Positionality and transformative knowledge in conducting ‘feminist’ research on empowerment in Bangladesh

Women's Studies International Forum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx

WSIF-01687; No of Pages 9

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Women's Studies International Forum

j ourna l homepage: www.e lsev ie r .com/ locate /ws i f

Positionality and transformative knowledge in conducting‘feminist’ research on empowerment in Bangladesh

Sohela Nazneen a,⁎, Maheen Sultan b

a Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka, Bangladeshb Center for Gender and Social Transformation, BRAC Development Institute, BRAC University, Bangladesh

a r t i c l e i n f o

⁎ Corresponding author.

0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. Ahttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2013.11.008

Please cite this article as: Nazneen, S., & Suon empowerment in Bangladesh,Women's

s y n o p s i s

Available online xxxx
This article is based on the experiences and reflections of a group of researchers in Bangladesh(of which we were members) studying women's empowerment. We investigate the kinds ofepistemological and ethical dilemmas that arose from how they selectively presented theiridentities to gain access and tried to create ‘positional spaces’ in conducting fieldwork. We alsoexplore how these researchers engaged in co-production of knowledgewith research participantsand tried to balanced our multiple accountabilities in this process. By exploring these issues, weanalyze assumptions about ‘feminist’ research practices and our struggles to live up to these.Based on this analysis we argue that there is scope for exploring individual identity basedpositionality in the following areas that are less studied in feminist methodology literature: a)how research dynamics are affected when participants are more powerful than [feminist]researchers, and b) the nature of discomforts that [feminist] researchers experience when theyengage with participants who espouse to different gender ideologies. We also explore howtransformative research is linked to co-production, politics of representation and processualreflexivity (i.e., how and by whom what kind of knowledge is produced; Nagar & Geiger, 2007).We argue that these issues have implications for how we research women's empowerment indeveloping country contexts.
© 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Positionality, analysis of power relations and transfor-mative knowledge production are issues and practices thatfeminist social scientists grapple with during fieldwork andin the analysis and presentation of findings. There is a largebody of feminist literature on these which has enricheddiscussions on the methodological and epistemological di-lemmas inherent in conducting fieldwork (see Fonow & Cook,1991; Harding, 1987; Wolf, 1996). While there are existingmodels of ‘doing’positionality and reflexivity, i.e. describing howresearchers explore their situatedness as researchers and theirmultiple and shifting identities and agendas that shape theknowledge they produce (Nagar, 2002), these may not ade-quately address the various dilemmas andpolitical engagements

ll rights reserved.

ltan, M., Positionality andStudies International For

that emerge in researching women's empowerment in adeveloping country context.

In this article, we, the authors, examine how a group offeminist researchers in a global research consortium1 based atan academic institute in Bangladesh (of which the authorswere members) grappled with the following questions in ourresearch on empowerment. The fifteen-member Bangladeshcountry teamwas a part of the South Asia Hub of the Pathwaysof Women's Empowerment Research Programme Consortium,2 a five year multi-country research program focusing on howpositive changes happen in women's lives in the global Southand the challengeswomen face. Drawing on the reflections anddata collected at various stages of the research conducted bythe Bangladesh country team of the Pathways of Women'sEmpowerment Research Programme Consortium, we examinethe following questions. Firstly, how did the members of theBangladesh Pathways teammanage issues around positionalityin fieldwork across multiple divides of power, locations and

transformative knowledge in conducting ‘feminist’ researchum (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2013.11.008

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2013.11.008

Unlabelled image


http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02775395

Unlabelled image


2 S. Nazneen, M. Sultan / Women's Studies International Forum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx

axes of social difference?What kinds of epistemological andethical dilemmas arose from the ways in which BangladeshPathways researchers engaged with issues of reflexivityand positionality in conducting fieldwork? Epistemologicaldilemmas refer to dilemmas we faced in grappling withquestions aroundwhether and how interpretations of empow-erment by the research participants were being presentedaccurately. The ethical dilemmas included issues related to howthe researchers of the Bangladesh Pathways team presentedthemselves in the field and managed power relations withresearch participants as well as their understandings of thechoices they made based on considerations of power dynamicsand consequent discomforts. Secondly, how did the researchersof the Bangladesh Pathways team try to link the production ofknowledge on women's empowerment to a politics of socialchange and transformation?What did thismean in terms of thespecific nature of their political commitment—who did theyproduce knowledge for, how and why? And how did theyengage in co-production of knowledge?

In this article, we, the authors refer to what the BangladeshPathways team members understood by ‘feminist’ researchand research practice. Central to these are assumptions abouthow power relations in fieldwork and knowledge productionprocesses should be managed. The Bangladesh Pathways teammembers took the following as ‘feminist’ research practicein conducting their research. First, they sought to minimizepower relations between the researcher and the participantsand eliminate hierarchies in knowledge production (Harding &Norberg, 2005). In order to do this, they tried to design researchprotocols and processes that would allow them to criticallyreflect on their identity-based positionality and how theirrole as researchers shaped their relations with the researchparticipants, their subject of enquiry and interpretations.Second, the Bangladesh Pathways team aimed to producesocially engaged and transformative research for women,i.e., research that holds itself politically and ethically account-able for social consequences and that empowers its participants(Harding & Norberg, 2005). Their ideas about what is goodfeminist research are not unique to the Bangladesh Pathwaysteambut aremuch discussed in feministmethods literature (forexample see Fonow & Cook, 1991; Harding & Norberg, 2005;Wolf, 1996).

