娇色导航

Positionality as problem, project and power: Charting the epistemic landscape of the early career researcher

A foundational concept common to research methods training across education and the broader social sciences, positionality is often taught and applied as a means of acknowledging or mitigating researchers’ human influences on methodology and the wider research process. However, such an instrumental view undermines the potential for more sustained development. Rather than acting as a static disclosure, positionality can instead be seen as a guiding principle of productive introspection, enabling researchers to become more self-aware and agentive in the construction of their identities as academics.

Drawing on the speaker’s experience of navigating institutional influences and dominant discourses while completing a part-time PhD alongside a full-time academic post, this presentation explores how early career researchers can build on their understandings of positionality towards an expansive view of the epistemic landscape in which their growth as a scholar is situated. The speaker offers methodological insights from their autoethnographic bricolage research for productive introspection, framing them not as isolated tasks, but as an invitation to engage in the greater project of sustainable critical reflexivity. This session aims to cultivate the growth of epistemic confidence, the navigation of productive uncertainty, and strength of voice as a legitimate, independent academic researcher.

Becoming through research: Embodiment, positionality and research praxis

Qualitative research is often described as a process of knowledge generation, yet it is equally a process of researcher development. As researchers engage with participants, methods and data, they are continually shaped by the relationships they build, the emotions they experience, and the assumptions they are challenged to reconsider. Becoming a researcher is therefore not simply a matter of acquiring methodological expertise. It is an ongoing process of becoming through research.

This keynote explores how embodiment, positionality and reflexive practice contribute to that process of becoming. Drawing on my own journey from creative methodologies towards Embodied Inquiry, I argue that methodological choices are not independent of the researcher but emerge through the dynamic interplay of lived experience, bodily presence, values, emotions and relationships. Positionality is therefore not a static statement of identity to be declared at the beginning of a project, but an evolving practice that develops alongside the research itself.

Through examples from creative, participatory and embodied research, alongside guided reflective and experiential activities, participants will be invited to consider how their embodied ways of knowing shape the questions they ask, the methods they privilege, the ethical decisions they make, and the knowledge they ultimately produce. Rather than treating reflexivity as a procedural requirement, the keynote presents it as an embodied practice that cultivates greater awareness of the self in relation to others, fostering more thoughtful, responsive and relational research.

Moving beyond methods and methodologies, this keynote positions research praxis as a transformative process in which researchers are not only producing knowledge but are themselves continually becoming. In doing so, it offers a framework for understanding researcher development as an embodied, relational and ethical practice that lies at the heart of qualitative inquiry.