociological Imagination’ as part of a preliminary reconnaissance of the field – as discussed in the research design section. I nonetheless found myself surprised by some of the questions and interactions arising during fieldwork. As such, even with appropriate pre-fieldwork preparation and an assumed assiduity to all eventualities, it is naïve, perhaps unreasonable to deduce that researchers are subsequently programmed with a certain clairvoyant sensibility of fieldwork by which they can almost intuitively foretell and forestall the challenges and dynamics of human interaction with a great degree of certainty. Rather the ‘in the moment’ (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004) encounters of the research process are not always foreshadowed and require post-field reflection. Moreover, it would be fallacious to downplay the degree to which a researcher’s field negotiations are coloured by and filtered through the lens of their own presuppositions and biases irrespective of any precautionary groundwork covered.

Data analysis

Unlike outsiders, intra-community scholars are argued to comprehend and appropriately represent participants’ narratives, which is incredibly important when studying racially minoritised, oppressed and marginalised communities (Corbin-Dwyer and Buckle, 2009). At the start of this qualitative inquiry, I would have readily, almost thoughtlessly, accepted this philosophy, however, the magnetism of my supposed ‘de facto’ insiderness was only intermittently summoned to the core of my participants’ interior worlds. As such, I was somewhat trepidatious, if not discouraged about how my outsiderness might intrude and interpolate the data analysis, especially knowing that one’s personhood informs which nuggets of extracted knowledge are deemed interesting and salient (Pillow, 2003). Rather than allowing the data to ‘speak for itself’, at times my authorial voice coloured and mediated its thematic articulation, which I understand reflexively, to be an overcompensatory strategy that I subconsciously adopted to mallet-down my ‘Whac-A-Mole’ outsiderness, in which I acquired an ambassadorial role speaking on behalf of Nigerian diaspora informant experiences. Not only did this cause a personal and methodological ‘Crisis of Representation’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1986) but my unmeritorious self-aggrandisement as ‘Diaspora Mouthpiece’ led me questioning ‘whether this is my interpretation of an actual phenomenon or am I projecting my own need…onto my participants’ (Watson, 1999:98).

Appropriately, to address miss-and-overinterpretation of data, I shared the completed transcriptions with some of participants involved in the study and solicited their feedback to evaluate, clarify and acclimatise their interpretations and explanations elicited from the data. This neccessarily involved asking important questions such as: ‘Is this an appropriate representation of your account?’, ‘Does this segment about your opinions on ‘Save the Children’ and ‘Oxfam’ ring true for you?’, ‘Have I captured your conflictions with Black portrayal in telethons well?’, ‘Am I leaving anything out?’. The transparency of this ‘member checking’ process afforded methodological rigour and simultaneously lassoed my outsider interference. Appropriately, Riessman (2007) advises that researchers fail to ‘hear’ anything at the analytic process unless they invite participants as experts of their own stories to speak uninterrupted, for themselves.

Moreover, in terms of critical reflexivity, this collaboration implores researchers, to think earnestly about attribution and representation of who speaks ‘when', ‘where', ‘how' and ‘for/to whom?’ As such, we must consider how ‘voice’ is afforded, withdrawn, distorted and expressed by/for participants, as well as how, to what degree, and upon which platform, researcher/researched ‘power’ (e.g. to frame, clarify, revise and represent narratives) is appropriately shared.

Conclusion

Issues and problematisations of researcher/researched positionality occupy much intellectual space within the qualitative domain with respect to how and with what implications, one’s socialisation is important to the process and evaluation of empirical investigations.

This article presented a self-reflexive elaboration of negotiating Outsider positionalities as an Insider conducting a co-ethnic qualitative study of first-and-second-generation Nigerian diaspora communities in London, United Kingdom (UK) and the implications of this for the methodological documentation and analytical interpretation of the research journey and of the perspicuity of participants’ realities.

Within the conceptual framing of ‘Critical Reflexivity’, it thoughtfully detailed how, despite normative claims of an intuitively straightforward ‘de facto’ Insiderism by co-ethnic scholars, the situated and experiential complexities of my Black British-Nigerianes become challenged in the field where they were subject/ed to participant negotiation, conditionality and suspicion. As such, certain aspects of ‘Self’ – my ‘race’, ethnicity, perceived social class, age, gender and educational identity, which were naively assumed benign or inconsequential to an inquiry of my supposed ‘ethnoracialised equals’, became significations and criteria of an intra-community Outsiderness. The negotiation of which had important implications for how I continuously questioned, second-guessed, fretted over, revised and evaluated the research design, participant recruitment, data collection and the analytical interpretation and presentation of generated knowledge.

Appropriately, the discussion demonstrates the false equivalence of ethnoracialised sameness and reciprocity of understanding, suggesting that researcher/researched relatedness is not always commonsensical, harmonious and productive. Rather what might be conceived as an adaptive advantage could potentially cause patterns of interactional maladaptation in the field, hindering participant access, rapport and the authentic elicitation of generated data. As such, as co-ethnic scholar Beoku-Betts (1994) advises, while the Insider-Outsider standpoints are useful orientations towards understanding the contradictions and ambivalences of shared racialised membership, there are other competing status identities which are fluid, variable, factor into, and complicate, the research process.

Central to all of this is critical reflexivity, which as an incisive tool, was implemented in the research process to comprehend and address uncertainties and awkwardness to develop a richer and complex understanding of the field and its dynamics. Important lessons are learned here, notably the transformational potential that reflexivity has in problematising our identities in the field. This is an indiscriminate activity, in that it is not exclusive to qualitative social scientists but all researchers producing rigorous, authentic and ethical data.

While of course, there exists similar largely-white global North contributions of intellectual thought on positionality generally, the originality and distinctiveness of the ‘Black on Black’ UK context of my study, specifically advances the paucity of Black British African scholarship on methodological reflexions of positionality in Black co-ethnic research. A space which appears to be over represented by African American analyses and the transnational lens of Black African migrants. As such, the presence and status of Black British African positionality in the methodological literature is negligible or in its infancy at best. My study thus offers a contemporary example of reflexive work useful for PhD students as well as neophyte researchers including early career academics navigating the specific methodological complexities of Black co-ethnic inquiries. For these groups, and even the more experienced among them, the articulation of researcher positionality from the perspective of reflexive methodological praxis can be seen as ethereal, adjunct, and sometimes simply difficult to problematise in the field. Nonetheless, it is hoped that the reflective lessons documented here become a useful go-to resource. Lastly, while the study is UK-based and informed by a Black racialised analysis, its reflexive considerations nonetheless have broader application and interest beyond these contexts.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Edward Ademolu

Note

Author biography

Edward Ademolu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Cultural Competency at King’s College London (KCL) with cross-disciplinary interest in International Development, Media Communications, Visual Representations and the African Diaspora.

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