Rachel Sieder
For too long, discussions about researchers’ positionality, reflexivity, risk, and vulnerabilities have been absent from most empirical socio-legal scholarship. This important collection edited by Lynette J. Chua and Mark Fathi Massoud is a welcome corrective which is bound to stimulate reflection in the field as well as serve as an important teaching tool.
Our choice of subject and research sites may be intimately bound up with our personal trajectories, the result of an initial interest at graduate school, or the outcome of a funding opportunity. However, when we come to our subjects, reflexivity about our positionality is central to good research design, fieldwork, and writing. As socio-legal scholars, we often study tough subjects in—as the editors say—“hard places” (p. xiii), places which are usually in sharp contrast to the relative comfort of the spaces where we live and work. This implies a host of ethical, political, and logistical challenges, as well as constant ongoing reflection during the course of our careers on the why and what for as well as the how of our research. Sharing these reflections contributes to better scholarship for all socio-legal scholars. It also challenges the pretences of one-size-fits-all research design and “neutrality” that are built on the invisibilisation of differences and the multiple, unnamed privileges and colonial legacies that still shape the scholarly field. As this volume emphasises, empirical research on law and justice is messy, ambiguous, and often deeply unsettling; yet it is precisely by reflecting on our own positionality, “out-of-placeness”, and the challenges we encounter in the field that we can generate rigorous research that makes a difference.
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks’ wonderful chapter “Pretty and Young in Places where People get Killed in Broad Daylight” raises vital issues about our responsibilities as scholars working in contexts of multiple, intersecting violence and the ethical and practical challenges such work entails. In what follows, I want to highlight four of these issues, and in the spirit of the volume, reflect on my own research and positionality in conversation with Mnisi Weeks’ rich reflections and provocations.
Security, Violence, and Epistemic Privilege
The chapter’s title is taken from an admonishment from Mnisi Weeks’ host in the field, someone whose local knowledge and risk assessment she initially ignored. Mnisi Weeks tells us of her own fear as she began work on traditional courts and “customary law” in Msinga in rural Kwa Zulu-Natal, a region of South Africa with a reputation for violence of all kinds. She also tells us how she countered that fear with a misplaced sense of her own invulnerability stemming, ultimately, from her relative class privilege. This is something that many scholars will recognise. Young women particularly may feel that admitting our vulnerability in the field may be taken as a sign that we aren’t serious about our research. Like Mnisi Weeks we battle on, hoping courage and good luck will carry us through—something she later comes to define as “naivete and youthful arrogance” and “wilful blindness.” As she rightly underlines, understanding the historical and structural causes of violence as a researcher doesn’t mean you’re not vulnerable to that violence as an embodied person in a particular time and place. Not taking our own security in the field seriously is a major flaw in research design, and can generate no end of problems, sometimes with negative, life-changing consequences for researchers and the people they work with. During my doctoral research on agrarian reform and the military in Honduras when I was in my mid-twenties, I certainly shared the “naivete and youthful arrogance” Mnisi Weeks discusses, thinking my academic credentials and enthusiasm for my subject of study would protect me, only to find out the hard way that degrees from a UK university matter little in the face of gender violence. I was lucky to get out of some scary interview situations with only my pride battered, but I knew of other researchers in the field who were less fortunate. One doctoral student was raped after attending a community celebration and drinking alcohol, which was a local tabu for women. Nothing justifies gender violence, but this terrible occurrence underlines the importance of not assuming the way we behave in one context may not be read in completely different ways in another setting, or that our epistemic privilege will protect us. Many years later in my role as a teacher and mentor to younger scholars, I am convinced that sending our students to the field without including adequate security protocols as an integral part of their research design is unacceptable, both morally and professionally.
Vicarious Trauma: Collecting Data, Writing Up, and the Importance of Self-Care
Mnisi Weeks writes about the traumatising effect of engaging with her “devastating findings” from Msinga after she left the field, and how long it took her to go back to her fieldwork data and complete her book. While she understandably struggles with seeing herself as a trauma victim, preferring instead the term “vicarious trauma,” undoubtedly both the violence we witness during empirical research and our relative impotence in its face are traumatising. As she states:
through my research, I was witnessing – over and over again – the suffering of people who lived in deeply vulnerable circumstances and were regularly confronted with serious risks, if not the reality, of harm and helplessness in their locale (70).
I had similar feelings when doing collaborative research in Guatemala on gendered justice with Maya k’iche’ women activists working with survivors of gender violence. Despite everything I believe about the power of “naming, shaming and blaming,” I will never forget one young woman survivor of sexual assault telling us with great sorrow that the only consequence of having sought justice was that everyone in her village now knew exactly what had happened to her.
