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Abstract

In this essay, two women of Color researchers examine the intersections of race and disability and ask, “What is the power and purpose of positioning and positionality statements?” Informed by Black feminist theory, and drawing from the DisCrit tenets of intersectional oppressions, historicity, and whiteness and ability as property, the authors focus on researchers’ positioning in relation to how they engage and communicate knowledge about multiply marginalized people. Positionality statements, they argue, must be more than a listing of identities or a claim on authority through the naming of professional proximity to marginalized communities. Recognizing the increasing expectations for education scholars to articulate positionality in their scholarship, the authors offer a three-pronged intersectional framework, with provocations about the onto-epistemic, sociohistoric, and sociocultural elements of positioning. Education researchers interested in conveying how intersectional oppressions effect knowledge production will find this framework useful for crafting positionality statements that consider the multidimensional nature of power, oppression, and research in relation to their field, the literature, and multiply marginalized participants.

Keywords

disability studies equity ethics feminist theory race research methodology

As part of the communication of their research endeavors, scholars are increasingly expected to write positionality statements. For example, former editors of the Review of Educational Research, intending to increase transparency about the journal’s editorial review processes, recommended that “authors of thematic reviews of empirical works interpreting qualitative data . . . may need to offer a more detailed accounting of researcher positionality and participant engagement” (Murphy et al., 2020, p. 5). We have noticed several patterns in how scholars write positionality statements as they become more prevalent in education research. Often, statements are written as confessionals (Pillow, 2003) or simply as disclosures of researcher identities (Secules et al., 2021). Other times, positionality statements are used to justify authority through naming professional proximity to marginalized groups (e.g., “I was a special education teacher in an urban community, so I have experience with disabled youth of Color”). These approaches to positionality statements do not explicitly contend with the power dynamics that accompany embodied privileges. For example, in the prior parenthetical statement, the researcher’s race and ability remain uninterrogated. These attempts at positionality statements serve as inadequate models for scholars seeking to better understand why researcher positionality matters to their participants, engagement with data, and the communication of findings to their fields.

Our purpose in this essay is to argue that education scholars must first understand the power and function of positioning to effectively write these statements, especially in relation to members of multiply marginalized communities (i.e., those at the intersections of myriad oppressions). Doing so reveals positionality not merely as a function of reporting findings to colleagues, but critical in the design and practice of ethical inquiry. We use the structural analytical lenses afforded by Black feminism(s) (e.g., Collins, 2000; Evans-Winters, 2019) and DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013) to extend Davies and Harré (1990), who describe positioning as:

the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced storylines. There can be interactive positioning in which what one person says positions another. And there can be reflexive positioning in which one positions oneself. (p. 37)

As such, we conceptualize a framework of positioning as an active verb where researchers reflect and address where their locations lie in relationship to interlocking systems of oppression; fields of study; and, most importantly, research participants over time. Researcher positioning is engaged and revisited throughout the process of knowledge production. Positionality, for us, is what researchers may articulate in a statement when they reflect on what they negotiated—whether it be with participants, secondary data about multiply marginalized communities, or other sources of knowledge—throughout the inquiry process. Articulating the distinction between positioning and positionality is central to our purpose, as well as to our theoretical, methodological, and axiological commitments.

Although education researchers may find themselves in vulnerable positions during a research project (e.g., tenure-earning faculty interviewing university presidents; Mason-Bish, 2019), in this article we prioritize how positioning matters in scholarship about multiply marginalized communities. Around the world, researchers must participate in ethics trainings that revisit the harm that researchers enacted on marginalized people, such as the extraction of Henrietta Lacks’s cells, Nazi sterilization experiments on Jewish and Roma captives, and the Willowbrook hepatitis studies on disabled people (Spellecy & Busse, 2021). U.S. federal regulations, moreover, require ethics boards to oversee research involving “vulnerable populations” (e.g., children, disabled people, incarcerated people, and those who are economically disadvantaged). Beyond these training and compliance requirements, we argue that education researchers must continually stay vigilant about the ways certain communities are more susceptible to harm—such as multiply marginalized people who are rarely centered in education research, either as participants or knowledge producers.

