Chapter 9: Insider and Outsider: Reflexivity and Intersubjectivity in Ethnography

For the past few decades, conventions of writing or representing ethnography and qualitative research have been heavily criticized. There has been much critical analysis of how fields and observations are actually “constructed” in the writing process, and that the pretense of objectivity has resulted in researchers’ objectification of the indigenous voices of “informants.” Predicated on the understanding that observations and stories are rarely “captured,” but instead, framed by experiences and perspectives of a particular researcher, the interpretivist approach deeply challenges researchers to interrogate and disclose their own subjectivity and positionalities. Researchers argue that such reflexivity challenges the more positivist paradigm, breaking down the power relations in dichotomous oppositions of researcher and researched, outsider and insider, knower and the known. Influenced by a more postmodern inclination, reflexivity therefore draws from epistemological relativism, subjectivity, and positionality, invoking political or even moral commitment of research practice by challenging the power relations inherent in ethnographic fieldwork.