REFLEXIVITY AND THE REFLEXIVE ETHNOGRAPHER

It is not a matter of looking harder or more closely, but of seeing what frames our seeing… (Lather, 2007: 119).

Observation can be construed as, ‘always filtered through the researcher’s interpretive frames’ (Schensul, Schensul and LeCompte, 1999: 53). Being accurate in what is observed and recorded is considered as a ‘scrupulous attention to detail’ (ibid.). But is there still vagueness towards the depth of detail that the observer sees and the lens it is viewed through? As an educator in a familiar

setting, albeit in a different role, even if I was interpreting through the framing of a researcher how much of the educator would still remain?

Consequently there is the need for a researcher to practice a self-critical attention towards any of their assumptions shaping the research process (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2007). However, this can also be a point of dispute, where the notion of standpoint reflexivity as being able, ‘to ‘step back’ from culturally laden prejudice, is rejected by many social and cultural analysts today’ (Lynch, 2000: 31).

No matter how epistemologically reflexive and systematic our fieldwork is, we must still speak as mere mortals from various historical, culture-bound standpoints…(Foley, 2002: 487).

As Foley indicates, there will inevitably be something of the ethnographer that encroaches into the research. Lynch (2000: 36), considers that what reflexivity does, is all down to ‘who does it and how they go about it’ and Wacquant adds, ‘conceptions of reflexivity range from self-reference to self-awareness’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 37), therefore raising issues of individualism. An indication is that qualitative enquiry, especially ethnography conducted by one researcher, can become, ‘a journey—a complicated, self-inhabiting one’ (Newman, 2011: 544) where what is seen, and how it is seen, needs to be interrogated as an iterative practice that is subsumed into the act of

being an ethnographer. In this research, the reflexive interrogation of myself as ethnographer and

also educator not only took part during the time in the field but beyond, as the data was interrogated and then as the ethnography, as thesis, was written.

Ball (1990: 159), with a focus on fieldwork, posits reflexivity as, ‘the conscious and deliberate linking of the social process of engagement in the field with the technical process of data collection and the decisions that that linking involves’. St. Pierre has researched in locations where she retained a significant personal history and she confronted her memories of those places that enveloped her during the research. She emphasises that, ‘we must confront the constraining framework of our pasts’ (St. Pierre, 2008: 121); adding, ‘one must be placed for a time in order to remap one’s cartography’ (ibid: 122). Therefore suggesting that going into familiar places but with a different agenda needs a reorientation of self and place and self to place.

As I always carried some part of the educator in me while in the field, despite any bracketing away, a level of familiarity was inevitable. Consequently, during the research there was always a

negotiation between my awareness of myself as an educator and all that could potentially bring into the research field and my priorities as an ethnographer. Within this proposition there is also the potential of a fine balance between reflexive limits and a working towards reflexive self-indulgence or narcissism (Weick, 2002; Nadin and Cassell, 2006) and the boundaries of how much an

ethnographer draws on and reveals of themselves as the research progresses and moves on to the text.

Coffey (1999: 132) suggests that there is a, ‘question of balance between the voices of ourselves, as knowing subject/object, and the desire to recognize and reveal the voice of others’. The implication is therefore that:

…all ethnographic work implies a degree of personal engagement with the field and with the “data” (which are always made and not “given”) (Atkinson, Delamont and Housley, 2008: 52 original emphasis).

Reflexivity emerges as not something that can be gauged by measurement, but more judgement as Willis, an ethnographer of education, considers that an element of the ethnographer can be drawn on to enrich the research.

In terms of direct field relations, I have long argued for a form of reflexivity, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a sense of the investigator’s history, subjectivity and theoretical positioning as a vital resource for the understanding of, and respect for, those under study (Willis, 2000: 113).

Initially, I had pondered over the point that being aware of reflexivity was sufficient preparation for the research. Was it something to be slipped in and out of quite easily? Reflexivity has been referred to as the ‘‘unknown soldier’ of social science: hats are doffed to it but nothing is done to establish its identity’ (Archer, 2007: 62 original emphasis). In this manner reflexivity is positioned similarly to ethics, in that ethics can also be greeted courteously with a ‘tipped…hat’ (Caputo, 1993:1) and a nod and we then pass it by and carry on with what we intend to do.

The very notion of reflexivity acknowledges that there is the capacity for self-awareness; a danger then is if it becomes a complacent process. Therefore my relationship to the research sites, as an insider, which is discussed in more detail in the following sections, and particularly in Section 8.2, was a reflexive process throughout the ethnography.