Positionality in Critical Feminist Scholarship: Situating Social Locations and Power Within Knowledge Production

What do we mean by positionality in critical feminist scholarship? And how is positionality integrated throughout every level of the process of knowledge production—from conception and authorship to publication and dissemination? These are questions our editorial board most recently re-engaged in Affilia's ongoing commitment to keeping the theory and practice of critical feminisms animated, evolving, and relevant. In a previous editorial, the Affilia editorial board collectively articulated a set of critical feminist principles and practices for feminist inquiry in social work meant to provide guidance for Affilia authors and reviewers (Goodkind et al., 2021). The process of collectively developing these was generative for us—enabling us to specify, interrogate, and clarify our guiding assumptions and beliefs. One of the principles of critical feminisms we described was the importance of positionality and of “be[ing] transparent and reflexive in analyzing and detailing the impact of who we are on the research we conduct—in terms of questions we ask, methods we use, and our interpretations and analysis of our data” (p. 483).

Those who have submitted manuscripts to Affilia might have noticed that, in requests for revisions, we often ask authors to discuss their positionality and how it has affected their research. While many submissions already do this, many others do not. Too often—both in manuscripts we receive and those that appear in other journals—authors who do list their identities fail to describe how their social location affected their scholarship. Perhaps this is because they understand positionality to be static or simply a box to be checked. Not all scholars have had the opportunity to learn about the crucial role of integrating a thoughtful and thorough discussion of positionality in rigorous scholarship nor is this encouraged throughout most of our field. With the goal of providing guidance for incorporating positionality, the Affilia editorial board recently engaged in a collective discussion to more specifically address this critical issue. This editorial presents our collaborative efforts to articulate considerations and questions focused on positionality to enhance our work as a board and the work of researchers, authors, and reviewers.

Before offering these considerations and questions, we provide a brief background on the importance and history of positionality. We emphasize that describing our positionalities and how they shape our research is an essential component of critical feminist praxis. It is a way of practicing accountability for who we are, why we do the research we do, the questions we ask, and the things we find interesting and important (or not). Incorporation of positionality in our analysis and writing is not meant to discount or overly elevate ourselves nor to serve as rote steps to a set of edifying rules. Rather, integration of positionality is an essential component of conducting socially just research.

We come to the Affilia editorial board and this editorial as critical feminist scholars committed to addressing the most pressing issues, needs, and solutions in our communities. We are united by the belief that research and knowledge production can and should be a form of truth-telling, a counter-narrative to those that have created the systems and structures that uphold inequity. We think, write, and collaborate from a range of positionalities across race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, immigration status, religion, class, age, ability, and more. The recruitment, selection, and overall constitution of our editorial board reflects a process that very much centers the social locations of its members and considers the board's constitution as a collective body across many aspects of identity, lived experience, and area of academic focus. The aim of this editorial and the number of co-authors in this collective piece preclude a specific presentation of each of our social locations and the considerations we explore more thoroughly below. However, examining our intersectional positional identities within the collective process of writing this editorial reflects our evolving exploration of these values and practices as individual scholars and as an editorial board.

Positionality is a concept used to indicate the social location of the researcher—in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, age, ability, citizenship status, and more—and its effects on the research. It should be engaged intersectionally, paying particular attention to how sociopolitical context shifts and shapes how we come to understand and experience our various social identities. This facilitates a closer examination of power and the interlocking dynamics of privilege and oppression operating within ourselves, our environments, and our research (Samuels & Ross-Sheriff, 2008). The term positionality, initially formulated as an epistemological challenge to essentialist categories such as “woman” (Alcoff, 1988), disrupted fundamental assumptions about so-called “objective” (white, male, elite) knowledge and knowledge production—rather, positing the partiality of “situated and embodied knowledges and an argument against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims” (Haraway, 1988, p. 583). Black feminist (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; hooks, 1981) and Indigenous, Chicanx, and other decolonial scholars (Anzaldúa, 1987; Mohanty, 1988; Smith, 1999; Spivak, 1988) further developed the concept of positionality and/or closely related concepts such as intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) as a means to transparently situate, re-imagine, and mobilize transgressive knowledge production and political action to take into account the relationships to power in which all claims to knowledge are embedded. These values and critical perspectives are also mirrored in the vibrant discourse about decolonizing research in the global south (Keikelame & Swartz, 2019), which includes both indigenizing research approaches and confronting the historical extraction of knowledge that has been part of the colonial and global capitalist enterprise (Arvin et al., 2013; Kovach, 2021; Reidpath & Allotey, 2019; Smith, 1999).

While the formulation of the concept of positionality extends beyond research, it has been taken up by critical feminist researchers (and many others) as a necessary consideration for research processes and outcomes. As social work scholar Lissette Piedra (2023) notes, “positionality is more than a static assessment of personal bias; it is a dynamic marker—a shifting analytic building block—that can deepen our understanding for how the context shapes and constrains people's beliefs, their choices, and the far-reaching consequences of those decisions” (p. 612). The work of feminist scholars, particularly scholars of color, has been foundational to delineating and understanding positionality in this dynamic way. Patricia Hill Collins (1990), Dorothy Smith (1987), and other feminist scholars developed standpoint theory as an epistemological critique of the sociological scholarship of white male researchers who presented their work as universal, objective, and unbiased. Demonstrating the impossibility of neutrality because of the social situatedness of all researchers, standpoint theory exposed the relationship between “the production of knowledge and the practices of power” (Harding, 2004, p. 1). In alignment with standpoint theory, the application of positionality to research is an articulation of the inherent connections between researcher and research. Reflecting on their positionality within critical ethnographic research, Soyini Madison (2005) notes that “[p]ositionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases just as we are denouncing the power structures that surround our subjects” (p. 7). In this way, it is both a methodological and political tool.