In this essay, we ask, “What is the power and purpose of positioning and positionality statements?” To answer, we focus on researchers’ positioning in relation to how they engage, study, and communicate research about multiply marginalized communities. In exploring the importance of clarity about the purpose, opportunities, and limitations of researcher positionality, we ultimately offer a framework for researchers to engage in positioning that decenters the authoritative figure of the researcher and prioritizes the knowledge of multiply marginalized communities.

Collaborative Conceptualization of Positioning and Positionality

We are two scholars who self-identify as women of Color—one disabled (Annamma) and one nondisabled (Boveda)—situated in discursive spaces dominated by white, nondisabled people in research, teaching, and advising (Arzubiaga et al., 2008; Boveda & McCray, 2021). We each spend considerable time mentoring graduate students and emerging researchers to examine the intersections of racism, ableism, misogynoir, and other intersecting oppressions. As such, we have thought deeply about the limitations and possibilities of positionality statements in scholarship about these intersections. Explicitly positioning our sociocultural identities in the dissemination of our research has at times provoked misunderstandings, mistrust, and even resentment from colleagues who interpret our intimate understandings with marginalization as an obstacle to sound research. This includes reductive interpretations of our research participants and our findings’ relevancy to a broad educational research audience.

We understand that positionality statements may increase the vulnerability of some scholars, particularly without established consensus about the purpose of those statements throughout education research communities. However, we argue that the answer is not to refuse positionality statements, but instead to engage a more robust, theoretically informed conceptualization of what they mean. We thus came together to theorize about how to responsibly support our colleagues’ and students’ understandings of purposefully engaging positionality.

First, we begin by examining what has been written since Educational Researcher last featured an article on positionality 15 years ago—that is, Milner’s (2007) touchstone piece. In the following section, Discourse of Positionality, we inquired about the social science literature, “What has been written about positionality statements when considering race and other sociocultural identities?” Of this literature, we then highlight two articles that focus on how to write positionality statements from the public health field (Jacobson & Mustafa, 2019) and engineering education research (Secules et al., 2021). Next, we use Black feminism and disability critical race theory to create a theoretically based conceptualization of positioning that considers intersecting oppressions. Finally, we shift to how we conceptualize positioning during knowledge production and address how to reflect that positioning process in positionality statements.

Discourse of Positionality

When examining scholarship explicitly focused on positionality published after Milner (2007), scholars frequently claim the need for positionality. Importantly, researchers contended with their racialized, gendered, and otherwise minoritized sociocultural identities (e.g., Ahmed et al., 2011; Caretta & Jokinen, 2017; D’silva et al., 2016; Evans-Winters, 2011; Fremlova, 2018), the professional tensions they encountered in the field (e.g., Fletcher, 2010; Mason-Bish, 2019), or how positionality aligns with methodological approaches (e.g., Cousin, 2010; Holmes, 2020; Jafar, 2018; Lin, 2015). In each of these articles, positionality served to examine how researcher identities influence questions asked, tensions navigated, and methods employed. We found these instructive in conceptualizing a framework for examining positioning.

