Race, positionality and the researcher

The chapter is an opportunity for retrospective reflection on issues of race and positionality of a researcher. A retrospective reflexivity is offered as a departure from the dominant approach of doing reflexivity because it provides an opportunity for identifying ‘transformative intervals’ that occur during one’s research journey. The chapter therefore focuses on these intervals as windows of opportunities for reflection including how these contribute to the researcher’s transformative journey from an ‘uncritical landmine campaigner and activist’ or a ‘naïve practitioner’, to a ‘critical academic researcher’ informed and challenged by academic rigor. The chapter traces this process and focuses on how one’s racialised and multiple identities provides for complexity in relation to the ‘insider-outsider’ status; demonstrating how complexity in identity is intersectional but that it also does provide for privileges while in the field. The conclusion therefore is that while reflexivity is a self-critical sympathetic introspection of the self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self as researcher, then there must be several models of ‘doing’ positionality and reflexivity, during research and therefore a retrospective reflection is a valid and equally transformative process of doing reflexivity