Paper short abstract:

In our paper, we examine the ambivalent positionality of the international graduate student researcher as “other of the other” (Khan, 2005, p. 2025), and how diverse fields of power mediated interactions among various actors in the student's MA research process.

Paper long abstract:

Using a critical reflexive process (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu, 1996), this paper identifies and examines issues of power, complicity and knowledge production as they emerged in the first author’s master’s research on migrant women farmers’ economic and reproductive health experiences in the middle-belt of Ghana. We examine the ambivalent positionality of the international graduate student researcher as “other of the other” (Khan, 2005, p. 2025), and how diverse fields of power, including the researcher’s educational institution and cultural norms regarding gender relations, mediated interactions among various actors in the research process. Specifically, we examine how the student researcher was complicit in reinforcing patriarchal standards, perpetuating western saviourism, and committing symbolic violence. Situating these reflexive findings in relation to insights from feminist postcolonial theories we highlight how power relations, gender, and social class informed these ambivalent complicities. Rather than erase/silence these tensions in the research process, we argue that such ambivalences may be an inevitable dimension of transnational knowledge creation, and thus it is imperative that researchers consider how their ambivalent positionalities and complicities may be navigated and leveraged most productively and with the least harm to research participants.