Given our intentions to offer provocations for education researchers as they (a) reflect on their positioning while engaging inquiry and (b) articulate positionality statements, we highlight two articles that offered practical guidance for thinking through how to recognize and present one’s positionality. Jacobson and Mustafa (2019) created a positionality map in the form of a graphic organizer, in which they listed the following sociocultural identity categories as starting points for novice qualitative researchers: class, citizenship, ability, age/generation, race, sexual orientation, cis/trans, and gender. They described these as tier 1 groupings. The second tier asks researchers to “go beyond these groupings by identifying how these positions impact their lives” (p. 4). The third tier focuses on reflexivity and asks researchers to name affective aspects tied to these social identities. The authors encouraged researchers to use these maps during the research design, data collection and analysis, and interpretation of findings of a study. Jacobson and Mustafa (2019) offered the caveat that the tool is intended for novices. Although they “separate” sociocultural identities for workshopping purposes, they “propose that a next step in the process of positioning oneself is to critically explore how these social identities are related to, informed by, and overlap with one another” (p. 10), in consideration of intersectionality conceived of as multiple identities. Black feminists, on the other hand, consider intersectionality to be about more than just multiplicative identities but also the myriad of oppressions that accompany those identities (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991).

Secules and colleagues (2021), who are engineering educators and researchers, categorize positionality practices in their field into three types: acknowledging practice, establishing transparency, and contextualizing methodology.

The two most common forms of positionality statements, Acknowledging Practice and Establishing Transparency of Self Attributes, originate from the paradigmatic roots of high-consensus disciplines such as science and mathematics (Biglan, 1973), where the researcher is acknowledged but nonintegral; bias must be identified, accounted for, and bracketed or suppressed. In contrast, Contextualizing Methodology statements challenge this paradigm by positioning the researcher as an integral component of the research process, highlighting the importance of positionality within our work. (p. 22)

Considering these categorization types, our essay falls under contextualizing methodology. Moreover, Secules et al. (2021) intended to “highlight dimensions of positionality associated with researchers from minoritized identity groups and/or working with minoritized participant populations” (p. 24). Although Jacobson and Mustafa (2019) centered on novices, Secules et al. (2021) intended to model more sophisticated ways of conceptualizing researcher positionality. Naming six dimensions (selecting research questions, epistemology, ontology, methodology, researcher-as-instrument, and communication), they presented examples from researchers at various stages of their careers, with an emphasis on equity in knowledge production. These guidelines and pedagogical tools help researchers consider positionality with respect to identities.

In addition to acknowledging sociocultural identities or professional backgrounds, scholars must also understand themselves as members of institutions implicated in power differentials and historical legacies of racism, ableism, sexism, and other intersecting oppressions. Our contribution to the discourse on positionality uses Black feminism and DisCrit as important lenses to articulate how education researchers can consider positioning related to multiple oppressions that participants may face.

Extending and Expanding Positioning Through Black Feminism and DisCrit

Davies and Harré (1990) use positioning to indicate the dynamic interplay between individuals and selves. Black feminism and DisCrit are rooted in understanding people who are multiply positioned through interlocking systems of oppression. Our understanding of positioning extends Davies and Harré through Black feminism and DisCrit to require that researchers reflect on interlocking systems and their shifting places within those structures. For example, a Black scholar at a predominantly white university may find herself in collaborations where she is the only multiply marginalized person. When working with incarcerated girls of Color, this same scholar must also reflect on her privileged position as a doctoral-degree-holding researcher. We thus revisit Milner’s (2007) conceptualization of positionality in education research.

Milner’s (2007) original exploration into “dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen,” powerfully anchored by a critical race theoretical framing, identified how researchers’ understanding of racism, society, and knowledge production influences their engagement with positionality. DisCrit grew from the roots of Black feminism (Collins, 2000) and drew from critical race theory (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and disability studies (Baynton, 2001; Bell, 2006) to engage the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism (Erevelles, 2014) more robustly. Given the generative commitments of Black feminism(s) and DisCrit, we do not seek to diminish prior analytical tools for understanding racial oppression. Instead, we seek to extend and expand the foundational work that came before ours. As such, Milner’s assertion that researchers “should be actively engaged, thoughtful, and forthright regarding tensions that can surface when conducting research where issues of race and culture are concerned” (p. 388) is one we take seriously.