Mnisi Weeks talks about “the moral weight” of the comparative experiences between her research subjects and herself (70) and how difficult it was for her to confront the “dehumanizing impact of the fundamentally racist separation between their daily worlds and my own that I was suffering” (72). The impotence we feel when faced with the impacts of injustice and violence in people’s lives often makes living with our privileges deeply problematic. This is surely something many of us carry from our experiences in the field, and sometimes it can turn into a paralysing form of survivors’ guilt, making writing almost impossible. Mnisi Weeks concludes that if she had known how traumatising her field research would be, she would have paid more attention to self-care. The effects of analysing narratives of violence and how to deal with them is seldom discussed in law and society research, although it has been written about at length by anthropologists (see for example the wonderful paper by Kimberley Theidon “How was your trip? Self-care for researchers working and writing on violence,” part of an SSRC series of working papers on research security).
In hindsight, I can see that my failure to deal with my feelings of rage and impotence in the face of the intersecting structural and interpersonal violence I encountered during fieldwork ultimately led me to emotionally distance myself from the survivors of gender violence, something that left me conflicted and sad. I also observed emotional distancing by some local women activists leading the project, themselves past victims of gender violence who did not or could not self-identify as survivors, the pain and shame—not to mention the reputational costs—of acknowledging their vulnerabilities perhaps being too much to bear. Recognizing our shared vulnerabilities and the structural inequalities shaping our respective places of enunciation and experience, and prioritizing self-care for all research participants, would have made for different outcomes. Self-care should be an integral part of research design and planning, not an afterthought.
“Objective” Writing and the Dangers of Appropriating Others’ Narratives
Empathy for our research subjects and taking their truths seriously is a basic tenet of good anthropological research. Yet in other disciplines, such identification can be seen as “lacking objectivity.” Mnisi Weeks reflects on the central challenge of how to balance human empathy and critical distance when writing about violence—violence that we ourselves have not directly experienced. How not to appropriate someone else’s narrative and mine it for a research paper? How to avoid the pornographies of violence that some research on violence seems to excel at?
In my own work with indigenous women on gender violence, I have tried to be guided by some basic ethical guidelines for fieldwork, including not retraumatising survivors, being empathetic and non-directive, embedding research within local collaborative networks that are working to transform situations of violence, and privileging local concepts, categories and narratives. Ethical guidelines also apply to writing: as a white, non-indigenous researcher, I am keenly aware of the histories and dangers of “ethnographic authority” exercised from non-indigenous standpoints (something Mnisi Weeks also refers to).
Particularly on the issue of violence against indigenous women, the legacy of racism around “indigenous cultures” means they are presented by many as the source of the problem—irredeemably patriarchal, “backward,” and in need of reform—instead of understanding gender violence as an outcome of broader, intersectional historical violences. As Mnisi Weeks argues, critical reflexivity about our own positionalities and the broader colonial, patriarchal histories we are part of is vital for good research design and writing.
Decolonising Socio-Legal Scholarship
Mnisi Weeks ends her chapter by asking how we can truly decolonise our scholarship while building a career in what remains a field dominated by the legacies of imperialism and structured by intersecting privileges (76). What is “good legal scholarship”? How should we approach the law? Working as Mnisi Weeks does on legal pluralism, for me, has meant trying to deeply engage with alternative conceptions of justice. In my research on gender justice, I later worked with Sebastiana Par, a Maya k’iche’ colleague, community leader, and spiritual guide to explore other languages to conceptualise and address what the academy defines as gender-based violence (see Rachel Sieder, “Maya K’iche Community Responses to Gender Violence in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala” in Katharina Ruckstuhl, Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, John-Andrew McNeish, and Nancy Postero (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Development (Routledge 2022)). I found many parallels with Mnisi Weeks’ reflections on how her empathy and identification with her research subjects have been used by some to challenge her scholarly credibility. In my case, my standpoint has opened me to the charge of “romanticizing” or “idealizing” indigenous law. This has led me, in turn, to write about the social and political processes involved in defining what is law. Ultimately, we need to be reflexive not only about our positionality but about law itself. As Mnisi Weeks’ chapter shows, the value of empathetic listening, of taking other people’s narratives seriously, and reflecting critically on what these mean for our own scholarship and conceptions of justice and law, is one of the great powers of empirical sociolegal research. All of this requires careful attention to our vulnerabilities, security, and self-care, and its inclusion within our research design.
Rachel Sieder is Senior Research Professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She is also a research associate at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and a global researcher at LawTransform, the Center for Law and Social Transformation, both in Bergen, Norway. Her research interests include judicialization, human rights, indigenous rights, social movements, indigenous law, legal anthropology, the state, and violence.
Feature Image: Durba Sen, Nature-Beckons.
This is part of a book round-table on Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (CUP 2024). Read the other posts here.
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