Researcher Positionality and Relational Power: Playing With ‘Researching Up’ and ‘Researching Down’ in Critical Reflexivity

What the paper says

Critical development scholars and feminist geographers call for reflexivity on the relationships between researchers and the subjects of their research. This includes questioning the power dynamics that shape knowledge generation, while recognising the partiality of these insights and the subjectivity of knowledge production. To advance these debates, I draw on the concepts of ‘researching up’ and ‘researching down’, sometimes used to distinguish between relative ‘power over’ and ‘power under’ interlocutors. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Hmong village in northern Thailand, I reflect on the relationality between myself and research participants, including moments of entering into more or less relational power. I suggest that by mobilising the heuristic of ‘researching up’ and ‘researching down’ as a relational analytic rather than oppositional categories, we can generate new insights into our own positionalities, and subsequently, the social difference, relationality and power dynamics within the populations we learn from. This approach helps to reject homogenising narratives of ‘vulnerable subjects’ to better unravel shifting power dimensions and affect within positional spaces.