It should also be noted that as authors we do not engagein discussions on what women's empowerment is in theBangladesh context or on theories on women's empowerment.Our focus is on feminist research practices and processes thatwe used for studying various issues/areas that are related towomen's empowerment in Bangladesh and which influencedour interpretations of empowerment, and also how thesemethods and good practices gave rise to different discom-forts and dilemmas during fieldwork. We also comment onwhether the researchers or participants found these processesempowering or disempowering. The Bangladesh program hadregular meetings and study groups where we had debates anddiscussions over themethods used during fieldwork and in theinterpretations of findings. We also organized a participatoryworkshop in February 2009 for researchers to review theirown conceptions of empowerment, power relations within theteam and also with research participants and its implicationsfor how we were interpreting our findings. Towards the endof the program, we carried out both individual and collective

Please cite this article as: Nazneen, S., & Sultan, M., Positionality anon empowerment in Bangladesh,Women's Studies International For

reflections on what had been the challenges and lessonslearned in researchingwomen's empowerment. Each research-er was asked to personally reflect on thework they had done inthe Pathways Bangladesh team and write up their reflectionsbased on common guidelines. These focused on positionality,insider/outsider status, transformative knowledge productionand politics of representation. These documents formed thebackground for a full day structured reflection workshop heldin May 2010 on the methodological challenges we faced inresearching empowerment.

The research in Bangladesh was organized under threeprogrammatic themes: i) women's economic empowerment;ii) women's participation in formal politics and collective action(including women's/feminist movements) for creating supportfor gender justice; iii) sexuality, cultural construction ofwomen'sidentity, and the role of religion in women's lives. Each themehad several different researchprojects. TheBangladeshPathwaysteam was an intergenerational team with members ranging inage frommid twenties to early sixties. It consisted of academics,feminist activists and development practitioners of variousdisciplinary backgrounds from literature and history to differentbranches of social sciences, including anthropology, sociology,demography, economics and development studies. In theBangladesh context, apart from some women's research andstudy groups, the coming together of an intergenerationalmultidisciplinary team researching women's empowermentis rare. Although there was diversity when it came to age, allof our members were middle class, urban Bengali womenwith post graduate degrees. We were almost all Muslim,with just onememberwhowas a Hindu. This placed us in thedominant social group in terms of class–religious–ethnic–locational identity. Given our ‘dominant’ class–religious–ethnicand educational backgrounds, when we entered the field andconducted fieldwork our relationships with the participantswere structured in specificways, for example in caseswhere theparticipants were poor–rural–nonMuslim–less educated. How-ever, it also created a different dynamic when we engaged withparticipants from the same urban social class- and ethnicity andeducational background.

In this paper, we will largely draw on the experiences ofthose involved in conducting the following research pro-jects: i) women's organizations' strategies for building supportfor gender justice goals (henceforth referred to as Women'sOrganizing research project); ii) the role of religion andhow women use and experience religion as empowering/disempowering in their lives (henceforth referred to asWomen and Religion research project); iii) the influence ofaid and external finance on how women's organizationsmobilize (henceforth referred to as Mobilizing Resourcesfor Women's Rights research project).

Before moving on to discussing the key questions examinedin this article, our own relationshipwith theBangladesh countryteam needs to be clarified. Maheen studied sociology and isa feminist activist and development practitioner who joinedPathways as the overall coordinator of the country team,which meant that she had to supervise the activities of variousresearch teams mentioned above. This placed her in a uniqueposition of participating in the processes and debates on therespective research findings and methods of all three researchproject teams mentioned above. Sohela specializes in Develop-ment Studies and is an academic based at University of Dhaka.

d transformative knowledge in conducting ‘feminist’ researchum (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2013.11.008


3S. Nazneen, M. Sultan / Women's Studies International Forum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx

She completed her PhD at IDS, the coordinating institution andjoined the Pathways Bangladesh team in 2008 to conduct thewomen's organizing and mobilization of resources researchproject. The analysis presented here has been influenced by ourown experience of engagement in academic research andfeminist movements, our disciplinary training and also ourrelations and position within the group.

Positionality and insider–outsider status in the field: Ourdilemmas and discomforts

From the beginning the Pathways-Bangladesh researchersin the different thematic teams tried to create researchprotocols that inculcated the practice of questioning andanalyzing their own roles as researchers, their relations withthe research participants, and understanding (while trying tominimize) the power dynamics or distance between partic-ipants and themselves. This was identified as a cornerstone ofdoing ‘good’ feminist research. But there were degrees ofdifference in how positionality was understood and engage-ment with reflexive practices within the different thematicteams under the umbrella of the Bangladesh Pathwaysprogram and also between different teams. Different kindsof ethical and epistemological dilemmas arose as the researchprojects evolved from these understandings.

