Cross-cultural considerations and indigenous methodologies

Because of the problematic nature of researching across differences, as already discussed, I grappled with my position as an outsider researcher. I differed from the participants in a variety of ways including culture, citizenship status, and translocal attachments. I attempted to widen my reflexive toolkit to understand how to be ethical, sensitive, and effective in conducting cross-cultural research. I was aware of concerns about voice, and questions about who should speak for whom. I also knew it might be difficult for me to understand the water experiences of the participants. For example, disability rights activist James Charlton (1998) argued that it is impossible for able-bodied researchers to understand the disability experience. Critical diversity studies scholar Alan Wong (2009) found that in the context of oral history, the interview process could be held back by the lack of familiarity that comes with shared markers of identity.

However, a small group of researchers argued that difference, if openly

acknowledged, could benefit an ethical research process (Biddulph 1996; Bridges 2001;

Tinker and Armstrong 2008). Sociologists Claire Tinker and Natalie Armstrong (2008) found that researchers from inside and outside a specific cultural group could elicit valid, albeit different, responses from participants. When an outsider researcher

acknowledged their lack of cultural knowledge, there were a variety of potential benefits. Participants, striving to help the interviewer understand their underlying beliefs, tended to provide highly detailed responses. The participants also feared negative judgement less because they knew the researcher did not share their value system. Similarly, outsider researchers could ask questions that might be overlooked or avoided by a researcher who shared cultural values and context with the participants.

Despite the evidence of these potential challenges and benefits of interviewing across difference, I knew that the outsider/insider dichotomy itself was itself problematic (Bridges 2001; Tinker and Armstrong 2008). Tinker and Armstrong (2008) argued that such fixed categories do not adequately reflect the differences within groups, nor

identity’s multifaceted and flexible nature.

Researchers can differ from, or be similar to, the people they are researching in a variety of ways: age, caste, ethnicity, religious belief, physical ability, personality, sexuality, and class to name but a few…

Researchers are always both insiders and outsiders in every research setting, and are likely to oscillate between these positions as they move in and out of similarity and difference, both within and between interviews.

Tinker and Armstrong (2008, pp. 53-54)

With all of this in mind, I cautiously incorporated the strategies advocated by Tinker and Armstrong (2008) in an attempt to conduct the cross-cultural interviews effectively.

After the interviews were completed and some time had passed, one of the participants, Hari⁷, who had since become a friend and colleague, asked me how I would address the fact that I was a Westerner researching non-Westerners. He sent me an article in which he had highlighted the following excerpt:

7Participants in this study will generally be identified by their real names. Following an oral history approach, I received ethics clearance to seek permission from participants to identify them by name.

Too often, researchers from the “advanced” democracies assume that research is not seen as threatening, that research participants will not actively mislead the researcher, and that the community being studied has linguistic and cultural conventions about groups and individuals similar to those found in North America and Western Europe.

Fielding (2014, p. 1068)

I had focused first on how to share authority and invite collaboration, and second on how to navigate differences in the interview process. With Hari’s encouragement, I began to reflect anew on the wider implications of my research position.

It is more challenging to consider the systemic and historic baggage that research carries than it is to consider how to conduct an effective and sensitive

interview. Indigenous and non-indigenous researchers have argued against the colonial assumptions embedded in Western inquiry, in which non-indigenous researchers place

“‘Others’ under the research microscope” (Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Nicholls 2009, p. 117;

Christian 2013). Conventional research traditions can reinforce historic and

contemporary patterns of oppression. To avoid this may require extraordinary effort.

Many researchers have argued for indigenous methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith 1999;

Christian and Wong 2013; Fielding 2014). Filmmaker Dorothy Christian and cultural studies researcher Rita Wong (2013) were critical of their experience with the Thinking With Water workshop. They argued the facilitators—and later, editors—of Thinking With Water should have done more, earlier, to engage indigenous and minority voices. It is not enough, they argued, to simply invite people from diverse groups to participate. In order to prevent marginalization, researchers need to “decolonize our relationships with each other” by considering “the ways in which normative knowledge

infrastructures are still strongly tied to colonial ways of thinking that construct

Indigeneity as other” (Chen et al. 2013, p. 7). Such work involves surfacing the colonial assumptions buried in academic conventions and everyday habits (Chen et al. 2013).

Included here would be the troubling habit that First World people have of

romanticizing “the ‘authentic, essentialist, deeply spiritual’ Other” (Tuhiwai Smith 1999, p. 72). It may be through simultaneously reflecting on these buried assumptions and

attending to relationship that I will best address the ways in which my own research practices should be further decolonized.

[Y]our methodology has to ask different questions: rather than asking about validity or reliability, you are asking how am I fulfilling my role in this relationship?...This becomes my methodology, an Indigenous

methodology, by looking at relational accountability or being accountable to all my relations.

(Wilson, 2001, p. 177)