Building from Milner’s argument for positionality, we aim to conceptualize a framework for positioning that robustly recognizes intersecting oppressions including racism, ableism, and sexism. In other words, we engage other dimensions of social oppression entangled with racism. Ours is not a comprehensive list of oppressions, and the purpose of our intersectional analysis is not to account for all of them (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Rather, we intend this as an example of how to consider multiple marginalizations when engaging researcher positioning.

To examine our guiding question—“What is the power and purpose of positioning and positionality statements?”—we revisit three tenets of this multitheory framework driving our conceptualization of positioning and positionality: intersectional oppressions, historicity, and whiteness and ability as property.

Intersectional oppressions

Black feminism is the intellectual foundation of DisCrit as it steers us to conceptually center those who experience multiple oppressions (Annamma, 2021; Annamma et al., 2018). Anna Julia Cooper (1852) wrote, “[W]oman’s strongest vindication for speaking is that the world needs to hear her voice (p. 122, italics in original). She goes on, “When race, color, sex, condition, are realized to be the accidents, not the substance of life. . . . Her wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with all undefended woe, all helpless suffering, and the plenitude of her ‘rights’ will mean the final triumph” (p. 125). Cooper and other Black feminist thinkers laid the foundation for what the Combahee River Collective (1977) argued over 100 years later: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Our goal here is not to articulate that only Black women’s voices matter in Black feminism, what Patricia Hill Collins (2000) critiques as “exclusionary definitions of Black feminism . . . (which) are inadequate because they are inherently separatist” (p. 36). Audre Lorde (1984), for example, emphasized the role Black feminism has in building coalition across different marginalized people. Instead, we acknowledge how addressing interlocking oppressions provides a robust analysis of systems of power and people’s interactions within those systems. Our intersectional analysis does not hyper-focus on multiple identities but instead recognizes how multiple oppressions land in our lives (Crenshaw, 1991).

Through this foundational recognition of multiple oppressions, DisCrit “focuses on ways that the forces of racism and ableism circulate interdependently, often in neutralized and invisible ways, to uphold notions of normalcy” (Annamma et al., 2013, p. 11). Consequently, DisCrit specifically highlights how notions of behavior, productivity, and intelligence are all mediated by perceptions of race (Lewis, 2021) and illustrate how racism is mutually constitutive with ableism (Artiles, 2013). Both Black feminism and DisCrit recognize racism as endemic, while holding that other oppressions interact with racism to influence and inform life from the macrosociopolitical to the microinteractional. Conversations held by congressional representatives, scholars, and activists about the criminalization of Black disabled girls (Pressley et al., 2020), for example, require examinations of interpersonal dynamics between a predominantly white teacher workforce and their students.

The power of conceptualizing positioning through Black feminism and DisCrit is that they reveal how a myriad of oppressions also limit knowledge production. Education researchers have ignored or refused narratives offered by multiply marginalized people, like disabled people of Color who have been found shameful and deficient (Erevelles, 2019). Conversely, the power of positioning can be generative when understanding how researchers and participants engage in relationships, given these interlocking oppressions. Returning to the example of the Black scholar working with Black incarcerated youth, making explicit her shared and divergent experiences with the youth may enrich the depth of their co-constructed understandings.

Ignoring historicity

Rose M. Brewer (1989) described Black feminism’s commitment to historicity as the “concern with the interplay between biography and the social-historical juncture” (p. 67). Hirsch & Stewart (2005) elaborate,

historicity in this sense is the manner in which persons operating under the constraints of social ideologies make sense of the past, while anticipating the future. Historicity is a dynamic social situation open to ethnographic investigation. (p. 262)

We find the distinction between history as an objective truth and historicity as articulated in Black feminism and DisCrit especially relevant to conversations about positionality.