At one end of the spectrum therewas an ideological feministcommitment to eliminating the barrier between the researcherand research participants. One of the lead researchers, a senioracademic in her fifties, explained that her past engagement infeministmovement had taught her that activism is effective onlywhen it overcomes the “us” and “them” binary. She felt that itwas necessary to break the barriers between the researchers andresearched as—‘[i]t is when the “us” and “them” can be merged,when the research is about myself and when I am one with theresearch that it becomes a truly feminist research (emphasisadded).’3

The team that undertook the research project on Womenand Religion examined the role of religion in urban women'severyday lives and how urban women's engagement withreligion enhances or constrains their power or position. Theproject's lead researcher's position influenced the approach ofthis study. The expectation among the researchers involved inthis studywas that theywould be able tomanage issues aroundpositionality (e.g. around class, location, educational back-ground) and create ‘positional spaces.’ Positional spaces referto transitory spaces that are created by researcher and theparticipants, where the situated knowledge of both partiesgenerates trust and co-operation (Mullings, 1999) is used togain an understanding of ‘women's lived realities’. Themethodstraining sessions and research planningmeetings run by senioracademics were designed to emphasize this issue. As theybegan fieldwork, however, the Women and Religion projectteam members were soon confronted with the reality of classand with differences in political views and on ‘propriety’. Forthose who were young and new to research, entering the fieldandmanaging the process of selective self representation (howone presents oneself to gain access and create trust: Mullings,1999), the confrontation with this reality was troubling as theytried to create positional spaces. When this issue was discussedduring the reflection workshop in May 2010 with the wider

Please cite this article as: Nazneen, S., & Sultan, M., Positionality andon empowerment in Bangladesh,Women's Studies International For

group, one of the senior academics in the Bangladesh teamleading this study argued that:

We have to challenge our societal norms, structures andtraditions from a feminist position, but we must recognizeour own limitations while doing so…. Class, religion,language, values, beliefs and also way of life created thisdistance between us (the researcher) and them [partici-pants in our research]. We need to foreground thesedifferences in order to conduct a successful [feminist]research.4

The above quote reveals what the group identified as‘correct’ or ‘ideal’ ways of doing fieldwork. This generateddiscussions during fieldwork on whether reflexive practicesthat recognize social differences and our own limitations wereenough to capture the complex process of how both researchersand participants create versions of themselves that are repre-sented in different ways through the interview processes. Thisissue was crucial since how women experience empowermentin their daily lives and what they presented to the researchersduring interviews require an awareness of this process ofrepresentation.

For the Women and Religion research team exploringwomen's engagement and negotiations with religion in theireveryday lives, the selective representation of researchers'identity to gain access to urban taleem groups (Quran Readinggroups—one of the categories investigated by the team)created strong ethical dilemmas. The ‘positional distance’(Mullings, 1999), in terms of political or religious views andpractices, was vast between the researchers and the partic-ipants, with the researchers feeling uncomfortable with howthey presented their own beliefs and practices. Two of theresearchers engaged in participant observation of Quranreading and discussion sessions explained their dilemma inthe following manner:

We felt we were being deceptive, when we were coveringour heads, saying prayers [with the group during time fornamaz] and portraying ourselves in ways that are not trueto who we are. We were doing this consciously, in orderto gain the confidence of our respondents and access tothe group….5

This was necessary to be able to gain access to spaces suchas women's Quran reading groups where a certain dresscode is expected, which made me feel false as I do notadhere to purdah norms in my daily life or pray five times(namaz)—I felt I had a dual identity—that I was not myselfand I felt like a hypocrite.6

The above explanations make it clear that gaining accessto the group required the researchers to observe certaindress codes and behavior and these created a sense of deepdiscomfort. The researchers also explained that their motiva-tion to observe was not purely opportunistic (i.e., gainingaccess). As Bengali-Muslims, they felt compelled to followsocially accepted religious rituals in such a group. If they hadbeennon Bengali and nonMuslim therewould have beenmorespace for negotiations to present themselves as interestedobservers and listeners. The political context in Bangladesh,with the rise of local radical Islamic groups and government




surveillance had also limited space for outsiders to come intothese groups, thoughmany of the groups engaged in scholarly/educational purposes operate freely in communities andeducational institutes. In this case the researchers outwardattempts through their dress and behavior to bridge positionaldifference did not lead to a ‘temporary insider’ status withinthe taleem group. In fact they remained outsiders about whomthe groupwas skeptical. The two researchers quoted above alsofelt that because of this ‘deception’ their rapport with theresearch participants was not honest. As one of the researchersput it:

Our research participants were very suspicious and till theend of our research we never got their trust…. All the timeI was a stranger to them, there was no integrationbetween me and them. Obviously it's my personal feeling[this is my personal reading of the situation and I cannotknow for sure]… that why the research doesn't feelfeminist to me [because of the positional distance]…. Wewere feeling hypocritical and distressed….7

