The problem of positionality

There seems to be great costs to whatever research steps we take, even ones we intend to be empowering.  In her 2005 essay on positionality, Khan points out the paradoxes of her role as "native informant."  Although she is an inside informant, what she says about Pakistani women is not always what the Western public chooses to hear.  Her research is always subject to willful interpretation.  If Khan writes an affadavit to help grant asylum to Pakistani women fleeing their families, the West will interpret it as 'yes, West is best!,' not realizing that the women are fleeing partly as a result of Western political interventions, nor accounting for the patriachal practices still present in the West.  Although Khan draws (and wishes to draw) public attention to Pakistani women's experiences, she is aware that this publicity could do more harm than good.  "Such awareness could also help generate rescue missions," she writes, "The bombing of Afghanistan provides an example."  She knows she cannot directly help the women imprisoned under the Zina ordinance who tell her their stories, and that aiding the women seeking asylum means hurting Pakistani men's chances to successfully seek U.S. visas.  Even though she is striving to help Pakistani women, she sees that the biggest obstacles to the effectiveness of her transnational work are Western located.  Khan yearns for greater direct action, touting an expansive transnational feminism that bridges the local and the global.

Kesby (2005), in his article on negotiating power in participatory approaches, describes a similar allure to direct action.  Participatory research, sometimes employed as a feminist methodology, is no longer a fringe method used strictly by activists.  As participatory research becomes less marginal, Kesby warns that participatory research risks being recolonizing; "power is most effective and most insiduous where it is normalized."  As an increasingly normalized approach, participation has been subject to necessary critique.

But Kesby's purpose is to defend participatory approaches from the obliteration of total critical destruction.  To say participatory approaches are now just recolonizing efforts, or worse, a wolf of tyrranical power in participatory sheep's clothing, is unhelpful.  "Calls for resistance to all forms of power are unnecessarily immobilizing and must seem to emanate from a rather privileged positionality," he writes.  Kesby provides the example of participatory action and research on HIV prevention in Ghana, suggesting that it was likely better for him to encourage the Ghanian women in his study to participate in safe sex training instead of encouraging them to "resist" the tyrannical power of the participatory approach.

Khan and Kesby offer similar solutions to their dilemmas of positionality.  Khan seems to see no clear way to aid Pakistani women within an oppressive, clouded Western interpretation of her research, and argues that 1) "accountability and transparency" as well as "connect[ing] local patriarchies to global ones and develop[ing] a transnational feminist analysis" are the best recourses.  Kesby reminds us that all approaches, even ones with empowerment as their goal, should be considered  "contestable, imperfect work[s] in progress" that are "subject to future challenge and transformation."  The native informant role is a compromised role.  Participatory approaches are compromised approaches.  Being accountable, transparent, and recognizing that every approach we employ is merely the best tool for now, not the perfect tool, is perhaps the surest path we have to reconciling our own positions.