Black women and other multiply marginalized scholars of Color have been largely erased as producers of knowledge, even as they participated in knowledge-building throughout history more generally and education research specifically (Evans-Winters, 2019; Smith et al., 2021). It is thus critical we use “the moment-to-moment updatable technology . . . interwoven with other forms of new media and creative and community-building educational events, to create an experiential archive” of Black feminist thinking and practice (Gumbs, 2011, p. 19). For example, Boveda and McCray (2021) noted how Black women’s contribution to special education, disabilities studies in education, and inclusive education are seldom explicitly acknowledged in the literature. The authors call for disrupting traditional notions of academic mentoring that limit Black women “to individualistic, whiteness-centered” ways of knowing, which “may produce internalized mistrust of embodied epistemologies and hinder the growth and development of new knowledges” (p. 509). Education researchers have ignored historicity that has replicated how knowledge production attempts to exclude Black women from the formal archives, positioning them as not enough. Yet, as The Cite Black Women Collective and others remind us, Black women have always produced knowledge and written themselves into the archives in innovative ways (e.g., Smith et al., 2021).

Black women are one of many groups left out of education research. Disabled people have also been imagined as incapable of producing knowledge, and studies of disability are often anti-Black (Bell, 2011). Education researchers too often treat parents, families, educators, and other caregivers in their lives as more knowledgeable than disabled people themselves (Wong, 2020). When included, education research addressing disability often centers on white disabled children, erasing the complex lives of disabled youth of Color (Banks, 2015). Leaving multiply marginalized people out of research—both as producers and participants—erases their voices, denies their humanity, and makes them vulnerable to violence as a result. Disabled people of Color have positioned themselves, and deserve positioning, that situates them as legitimate researchers, research participants, and knowledge builders.

Drawing on the commitment to historicity, DisCrit examines the “legal and historical aspects of dis/ability and race and how both have been used separately and together to deny the rights of some citizens” (p. 11). Chris Bell (2011) calls this recovery and detection work—work to uncover hidden, invisibilized, and erased histories. Documenting positioning serves to archive past and current practices of resistance to build a better future; this, in turn, is a commitment to historicity. Consequently, for researchers who are women of Color and those embodying multiple marginalized identities, historicity is not only about writing ourselves into the narrative as marginalized scholars. Historicity is also of consequence for facing how our affiliations with prestigious institutions and scholarly communities necessitate an understanding and articulation of the academy’s historical and current relationship to the specific multiply marginalized communities we learn alongside. Said differently, the purpose of linking researcher positioning and historicity is to recognize the necessity of documenting multiply marginalized people’s experiences and the inequitable outcomes they face—thereby connecting them with interlocking systems of power across time.

Whiteness and ability as property

The recognition of whiteness and ability as property is the third theoretical principle guiding our framing of the purpose and power of positioning (i.e., researchers’ continuous reflection and negotiation with power throughout the inquiry and knowledge production processes). Cheryl Harris (1993) conceptualized whiteness as property to better understand how power is reproduced: “In particular, whiteness and property share a common premise—a conceptual nucleus—of a right to exclude” (p. 1713). Before and during enslavement in the United States, white identity was used as further justification for stripping Indigenous people of property rights to the land they tended for generations. This interaction between whiteness and property evolved when Black people were owned as property. Black women experienced a specific kind of dehumanization during this time. “The cruel tension between property and humanity was also reflected in the law’s legitimation of the use of Black women’s bodies as a means of increasing property” (Harris, 1993, p. 1719). It was in the moments of genocide and enslavement that white identity became more firmly entrenched with owning property. Hence, the right to include meant the right to strip others of access to the property and to secure all the accompanying powers that came with being a property owner. Consequently, when understanding positionality, we must recognize how the property rights of whiteness—which provides an opportunity to exclude others from the research process—allowed researchers to pretend race did not matter and “own” and feel entitled to knowledge about multiply marginalized people.