During interviews with the taleem groups, the researchersexperienced difficulties in creating ‘positional spaces’. Theresearchers found it difficult to comprehend how the taleemparticipants reconciled the perceived gaps on women's rightsenshrined in the sacred texts and their everyday livedrealities. The researchers could comprehend that the taleemwomen exercised agency through textual learning andfollowing the dictates of the texts and that the taleemwomen found this as empowering. But understanding howthe taleem women reconciled their own discomforts withparticular religious dictates such as men's unilateral right todivorce or polygamy which placed women in a disadvanta-geous position or how they accepted the complementarity ofroles between the sexes and not equality based on particularinterpretations of the texts, created a positional distancebetween the researchers and the participants. This difficultyarose partly from the fact that the views the researcherselicited from the women in taleem groups disturbed themand challenged their own views based on liberal feministtraditions. They could not identify with the views of thewomen in the taleem classes, nor could they fully dismiss orchallenge them. The researchers were there to explore theviews and experiences of these women, and what thesewomen were describing to the researchers were based on agenuine belief of a particular world order and the researcherswere unwilling to close off this communication channel. Butthe researchers experienced distress at encountering verydifferent perspectives on women's rights and position insociety they could not openly challenge, for example bysuggesting that the various interpretations of the Quran thathave been used for consolidating male power are not the onlyones and that there were alternative interpretations of thesame verses. The need to gain and maintain access in thiscase dominated the position the researchers adopted, ratherthan the feminist principles of sharing and negotiation.

Luff (1999) makes similar points about establishingrapport with research participants who are not feminist.Luff's research was on women of the ‘moral right’ in the UKand she writes how she struggled with achieving a delicatebalance between gaining acceptance and not misrepresenting


her position. Luff pointed out that listening patiently andfacilitating discussions on views that she would normallychallenge may have ensured that she maintained academic/methodological protocols, but it ‘can feel personally verydifficult and lead to a questioning of the whole researchagenda’ (Luff, 1999: 698). The researchers on theWomen andReligion project expressed similar views. They acknowledgedthat since at times religion has been used for subjugatingwomen and the political use of religion is a sensitive area inBangladesh, research relations between the researcher andresearch participants would be fraught and tensions on bothsides would arise. But most of the young team members alsopointed out that during the planningphasemore emphasiswasplaced on gaining entry and access, and they argued that therewas less focus on the ethical dilemmas this formof engagementelicits from the researchers. These researchers argued thatcurrent discussions on methodologies and empowermentresearch needs to move beyond the usual reflexive practicesaround positionality and also focus on how the researchprocesses can be made less traumatic for the researcher,especially in cases where the researcher engages with nonfeminist groups with strong views against women's equality.

During the larger group discussions, these dilemmas andexperiences led to the Bangladesh Pathways researchersquestioning the extent to which the distance between theresearchers and participants can be bridged and whether ourown expectations were realistic in this context. Many of uspointed out that a commitment to feminist solidarity orideology did not automatically create conditions for beingable to overcome various axes of social differences (class, age,gender, location etc.) and positional differences that weencounter during fieldwork. A key challenge for us was tointerrogate whether this form of selective disclosure hadinfluenced the information solicited and gained from thesecontexts and also finding ways and specific strategies whichcould be employed for explicit disclosure of circumstances ofcollecting data during the analysis and writing up phase(Mullings, 1999). One young academic engaged in theWomen and Religion research raised the questions duringthe workshop in the following manner:

[In this case] perhaps relating to yourself is not exactlywhatyou want through this research? You want participants tobe comfortable with you and it's different from what youwant from the research. I don't always see myself in thepeople I'm doing the researchwith. I tried telling themwhyI was there [that I was doing a study] and on what areas Iwanted to hear from them. Rapport building is veryimportant for getting information… but I expected andaccepted that there will be a positional distance….8

Kirsch (2005) makes similar points about differentiatingbetween friendship and friendliness when engaging withresearch participants and argues that researchers need ‘todevelopmore realistic—andperhapsmore limited expectationsabout relationships with participants…’ (Cotterill, 1992: 595cited in Kirsch, 2005). Methods employed by feminists tominimize power relations between the researcher and theparticipants and positional distance between the two groupsmay in certain contexts have unintended consequences. Atpresent these unintended consequences have been explored in




cases where ‘methods intended to achieve feminist ends…may have inadvertently reintroduced some of the ethicaldilemmas feminist researchers had hoped to eliminate:participants' sense of disappointment, alienation and poten-tial exploitation’ (Kirsch, 2005: 2163). However, the re-searchers belonging to the Women and Religion project alsoexperienced a certain sense of alienation9 and there was afeeling of mutual exploitation. The participants and researchersfelt that the nature of ethnographic engagement (participantsobservations/interviews) was extractive—i.e., encounters beingmined for information, and not necessarily for mutual learning(these concerns around positionality came up later in debatesabout how to interpret and present our findings andwhetherwewere essentializing women in the taleem group or representingthem accurately, which are discussed in later sections).

Obviously, power relations played a key role in construct-ing Bangladesh Pathways researchers' access and experiencewith the taleem members. In most fieldwork literature thefocus is on ways in which the researcher's positionality placesthem in a more powerful position than the participants. Inthe case of taleem groups, particularly groups that organizedin affluent areas of Dhaka city with educated upper classmembers, the access channels and nature of engagement(what could be asked) was substantially influenced bythese group members. They interrogated whether theresearchers had enough knowledge of the religious text toestablish them as knowledgeable outsiders and thuslegitimate inquirers.

