Geography
Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, 38000 Grenoble, France
My comprehension of positionality comes from my ethnographic fieldwork in the Black townships of Cape Town, South Africa, as part of research in urban, social, political and cultural geography. The concept of positionality responded to the reflexive and epistemological questioning with which I had to engage after encountering obstacles during data collection. But I only encountered this concept much later in my research career, shortly before the reflexive period of writing the "habilitation" thesis I needed in the French system to to supervise Ph.D. students.
When I arrived for the first time in South Africa in 1994, it was at the time of the first democratic elections that brought Nelson Mandela to the presidency and as I began fieldwork for my thesis in 1996, I (finally!) realized that being white isn’t inconsequential. I made the choice to work on the cities’ Black neighborhoods – those where the racist apartheid regime excluded, restricted, and exploited the Black majority population, those at the forefront of the struggle. In these neighborhoods, the political violence produced by apartheid, both structural and paroxysmal, is still present. My presence there cannot be trivial: the other white faces are those of priests and clergy, of police and the military. Why would the locals there ever trust me, and provide me with information about their ways of life, their occupations, their networks? Maybe my nationality can help: as a non-South African, I was, thus, not part of the white people who directly benefited from the regime. I am a citizen of France, a country that had positioned itself against apartheid but where secret services colluded with those of the apartheid regime, leading to the assassination of Dulcie September, representative of the African National Congress, in Paris; a country that is but another colonial metropolis. Political violence is not the only form of violence: criminal, sexist and sexual violence’s are breaking international records right where I do fieldwork, alone. There are places and moments where I cannot be present; the risk is just too high.
Therefore, who I am, physically, configures the data that I am able to gather, its reliability, its silences. Who I am influences the manner in which I interpret data: The theoretical frameworks of French geography differ from those in Anglo geographies; they were constructed over a national disciplinary history and deeply intertwined with the colonial project; they refer to provincial – rather than global – conceptual discussions. Who I am ultimately limits the impact of my research: in what language shall I publish? How do I report back to the communities I have researched, when, as a precarious researcher, I don’t know where the money for my next plane ticket will come from, or while, as a mother of young children and a young permanent teacher-researcher, I can’t make time for the handful of weeks per year that the fieldwork requires?
Knowing that who I am defines to a certain extent my research: That is positionality. Formulating it, making it explicit, assessing it, means that I don’t pretend it doesn’t have an impact, but that I try to make that impact more objective.
More from this author:
Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, 2021, Keeping you post-ed: Space-time regimes, metaphors, and post-apartheid, Dialogues in Human Geography, DOI: 10.1177/2043820621992256
Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, 2020, Making the provincial relevant? Embracing the provincialization of continental European geographies, Geographica Helvetica, 75 No. 2, pp. 41-51. https://www.geogr-helv.net/75/41/2020/
Cite this item: Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, “Positionality”, translated by Caroline Schlenker, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177871