Securing whiteness as property also allows for a claim to white innocence and the erasure of historicity. Gotanda (2004) describes this

“innocence” in the sense that the Aha! Moment has, through the use of a “new” beginning, cut off the moral, social, economic and political ties to the past. The “innocence” is the innocence of a new beginning. There are many other aspects to the notion of innocence that can be drawn from my simple idea of a new beginning. For example, one could attempt to build inquiries into such issues as responsibility, guilt, or compensation from the idea of innocence. (p. 673)

Specifically, when engaging in positioning, some scholars claim this new beginning by “suddenly” recognizing race and racism. Yet the generations of knowledge production that depended on whiteness as property are not easily swept away with a positionality statement. If left uninterrogated, scholars simply build on top of whiteness-centered knowledge, feigning innocence as if the very foundations of our educational institutions are not contingent on exclusion (Orozco, 2019).

Leonardo and Broderick (2011) wrote, “like race, ability is a relational system”; they complement each other in discursive and material ways to exclude “those deemed to be uneducable and disposable” (p. 2208). Leonardo and Broderick delineated how deficit thinking and knowledge production stem from whiteness and ability as property. Ultimately, DisCrit roots itself in this understanding that notions of ability cannot be removed from notions of whiteness, as they depend on each other to thrive. This is what we mean when we say racism and ableism are mutually constitutive.

When reflecting on the ways positioning is made legible or ignored, DisCrit reminds us of how whiteness has been situated as the norm and used to justify the exclusion of Black women, disabled youth of Color, and other multiply marginalized humans from receiving credit for generating knowledge. This exclusion functions through a racist and ableist rationale that positions certain people as being less than in thinking, behavior, and production (Lewis, 2021). Therefore, when scholars make explicit how they are positioning themselves within these structural dynamics, as well as in relation to the multiply marginalized communities presented in their scholarship, they expose whiteness and ability as property. This inclusion is essential as it situates scholars as those who may work against the grain of power reproduction in education research.

These three tenets, intersectional oppressions, historicity, and whiteness and ability as property—garnered through Black feminism and DisCrit—have helped us conceptualize what has limited the ways we generate knowledge. That is, by engaging positioning as a statement to be made as a list of identities or a confessional, researchers fail to utilize one or all of these three tenets. Concurrently, these tenets also provide us with an understanding of what possibilities there are in contending with positioning in education research. We do this by engaging three elements of researcher positioning informed by these tenets that can inform research, both during the process of inquiry as well as writing the positionality statements afterward.

A Framework of Positioning Through Black Feminism and DisCrit

Our goal in this section is to infuse the theoretical tenets outlined previously within the elements of positioning to create a framework for engaging researcher positioning throughout the knowledge production process and when writing positionality statements. We argue that positionality, as it has been taken up, often recenters the powerful or uses researcher proximity to marginalized communities as a rationale for why we are an authority. When positionality is engaged as static (a statement), we miss theoretically informed ways to consider researcher relationships with their field, the literature, and participants. We argue that the power and purpose of positioning should be to remove the researcher from the center of the work and centralize multiply marginalized communities. Consequently, positioning requires reflection throughout the research process, not just in researcher statements.

Milner (2007) included a list of seven bulleted questions related to the researchers’ understanding of themselves, race, and culture, and five bulleted questions related to researchers “relation to others.” Although not explicitly an article about positionality, Boveda and Bhattacharya (2019) offer several “points of consideration” in question format for researchers to consider how onto-epistemology matters when purporting to engage in ethical de/colonial inquiry. We follow their approach and offer questions as provocations. These questions are categorized under three elements of positioning: (1) the onto-epistemic that recognizes how embodied experiences shape understandings of intersectional oppressions, (2) the sociohistorical that engages historicity, and (3) the sociocultural that concedes whiteness and ability as property. We then provide questions that animate each of those reflections to engage throughout the research process, from design to publication. For didactic and pedagogical reasons, we separate these assumptions and ideas, but in practice, these elements are entangled.