The degree of positional distance between the researchersand research participants was also very critical in theWomen'sOrganizing research project. Perhaps surprisingly the tworesearchers conducting the study with women's organizationsand the movement's strategies for promoting gender justicehad some similar experiences. They had personal as well associal connections with members of the selected women'sorganizations, and they were dealing with persons of equiva-lent or greater positional power. Both felt powerless atdifferent times and at different stages of the process. Both theresearchers were straddling the insider/outsider divide, theywere insiders since they had membership of these organiza-tions or had long family connections with these organizationsand they were outsiders as they tried to create an identity asacademic researchers. Both were often interviewing seniormembers of the selected organizations who knew them asyounger women with less experience. The potential powerrelations in these age hierarchies and attendant differences inpolitical experience meant that the researchers often felt lesspowerful than those they were seeking to interview. One ofthem explained their position:

They did not have to give us time for the interviews orexplain their actions to us in detail. We felt grateful thatthey did spare the time and tried to accommodate asmuch as possible in terms of interview time, processesand issues covered in the interviews etc.10

Though the researchers' knowledge about and participa-tion in the women's movement in Bangladesh and theiracademic positions created a certain kind of acceptance ofthem as legitimate inquirers and a ‘positional space’ for themto engage with the interviewees, it also created particular


expectations regarding the process of gathering knowledgeand its interpretations and associated ethical concerns. Oneof the researchers, a young academic, who personally knewthe women leaders from her childhood as her mother'sfellow activists and friends, explained their interview processand dilemmas in the following manner:

I felt actually powerless. The research on women'sorganizations required careful phrasing of questions andalso determining the lines of what and how it could beasked. I had expected a more direct and frank atmospherebecause we were all part of the [feminist] movement..,and that reflexivity would be our second nature—in ourblood as we are feminists, but that was not so…. I wouldhave been more direct and critical if we did not knowthem personally…. As for writing up, at times I felt thatpresenting some of the issues we found maybe harmfulfor the participants in the long run, and at times I had topresent a toned down version of my findings andarguments… which led to the articles losing their punch.I had not violated any ethical/academic protocol and thiswas a conscious choice but it did place a particular kind oflimit on what I could say publicly … and also made mequestion whether [in our kind of research] academicwriting can be done without consequences [to theparticipants and] just for [generating] knowledge…11

(see later in politics of representation section).

As a part of the research process feedback sessions werearranged for the individual organizations for clarifications andreflections. This conscious attempt to provide feedback on theresults of the research and check back on the findingswith theorganizations was useful, but also challenging and sometimesuncomfortable. Discomforts emerged from the following: theresearchers having a different lens and interpretations of theorganization's history and strategies than did its members,expectations that some of the organizations' members hadthat the researchers would view the organizations in a similarmanner to themselves because the researchers were fellowactivists, and academic protocols that required the re-searchers to present issues using particular language andstyle conventions. One of the researchers who was a memberof one of the organizations being researched and active in thefeminist movement experienced most acutely and uncom-fortably the expectations that arose from her insider status.She explained this in the following manner:

What became evident is that the analysis would notreproduce the organization's own understanding of theirprocesses and movements. [Organization X] was the mostdemanding in wanting their thinking, principles andunderstandings reflected in the article, perhaps thinkingthat I, as one of the members, should have been able to dothat.12

Interestingly, the Women and Religion project team didnot consider organizing such feedback sessions with thetaleem groups. Given their ‘deceptive’ practices, theseresearchers felt uncomfortable and felt that it would berisky in engaging in an open debate over religious interpre-tations of women's rights and the way taleem womennegotiated religion in their everyday lives by going back to




these groups. Some of the researchers also felt that the spacefor critical reflections within these groups was closed off.

The above discussion shows the ethical dilemmas,discomforts and power relations that the Bangladesh Path-ways team members had experienced as a group doingdifferent kinds of research on women's empowerment in thefield. These discomforts arose from the positionality adoptedby the Bangladesh Pathways researchers that was dominatedby need to gain and maintain access and their relativepowerlessness viz-a-viz the research participants. The re-searchers working in both the Women and Religion andWomen's Organizing projects were relatively powerless asthey were either dealing with people who had similar class–locational identity (urban-educated-middle class taleemgroup members) or experienced women's rights activists(supported by hierarchies based on age and more activistexperience). The discussion on managing power relationsraise questions about the nature of the enterprise that isneeded for creating positional spaces in such cases, which isvery different than the ones undertaken in most researchconducted on women's empowerment in Bangladesh wherethe research participants are poor-rural-women.

The above issues around individual positionality (researcher'sown), insider–outsider status and power are also linked to ourpractice and politics in interpreting/presenting findings. The nextsection focuses on how these shaped the process of knowledgeproduction and politics of representation.

Transformative knowledge production and politicsof representation

For most of Pathways Bangladesh researchers as feminists,Pathways research had a clear political agendawhich included:firstly, challenging the prevailing understanding of empower-ment in development discourse based on the lived realities ofwomen's multiple pathways and processes to empowermentin their everyday lives; and secondly, ensuring that ourways ofworking,—in both research and knowledge production pro-cesses, generated transformative knowledge for multipleaudiences, including the participants in our research. Theseagendasmeanmovingbeyond the usual academic protocols forensuring rigor and exploration of individual identity basedpositionality and power relations in research and explicitlyasking questions about: who did we produce knowledgefor? How did we engage in doing so? What kinds ofprocesses did we use? What kinds of products werecreated? Did we engage in co-production of knowledgeand space for critical reflection (Nagar & Geiger, 2007)?What is the relevance and value of the work for theresearch participants? What kinds of choices did we makein presenting our findings and how were these influencedby wider political considerations?

