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Accepted Paper:
The challenge of collaborative and participatory research: investigating gender empowerment with migrant women
Neda Deneva-Faje
(Babes-Bolyai University and SYNYO)
Embracing collaborative research in anthropology requires not only conviction but also conscious and ongoing practice of relationality. The paper critically examines entrenched assumptions about the relationship between researchers and 'respondents', drawing on research with migrant women.
Paper Abstract:
Embracing collaborative and participatory research in anthropology requires not only conviction but also ongoing, conscientious practice. This paper critically examines entrenched assumptions about the unidirectional relationship between researchers and 'respondents', recognising that successful collaborative methodologies require ongoing, self-reflective engagement. It also interrogates the possibility true reflexivity about the positionality and situatedness of researchers trained in classical methods. Drawing on recent research from the ReIncluGen project on reconceptualising gender empowerment among Muslim migrant women, this paper presents the methodological challenges for collaboration. Photovoice was used as a technique for capturing the expression of ideas beyond language through images aiming to transcend the pre-determined impositions inherent in language defining abstract but deeply personal concepts. However, the power relations inherent in traditional research are easily reproduced on both sides. I argue that in order to transcend this, it is not enough for the researcher to question their own positionality and the situatedness of knowledge production; allowing researchers to experience vulnerability, relationality and consciously establishing proximity is crucial to creating a shared negotiated space for newly emerging concepts. By exploring our own team's different constructs and concepts of gender empowerment, our own situatedness of foreignness and difference, and our own privileges, and by sharing at least some of this with the women we were researching with, we aimed to construct a shared space of relationality. However, in order to truly develop collaborative research, we need to constantly reframe the questions we ask. It is in this space of uncertainty that this paper is situated.