The onto-epistemic

In its simplest form, the onto-epistemic considers both what we know about the world and how we find knowledge within that world. “Onto-epistemology refers to the inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology when engaging in knowledge production, with scientific practices, and with the world itself and its inhabitants—” (Hyde, 2021, p. 381). Given the black Feminist and DisCrit theoretical tenets we draw from, the onto-epistemic element of positioning recognizes how knowledge production is impacted by historic and current intersectional oppressions. Consequently, we encourage researchers who center the interlocking oppressions multiply marginalized people face to ask the following:

What theoretical framing and intellectual foundations will you draw from?

What do these theories suggest about ways of knowing?

What does that framing say about how power relations are reproduced?

What do these theories require of you regarding positioning?

How does this theoretical framing account for being in a relationship with others and with those with less power than you?

What do these theories say about who is qualified to produce knowledge?

How do your theories explicitly address racism, ableism, cisheteropatriarchy, and other oppressions?

If your theories do not address or center these oppressions, how will you consider them?

These questions about the onto-epistemic element of positioning allow recognition of ideas about the sources of interlocking oppressions, highlighting education scholars’ roles in reproducing power inequities in knowledge production. The power of the onto-epistemic in positioning, then, is that it requires us as researchers to explicitly grapple with, throughout the inquiry process, what our assumptions about reality, truth, and knowledge mean for research.

The sociohistorical

Within an intersectional framework, the sociohistorical responds to calls to attend to the interplay between biographical and social-historical junctures (Brewer, 1989). Thus, the sociohistorical element of positioning refuses to ignore historicity by attending to our professional situatedness; power dynamics regarding that situatedness within the academy; and collaborations between coauthors, research teams, and participant-researchers, which all impact knowledge production. Sociohistorical questions that infuse our understanding of positioning include:

Addressing professional situatedness:

What is the genealogy of your field(s)?

What epistemic assumptions are explicit or implicit in the field(s)?

To what extent does the institution you are affiliated with hold power within your field? How has your field and institution been in a relationship with multiply marginalized people? Specifically, what harm has the institution caused and what repair has been done?

What are you doing to recognize the genealogy, assumptions, and harm within your research?

Addressing power dynamics:

What are the relationships and hierarchies within the disciplines and subdisciplines?

How are these theories and ideas received in your academic community? How is this reception problematic or productive?

How will you recognize and disrupt these power dynamics with your work?

Addressing relationships between collaborators:

What are the relationships between members of a research team?

What are the varying statuses and notoriety of members of an authorial team?

Which collaborators are: tenure and nontenure earning? Scholar/practitioner? Student/superior? Advisees?

How do these statuses impact collaborations?

Addressing the interrelatedness of sociohistorical elements of positioning:

How are professional situatedness, power dynamics, and collaborations between researchers and coauthors impacted by multiple oppressions?

How do approaches toward collaborations disrupt or reproduce sociohistorical hegemony?

What are the social implications of dialoguing about harmful institutional histories?

The sociohistorical element of positioning is animated through a lens of historicity, where we as researchers recognize our complicity through belonging to institutions, fields, and partnerships that have reproduced power and harmed multiply marginalized communities and write ourselves and our communities into the archive of knowledge production. If one occurs without the other, our reflections on positioning will remain superficial.

The sociocultural

Informed by how Black feminism(s) and DisCrit frame markers of difference, structural inequalities, and the need to center the experiences of multiply marginalized people, positioning must include the sociocultural element. Whiteness and ability have been the foundation of knowledge production, including the right to exclude others who do not fit within these narrow boundaries. Socially and culturally, multiply marginalized people have been left out of educational research, both as participants and formally recognized knowledge generators. Consequently, we must refuse the white innocence that erases historicity and ignores intersectional oppressions. Instead, education researchers must ask:

What are the sociocultural identities you share with your participants and research team members?

What are the interlocking systems of oppression that your participants and research team members may face that you do not? (These will be different for different participants and research team members—e.g., participants: teachers and students; research team: postdoctoral fellow, graduate research assistant)

To what extent is the literature informing your research team, design, and analysis centering multiply marginalized people?