These questions are not always dealt with by researchersduring fieldwork, and if they are, they come in as a part ofpost fieldwork or post analysis exercise. Usually academicresearchers conducting ethnographic research on women'sempowerment in developing country contexts reflect ondifficulties with relationships and responsibilities in the field.This allows them to illuminate issues around bias andindividual identity-based positionality (Nagar & Geiger,2007; Wolf, 1996), but not necessarily about how production


of knowledge could be tied to a politics of social change. Asfeminists doing research for women's empowerment and noton women's empowerment, we had difficulties with ourfunders and academic institutions in underscoring the valueof co-production of knowledge, of ‘processual reflexivity’(i.e., how and by whomwhat kind of knowledge is produced;Nagar & Geiger, 2007) and of intellectual products such ascommunication tools, creative work, outreach activities, whichare described as ‘extra-curricular’ in the academic and policyworlds.

The separate research teams under the PathwaysBangladesh program interpreted their ideas on production oftransformative knowledge differently. For example, in theMobilizing Resources for Women's Rights research thatfocused on the strategies women's organizations employedfor raising resources and adjusting to changes in the Aidscenario, co-learning and production of knowledge werein-built. The members of the Mobilizing Resources projectused a participatoryworkshop, internal feedback and reflectionsessions together with tools and reports explicitly designed foreach individual organization to document their history. Each ofthese processes created space for critical reflections by theresearch participants on institution building, influence of donorfunding on ways of working, alliance building, changes in theagenda etc. The participating women's organizations feltthey could use outputs and processes from these reflectionworkshops to strategize for developing fund raising strategiesand for strengthening internal and external relationships.Interestingly the interviews and feedback session organizedwith the donor agency participants also created space forreflections, in this case, on how their relations and rolesvis-à-vis women's organizations and the gender justice agendahad evolved. In fact, both sets of participants, from the donoragency and the women's organizations, found these pro-cesses to be empowering. They were more appreciative of thespace created for critical reflection and learning than the glossyfinal reports or academic outputs produced by the team.However, these processes did not carry the same value to ourfunders, or to our departmental colleagues working on otherissues. While they acknowledged that these were interestingmethods, to them the value of research depended on thequality and prestige of the final academic product and its policyrelevance, in providing for example prescriptions to the donorcommunity for enhancing women's empowerment or influenc-ing the aid effectiveness agenda.

The differences between how the different stakeholdersof Mobilizing Resources project perceived the value ofthese unconventional research processes and the role ofintellectual products that fall beyond the usual academic orpolicy outputs indicates not only how political commit-ments for producing transformative knowledge wereweighed differently by the various stakeholders, but alsothat as researchers our accountability towards these differ-ent stakeholders may be in conflict. Our accountabilitytowards the participant research organizations requiredus to use processes and also produce products that theparticipants found useful and empowering. However, theco-production of knowledge using unconventional methodsand producing other types of intellectual output thanthe usual academic/policy ones required money and extratime and energy. The research projects were funded by a




global consortium where the funders are accountable totheir governments for using public funds. This required thisresearch project and also others projects conducted bythe Bangladesh Pathways team to produce and prioritizeoutputs that had high academic and policy relevancethat could be used by the funding agency to demon-strate impact—journal articles, policy briefs and so on. TheBangladesh Pathways team members had to work extraunpaid hours and constantly had to justify why and howthese unconventional methods used for co-production ofknowledge generated quality data. As the academic and thedevelopment policy actors place a higher value on partic-ular types of intellectual products and weigh otherintellectual products as less valuable, there is a possibilitythat the scope for co-production and processual reflexivity(Nagar & Geiger, 2007) and the scope for empoweringparticipants through the research processes may belimited.

Not all Pathways research teams in Bangladesh had directbuilt-in strategies for co-learning and production of knowl-edge. Nor was this possible in all cases, given the nature ofthe enquiry and the research processes used for the variousprojects. This led to heated debates on transformatoryresearch between and within the different project teams:what is it? And does the transformation have to directlybenefit the research participants or improve the lives ofwomen? Should transformatory research always entail theco-production of knowledge? One of the senior academicargued that transformatory research need not always beabout directly benefitting research participants, using thefollowing to explain what some members of the PathwaysBangladesh team understood as transformatory feministresearch:

Feminist research means highlighting women's perspec-tives and creating more gender equitable relations… [It isabout being] feminist in its goals. It is [research is]feminist because it foregrounds women's relationship,gives women the chance to articulate themselves… andwhen it advances women's causes [perhaps not forparticular group of participants].13

For Bangladesh Pathways team members as feministresearchers, being able to highlight women's perspectivesdepended on the politics of representation, in particular howand with whom the findings of the research could be shared,so that it contributes to social transformation, withoutharming either the participants or researchers, or adverselyaffecting the cause for women's empowerment and genderequity. As researchers we are politically and ethicallyaccountable for social consequences of our actions (Harding& Norberg, 2005:2010). While this was not problematic forsome of the research done in Bangladesh, for example that onwomen's economic empowerment, where the debates aremore established, this was particularly an issue with regardto the projects we conducted on Women's Organizing andon Women and Religion, both of which are areas that arepolitically and socially contested.