As researchers, we must consistently acknowledge our positionality, recognizing that it remains fluid within an ever-evolving social landscape. Consequently, we are tasked with embracing reflexivity, a deliberate and reflective practice involving self-awareness, self-assessment, and self-disclosure. This active engagement allows us to pinpoint and comprehend our positionality. Being reflexive requires that we identify and scrutinize our preconceptions, encompassing values, beliefs, motivations, and qualifications brought to the research; analyze how these elements relate to both the participants involved and the perspectives of our co-researchers; examine the interplay of these preconceptions within the research context, understanding their influence and implications within that specific framework; and allocate time and effort to navigate through this comprehensive process (Beltrán, 2019; Holmes, 2020; Savin-Baden & Howell Major, 2013).

We believe that a discussion of positionality is integral for all types of scholarship, not just qualitative and interpretive research. Quantitative researchers who critically engage positionality can discover not only unanticipated challenges and limitations but also opportunities within their study indelibly linked to inter-relationships between social work researchers, topics of interest, and the marginalized communities our research is intent to serve (Lorette, 2023). Understanding the roots of positionality reveals how all research is shaped by the social locations and experiences of the researchers engaging in it. It thus represents an epistemological challenge to postpositivism, such that requiring a discussion of researcher positionality for all social work scholarship would mean relinquishing the aspirations towards being “objective” that many social work researchers strive toward. As Secules et al. (2021) note, “positionality can and should disrupt the notion that any of us can remove ourselves entirely from the personal and interpersonal nature of research” (p. 38). This rings true for social work researchers who pursue research in alignment with our mission to promote a diverse, just, and equitable society.

We write this editorial as a recognition and celebration of the contributions of feminist scholarship to social work knowledge production and as a way to continue to build on these important foundations. We acknowledge the increased vulnerability and burden positionality statements have traditionally placed on certain scholars, particularly those of us who identify as women of color and gender-neutral/nonbinary, queer, and Femme persons of color. This vulnerability includes the emotional labor of dredging up painful memories and traumatic experiences associated with being “othered” and isolated in the academy due to our intersectional identities and nontraditional (noncolonial, noncritical, and nonwhite) research pursuits (Massoud, 2022). Since social work, like other disciplines, lacks consensus about the purpose and process of positionality in research, when BIPOC scholars lay our internal reflexive work bare in writing, including how we grapple with our varying privileges and oppressions tied to flexing statuses of insider/outsider (Kanuha, 2000; Smith, 1999) and outsider-within (Collins, 1986), our research (and ourselves as researchers) is subject to additional layers of scrutiny and critique due to epistemic injustice (Collins, 2017).

In posing the following questions, we hope to move social work toward consensus by revisiting the discussion posed originally by our esteemed predecessors, many of whom are women of color and queer scholars, to critically understand the central role of power (both for good, for bad, and everything in between) when positioning ourselves as researchers and by default producers of knowledge. To quote queer white feminist Kaelyn Rich (2021) in her keynote address at the 2019 biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues, “positionality is the key to unlocking our power, both the power to do good and the power to do harm” (p. 2). Yet, in order to truly unlock the collective power of positionality, we must first contend with how it has been used (and continues to be used) to disempower BIPOC and multiply marginalized researchers and their research in social work and related disciplines.

With this in mind, we offer the following questions to ensure that social work scholarship is unlocking our power to do good and working to center the research of scholars who have been marginalized. These questions are meant to prompt reflection and action at various points in the research process. We highlight again that positionality is an active as opposed to static process that should be revisited and re-engaged throughout the scope of any research project regardless of methodology (Boveda & Annamma, 2023). Some of the answers to these questions may be part of a discussion of positionality included in a write-up of research. Others may not appear explicitly in writing but should shape decision making around the research process and authorship. Some questions are aimed at researchers, others at reviewers (adding the question of whether reviewers should consider describing relevant aspects of their positionality in their reviews). Not all will be relevant for every research endeavor, but we hope that they will promote rich dialogue and just practice that enhances both the process and outcome of critical feminist social work research.These considerations and questions are not exhaustive. As researchers, we must consistently acknowledge our positionality, recognizing that it remains fluid within an ever-evolving social landscape. Reflecting on questions of power, oppression, privilege, and social location as we design, conduct, and write up our research is ongoing work that should be part of all social work scholarship. We understand that this is never simple; rather, incorporating and accounting for positionality in our research is a complicated process. Patricia Hill Collins (2012) reminds us that this is made easier when done in conversation: “We can throw up our hands at the magnitude of the task of negotiating the complexities of our individual, situated standpoints, or we can embrace a form of engaged scholarship that is grounded in a commitment to dialogical knowledge production” (p. 15). This is how we approached the task of writing this editorial. We knew that the diverse perspectives and experiences of the members of the Affilia editorial board—already key considerations in the editorial board's recruitment and constitution—would enhance our collective discussion and thus enrich what we could generate. As members of the editorial board of Affilia, we reflect on our own positionalities in the context of critical feminisms, social work values, and ethics as core ideas that bring us together. We acknowledge our privilege in being able to have this seat at the table and voice our shared opinions and discussions on the topic. Critical feminist values are in many ways in conflict with institutional values, and there is pushback at every turn for living these values in our scholarship. Thus, this editorial is an attempt to align our journal processes with our values by sharing questions we consider in our work as an editorial board with authors, reviewers, and the broader critical feminist and social work community.