How does the source of your knowledge production resist essentialism about your participants and research team members and represent in-group variance?

Each of these questions seeks to resist whiteness and ability as gatekeepers to knowledge production. Even the most critical scholars, those deeply rooted in examining and uprooting power dynamics, can replicate those same power dynamics in relationships with participants and research team members. Using the sociocultural elements of positioning, then, must explicitly question how researchers attend to power differentials with the people with whom they partner.

We argue that reflecting on our positioning in the academy is about more than listing our identities as if they are stagnant and uninformed by shifting power, people, and places. It is more than claiming authority by centering our experiences. Instead, positioning must be understood as an ongoing act that takes time, care, and repeated effort to return to these questions.

Conclusion

At the outset of the paper, we noted that we imagine a distinction between positioning and positionality statements, which we return to now. Engaging a framework for positioning imbued with Black feminism and DisCrit is a careful and conscientious act that occurs throughout the research process. It is a cyclic endeavor, not linear, ever-expanding and evolving as research teams, participants, and coauthors change over time.

The positionality statement is the outcome produced through enacting, with due diligence, reflections on the elements of the framework. The goal of the framework offered is not to answer every question posed in a positionality statement, nor is it a prescriptive checklist. However, if a positionality statement is going to be more than an enumeration of identities or a claim on authority, researchers who center multiply marginalized people can use this positioning framework as a guide throughout their inquiry. By doing so, researchers can generate positionality statements that consider the multidimensional nature of power, oppression, and knowledge production in relation to the field, the literature, and multiply marginalized participants.

As editors increasingly encourage positionality statements and education researchers strive to include them in their scholarship, we must have more robust conceptions of their function beyond rhetorical moves that center researchers. We built on Davies and Harré’s (1990), Milner’s (2007), and other scholars’ efforts to offer robust understandings of positioning because we are heartened by the possibilities of how they make space for reflective researchers who understand the roles that identity and race play in knowledge production. We sought to expand on this work through a Black feminist and DisCrit lens to offer insights for those who substantially address intersecting oppressions. We offer this framework for positioning, and the elements within, as provocations. As such, we hope our collaborative conceptualization of the power and purpose of positioning can provide a pedagogic and praxis-oriented guide to a range of scholars enacting various research methods. When positioning is situated as a necessary part of the inquiry, positionality statements communicated by scholars who are in the initial stages of learning research practices, as well as those written by veteran researchers who support emerging scholars, will ultimately become more robust and insightful.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Educational Researcher editorial team and reviewers for their poignant feedback on this essay.

ORCID iDs

Mildred Boveda

Subini Ancy Annamma

Authors

MILDRED BOVEDA, Ed.D., is associate professor at the College of Education, The Pennsylvania State University, 140 CEDAR Building, University Park, PA 16802; mboveda@psu.edu . In her scholarship, she uses the terms “intersectional competence” and “intersectional consciousness” to refer to educators’ understanding of social differences and how students, families, and colleagues have multiple markers of identity that intersect in complex and nuanced ways.

SUBINI ANCY ANNAMMA, PhD, is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, 520 Galvez Mall, CERAS 516, Stanford, CA 94305; subini@stanford.edu . Her research positions multiply marginalized youth as knowledge generators, exploring how they are criminalized and how their resistance disrupts systemic inequities and reimagines education as a liberatory space in urban schools and youth prisons.

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Beyond Making a Statement: An Intersectional Framing of the Power and Possibilities of Positioning

Abstract

Keywords

Collaborative Conceptualization of Positioning and Positionality

Discourse of Positionality

Extending and Expanding Positioning Through Black Feminism and DisCrit

Intersectional oppressions

Ignoring historicity

Whiteness and ability as property

A Framework of Positioning Through Black Feminism and DisCrit

The onto-epistemic

The sociohistorical

The sociocultural

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

ORCID iDs

Authors

References