In the research on Women's Organizations and theirstrategies for mobilizing support, the researchers had to beaware that these organizations have at times taken up


socially controversial positions and issues for promotinggender justice and had strong right-wing opponents inBangladesh and researchers involved in this particularproject did not want to give their detractors furtherammunition. Therefore in examining issues such as themovement for ratification of CEDAW, or for a uniform familycode that challenged supremacy of Sharia the researcherswere careful in how they portrayed the challenges women'sorganizations faced, the difficult choices these organizationsmade and even inconsistencies in their strategies, as well asorganization's views on the role played by their right wingopponents. The decision to ensure that Bangladesh Pathwaysresearch project did not publicly place these organizations ina difficult position was a conscious one on the part of theresearchers, although it felt constraining at times (see earlierquote by R8 in the section on positionality).

Similarly, the Women and Religion research team had tobe very careful about how they presented their interpreta-tions and representations of their findings. There are verystrongly held views about religion and whether it is or is notempowering or exploitative for women, as well as aboutpolitical Islam in Bangladesh. The researchers did not want toenter into the political debates about religion and Islam,either for or against, but rather to bring out changes inwomen's lived reality of religion and how they are engagingwith its interpretation. However, this careful positioning wasalso important for the researchers of themselves, in present-ing their motivations and the objectives of the research intheir academic papers and other public presentation. Thisstance was not easily accepted within the larger BangladeshPathways research team and its research consortium part-ners and also by the academic and activist audience to whichthe research was presented in Bangladesh and this gaverise to heated debates. In these multidisciplinary settings,activists and participants with a background in politicalscience and economics expected the researchers to take anoppositional position to the explanations and experiences ofreligion and religiosity being empowering for women. This,the researchers on the project, who were anthropologists andwere engaged in cultural studies, refused to do as they felt itwould further marginalize their research participants. Theyalso argued that this would essentialize the women in taleemgroups and portray them as one homogenized bloc. Thedifferent positions taken by the researchers and theiraudience in these multidisciplinary settings perhaps alsoindicates the influence of how these academic disciplinestrain researchers to engage with findings.

Interestingly, in those discussions where the Womenand Religion project researchers had thought they would findspace for discussion and exchanges, such as with secularBangladeshi feminists within the Pathways team and acade-mia, it emerged that they were not comfortable engaging insuch discussions around religiosity. At times the projectresearchers were openly asked by other members of theBangladesh Pathways team across the global consortium andin Bangladeshi academia why they chose to study such issuesand engage with the taleem groups and why they did not takean overt stand against political Islam. In fact, some of theaudience and readers assumed that the Bangladesh Pathwaysresearchers who studied these forms of religiosity werethemselves sympathetic to them and to political Islam. Some




even questioned openly why the Pathways Bangladesh programhad chosen to spend money on studying religiosity. Onesuggestion was that these studies were being carried out tocater to a Western audience where it is a ‘fashionable’ topic.Given these reactions the researchers on this project experiencedemotional distress and at times felt stigmatized (Lee, 1993).These experiences led the young academics engaged in thisresearch to selectively reveal their research interests and findingsandonly to potentially sympathetic social audiences, for examplethose doing similar kind of work such as in international fora ofanthropological and cultural studies. This example also drawsattention to the differences among feminists themselves andraises questions about methodologically how these differencescould have been addressed so that thosewhowereworking on asensitive topic such as religion could have more constructivediscussion with wider feminist community?

Conclusions: What does it mean for feminist researchon empowerment?

At the beginning of this paper, we stated that we would notdiscuss theories or definitions of empowerment but illustratehow particular feminist research practices and processes usedfor studying women's empowerment can be empowering forparticipants, or give rise to particular ethical dilemmas incertain contexts. We also stated that we would explore ourown assumptions on what is feminist practice for dealing withpositionality, the analysis of power relations between research-er and research participants, and the politics of knowledgeproduction by reflecting on the research we have done forPathways in Bangladesh, and the dilemmas and difficulties thatwe experienced in the field and in fulfilling our responsibilitiesfor producing transformative knowledge.

Overall, our analysis above brings out the importance ofbelonging to a larger team of researchers with which tointeract and also the importance of building processes forreflection within the group which ensures that individualresearch work is less fragmentary and allows for explorationof different perspectives within the wider group. Althoughexploration of these different perspective do not necessarilymean that these differences would always be reconcilable.

