KWALON - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2023

Introducing positionality meetings: A reflexive tool to collectively explore and discuss the power relations in situated knowledge.

In this article, we introduce positionality meetings to enhance reflexivity in qualitative intercultural research projects. We aim to contribute to timely debates on positionality and reflexivity by critically discussing and comparing the experiences of three early career researchers doing research involving Muslims. The article provides empirical evidence from several sources such as our individual research project, self-reflections and excerpts from the positionality meetings we organised ourselves. We illustrate the ways in which comparing our varying identities and biographies help to tease out the way we are situated in the social world, but with an emphasis on our individual research projects. Moreover, the article demonstrates the important role of feeling and being uncomfortable in order to critically reflect on positionality. In doing so, the meetings produce in-depth understanding of the constantly changing insider/outsider relationships in research as well as the multiple relationships towards religion. To encourage other qualitative researchers to participate in positionality meetings, the article provides recommendations and a step-by-step plan to organise such meetings.

The Unadjusted Fieldworker

For a researcher, fieldwork is usually not only a confrontation with another world, but also with one’s own ‘unadjusted’ behavior in this world. Fieldworkers often focus their research on the way in which everyday life takes shape and meaning in societies, or are interested in everyday matters from a different angle. The lack of experiential knowledge and, sometimes, adaptability means that they do not always observe all requested or required standards of behavior in everyday situations. The unadjusted behavior that results from this can lead to hilarity or discomfort, and have all kinds of other consequences. At the same time, it can have an important function by revealing something of the world that lies behind the daily routines and habits of respondents. This essay elaborates on this issue on the basis of a fieldwork experience in a crime-stricken neighborhood of Guatemala City.

Learning to see the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest: the Dutch Case Studies Project in Chaplaincy

Chaplaincy/spiritual care is a young profession whose multiple and multicolored practice has so far hardly been explored and analyzed through empirical research. In our research, we have partly mapped the practice using case studies. In doing so, we made a number of methodological choices, such as soliciting case studies of care practices in various fields of chaplaincy, attending to context, requesting member checks, working in research communities with a detailed format for the case studies, all in a four-year process. We offer here a motivation for our methodological choices, followed by an evaluation. A common thread running through the choices and evaluation is the tension between the concreteness of the practices and general definitions of what chaplaincy/spiritual care is.