Reflexivity in practice

This project aims to develop methods to operationalise reflexivity accessible to a broad and diverse audience. It therefore supplements approaches to reflexivity as reflection on one's position to demonstrate theoretically sound research strategy one can implement at different stages of a research project. Through this, it contributes to the emerging body of literature I refer to as "reflexivity in practice".

Doing so, this project aims to address a theoretical and epistemological challenge. The idea that knowledge and discourse are neither neutral nor a priori emancipatory is now commonly accepted in social sciences. It is, for example, a core premise of the body of theories often referred to as ‘critical theories’.
This theoretical posture, however, raises a tension that has not been given due attention: considering the invisible social dimensions of discourse and knowledge, how can we ensure that the knowledge we produce is not only empirically valid and theoretically coherent but also challenges rather than reproduces the issues we aim to oppose? Indeed, while denouncing the harmful socio-political effects of knowledge in general, critical scholars exclude the knowledge they produce from the scope of their scrutiny. This runs the risk that these theories reproduce in an even more insidious way the phenomena they aim to challenge, precisely because they present themselves as challengers of the socio-political order, as highlighted by a growing body of literature (Allen 2017; Duzgun 2018; Kapoor 2017; Alejandro 2018). This research project aims at transforming the concerns regarding the mismatch between critical theories and research practices into a methodological programme and addressing it with practical solutions.

As such, this project also has a methodological and practical objective. This project emerged out of the frustration I encountered as a junior researcher and teacher. On the one hand, I was theoretically and epistemologically grounded in discourse theory and critical qualitative research and thus working with the premise that language organises our perception and produces socio-political effects. On the other hand, due to the lack of dedicated pedagogical and methodological material, I struggled to tackle this problem in my own research practices. This absence also made me feel unequipped to support students/junior researchers in their research journey. I needed tools to help them overcome some of the recurrent challenges they faced regarding reflexivity and language. And I developed this research programme with this practical objective in mind.

Different publications have already come out of this project:

Abstract: How to implement reflexivity in practice? Can the knowledge we produce be emancipatory when our discourses recursively originate in the world we aim to challenge? Critical International Relations (IR) scholars have successfully put reflexivity on the agenda based on the theoretical premise that discourse and knowledge play a socio-political role. However, academics often find themselves at a loss when it comes to implementing reflexivity due to the lack of adapted methodological and pedagogical material. This article shifts reflexivity from meta-reflections on the situatedness of research into a distinctive practice of research and writing that can be learned and taught alongside other research practices. To do so, I develop a methodology based on discourse: reflexive discourse analysis (RDA). Based on the discourse analysis of our own discourse and self-resocialisation, RDA aims to reflexively assess and transform our socio-discursive engagement with the world, so as to render it consistent with our intentional socio-political objectives. RDA builds upon a theoretical framework integrating discourse theory to Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus for reflexivity and practices illustrated in the works of Comte and La Boétie. To illustrate this methodology, I used this very article as a recursive performance. I show how RDA enabled me to identify implicit discriminative mechanisms within my discourse and transform them into an alternative based on love, to produce an article more in line with my socio-political objectives. Overall, this article turns reflexivity into a critical methodology for social change and demonstrates how to integrate criticality methodologically into research and writing.

Abstract: Following qualitative researchers’ growing interest in reflexivity, a body of scholarship has emerged that aims to turn informal practices for reflexivity into methods that can be learnt and taught alongside other research practices. This literature, however, has focused on helping researchers become more reflexive toward their situatedness and positionality, rather than toward their use of language and its effects on knowledge production – a process I refer to as ‘linguistic reflexivity’. This article addresses this gap by formalising a method for ‘problematising categories’, an informal approach familiar to qualitative researchers as a promising solution to the analytical and ethical blinders that result from scholars’ unconscious use of language. I proceed in three steps. First, I review the literature to show the analytical, empirical and ethical rationales behind this approach and offer a definition of problematising categories as the practice of making conscious how socio-linguistic units of categorisation unconsciously organise our perception and can represent a problem for knowledge production. This practice, I argue, enables us to decentre ourselves from the taken-for-granted nature of those categories. Second, I develop a three-stage research method for problematising categories: noticing ‘critical junctures' when problematisation is called for, identifying the categorical problem through sensitising questions and reconstructing an alternative. Third, I demonstrate how problematising categories contributes to the research process by applying this method to my experience in problematising the binary pair ‘local’ versus ‘international’ in a research project on the environmental impact of Chinese investment in the Senegalese fishery sector. I show that problematising categories leads to more rigorous empirical findings and nuanced analysis in a way that is feasible within the frame of qualitative research projects. Overall, this article expands the practical tools for linguistic reflexivity and heeds the methodological call to make conscious and explicit choices for every dimension of our research.

Abstract: Despite the imperative to pay attention to the words we use as a routine dimension of research, the methodological and pedagogical tools illustrating how to work on our own use of language are largely missing within and beyond international relations (IR). To address this gap, we develop a method—the “Reflexive Review”—which adds a linguistic and reflexive dimension to the common practice of a literature review. This method is accessible for researchers who are neither linguistic specialists nor working on language and can be integrated within a standalone research project. First, we review the existing traditions used in IR to investigate language—quantitative text analysis, conceptual analysis, discourse analysis, deconstruction, and problematization—and assess their interest and limits regarding linguistic reflexivity. Second, we introduce four methodological steps for conducting the Reflexive Review, by reviewing literature to: (1) build a list of “priority words” that may need reflexive attention; (2) look for metalinguistic statements to synthesize how the literature has explicitly discussed these words; (3) identify patterns of word use, as collectively shared meanings that coexist and that we should become aware of; and (4) compare the identified uses of language with our own. Third, we demonstrate the Reflexive Review in practice based on a word commonly used in IR: “local.” We identify four patterns of the word use of “local” in IR literature as: a class of actors, a level of analysis, community, and experiences of the everyday. In sum, we demonstrate how a Reflexive Review enables us to implement reflexivity in practice and make more conscious linguistic choices, to support more nuanced, ethical, and rigorous analysis and empirical work.

Audrey Alejandro (2018-)
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