Paper short abstract:

An autoethnographic account of how positionality in my research has hindered the quality of interviews during field data collection.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa is often referred to as the Rainbow Nation, a term coined by the revered Archbishop Tutu. The term was an attempt at rebranding the country after the dark past of Apartheid. Policies, such as Black Economic Empowerment were implemented to encourage more diversity in industries such as agriculture. While analysis of food systems in South Africa debate the outcomes of these policies (McEwan and Bek, 2009; Visser and Ferrer, 2015), it remains a white dominated field and the research participants for my work on south african value chains are not a rainbow selection - among the 7 interviews conducted only 2 were women and only one person of color. Conducting the research as a black Zimbabwean women, meant positionality, defined as when the researcher and the researched hold different unequal positions of power and privilege, class, ethnicity (Charmaz, Thornberg and Keane, 2018) had an effect throughout the field collection.

While there are many impacts this has on the research, a reoccurring phenomena was that research participants felt that the interviewer did not have sufficient technical agricultural knowledge or empathy with their experiences. In an attempt to minimize this impact a trained technical observer was present, however, this resulted in instances where the observer and the participant would speak in Afrikaans and without the skills to translate, the researcher was left to be an outsider. Turning to my white supervisory team, I often blush with embarrassment at how I may be to black to hold the research light.