Besides the benefits of in built processes for reflectionwithin a wider group, the above discussion on positionality inthe field highlights some important areas for processes inresearching women's empowerment. We showed that indi-vidual identity based positionality and resulting insider–outsider status is a temporary position. This implies that thetemporariness of our positions and the complexity of thisissue require careful unpacking when using ethnographicresearch findings on women's empowerment. Based onBangladesh Pathways team's experience in the field, weargue that the existing methods used for examining individ-ual identity based positionality and reflexivity for examiningthe situatedness of the researcher (that any good feministresearch explores) may need to be expanded in scope.Established academic protocols more commonly use reflex-ivity to exploring one's decisions to selectively reveal partsof one's identity and how that influences the researchprocess. This is the s the usual focus of methodologicaldiscussions. However, the ethical dilemmas, discomfort, anddisempowerment that arises from the practice of selective


disclosure have not been adequately addressed in theliterature. Similarly, when power relations are reversedbetween the researcher and participants, its impact on theresearch process needs to be explored in the literature onwomen's empowerment. As we show, with the participantsin the middle class urban taleem groups and also with theexperienced women's rights activists, creating positionalspaces became very a different kind enterprise, as theseparticipants were not only powerful in these specific researchcontexts but also in the wider Bangladeshi society. Theanalysis presented of these research projects perhapsprovides an incipient critique of positional space argumentin feminist research on empowerment. Research on empow-erment in developing country has largely focused on creationof positional spaces where the research participants are poorrural women. The difficulties that arise in researchingpowerful research participants have been better covered inbusiness studies and perhaps in some development/policyresearch that focus on the elite, but these are importantmethodological concerns for those studying empowerment,as they not only determine access but also nature of in-formation that is gathered on how women belonging topowerful social categories experience empowerment. A keyissue in feminist research has been political commitmentof the researchers to produce transformative knowledge.This not only requires a focus on the content of whatwe produce but also how we produce it, the forms of outputswe produce and also to whom we selectively reveal re-search information. This requires a shift from focusing onindividual identity based reflexivity to processual reflexivity.Co-learning and co-production of knowledge that partici-pants find empowering may help in this regard. However,where there is a significant epistemological divide betweenthe researcher and the participant, co-learning and co-production is not possible, as we found in the case ofWomen and Religion research. Moreover, creating space andscope for co-production and co-learning requires addressingtensions that exist between activist analysis and academicanalysis in feminist practice. It also requires researchersusing unconventional methods and producing intellectualoutputs that go beyond conventional academic articlesand policy documents. Creating such scope and space thenrequires a form of activism through interrogation of em-bedded values and structures in academic, policy andactivist worlds. Feminist research on empowerment ismuch more than the production of technical knowledge aswhich it is portrayed, far too often, in most developmentpolicy literature. It is rather a deeply political agenda.

Endnotes

1 Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC.2 It was funded by the Department for International Development

(DFID)/UKaid, SIDA and had partners in five different countries and wascoordinated by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the Universityof Sussex.

3 R4 in May 2010 workshop.4 R4 in May 2010 workshop.5 R1 in May 2010 workshop.6 R5 in May 2010 workshop referring to full sleeved dresses, head

covering.7 R1 in May 2010 workshop.8 R5 in May 2010 workshop.




9 We also reflected on whether the participants in the Quran readinggroups also felt this when interacting with researchers, whom they treatedas outsiders. Also the participants had difficulties in comprehending theopen ended nature of an academic exercise and the purpose of the researchproject where one is trying to explore and the ultimate goal is notnecessarily to embrace a particular way of life/structure and nature ofgender relations.

10 Individual reflections by R8.11 Individual reflection by R8.12 Individual reflections by R9.13 R1 personal reflections.

References

Cotterill, P. (1992). Interviewing Women:Issues of friendship, vulnerabilityand power. Women Studies International Forum, 15(5–6), 593–606.

Fonow, M., & Cook, J. (Eds.). (1991). Beyondmethodology: Feminist scholarshipas lived research. Bloomington: Indian University Press.


Harding, S. (1987). Feminism and methodology. Bloomington: University ofIndiana Press.

Harding, S., & Norberg, K. (2005). New feminist approaches to social sciencemethodologies: An introduction. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture andSociety, 30(4), 2009–2015.

Kirsch, G. (2005). Friendship, friendliness and feminist fieldwork. Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(4), 2165–2172.

Lee, R. M. (1993). Introduction. In R. M. Lee (Ed.), Doing research on sensitivetopics. London,Newbury Park andNewDelhi: Sage Publications (Chapter 1).

Luff, D. (1999). Dialogue across divides: “Moments of rapport” and power infeminist research with non-feminist women. Sociology, 33(4), 687–703.

Mullings, B. (1999). Insider or outsider, both or neither: Some dilemmas ofinterviewing in a cross cultural setting. Geoforum, 30, 337–350.

Nagar, R. (2002). Footlose researchers, ‘traveling’ theories and the politics oftransitional feminist praxis. Gender, Place and Culture, 9(2), 179–186.

Nagar, R., & Geiger, S. (2007). Reflexivity and positionality in feministfieldwork revisited. In A. Tickell, E. Sheppard, & T. Barnes (Eds.), Politicsand practice in economic geography (pp. 267–278). London: Sage.

Wolf, D. L. (Ed.). (1996). Situating feminist dilemmas in fieldwork. Boulder:Westview Press.


http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0277-5395(13)00208-2/rf9000

























Documents

Positionality and transformative knowledge in conducting ‘feminist’ research on empowerment in Bangladesh