Consenting to the Consent Form

Consenting to the Consent Form

Qualitative Inquiry Volume 13 Number 8 December 2007 1095-1115 © 2007 Sage Publications 10.1177/1077800407304421 http://qix.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

What Are the Fixed and Fluid Understandings Between the Researcher and the Researched? Kakali Bhattacharya University of Memphis, Tennessee

Grounded in the author’s dissertation study, this article presents the negotiations of the formal and informal expectations arising out of interpretations of the consent form. These negotiations disrupt the structure of qualitative inquiry and its associated guidelines for academic rigor, trustworthiness, and transferability. If the understanding of the consent form and its meaning is contingent and permanently deferred, then how does the relationship between the researcher and the researched inform de/colonizing methodologies? Using a vignette, the author explores how member checks and re-presentation are affected by the intersection of colonizing and decolonizing epistemologies within the current context of troubled “scientific” inquiry. She also discusses how a fluid process of consenting, insider-outsider kinship relations between the researcher and the researched, and the inadequacy of Western structures of inquiry open up alternate spaces of discussion for scientific inquiry that is responsive to the space of blurred relationships, messy methodology, and collaborative designs often present in qualitative research. Keywords:

ethics; de/colonizing; transnational; qualitative methods

I

have just finished a long day of data collection, teaching, graduate assistantship work, and several e-mail and telephone responses. As I am driving home from work, I turn on my cell phone and find that Neerada has left me a message. “Call me as soon as you get this message, please, no matter how late it is,” she says. Neerada had agreed to participate in my dissertation study, in which I wanted to explore how two female Indian graduate students who have been in the United States for no more than 1.5 years negotiate their initial experiences while pursuing their higher education. I dial Neerada’s number while driving down College Station Road, which seems deserted at 1:30 a.m. 1095

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“Hey, I didn’t think I would hear from you tonight,” Neerada answers in a groggy voice, “I am sorry, I don’t mean to bother you, but I just broke up with Rahul, and I don’t know what to do. I have no one to talk to and I feel like a fool, and. . . .” Neerada’s crying pierces through my cell phone, making her disappointment intensely transparent. Between her frequent sobs, Neerada recounts tales of betrayal, misunderstanding, miscommunication, and many decisions that are met with her regret. I continue to listen as Neerada explains that she cannot stay with her Indian roommates in the Indian students’ apartment complex because they are too nosey. They gossip and judge people and she is too upset to put up with them. So, she asks me if she can stay with me. Neerada asks me if she can stay with me, as she thinks of me as her elder sister. In the context of Indian culture, this is a common kinship relationship that girls form with other women older than themselves. I begin to think of what I would have done had I really been her older sister. Would I have left her alone? When should my researcher self kick in? Because my researcher self perceives the entire conversation as data, I question if Neerada consented to my using any and all information to which she has given me access as a re-presentation of her experiences? I need to conduct some thorough member checks, I tell myself as I make furious journal entries when I return home. The next day, I pick up Neerada from her apartment, with her two suitcases containing most of her belongings, so that she can move in with me. I am still in conflict about the multiple roles I play in Neerada’s life: her confidant, her advisor, her elder sister, and a Western-trained researcher who has expressed explicitly the need to extract dissertation data from her. Part of me feels flattered that Neerada and I have developed a trusting relationship over a short period of time, something she has not been able to develop with her other Indian roommates. For the next 3 months, Neerada continues to provide details about her life, her relationship with her parents, her boyfriend, and how all of that affects her current academic performance and decisions about her future. I try to suggest that she try to talk to her mother or her sister in India. I offer to make a phone call on her behalf, as she has already told her family about me. Neerada turns down my offer and continues to struggle with her depression. From time to time, I see Neerada crying and wanting to make sense of her life and her decisions. I feel guilty for all the journaling I do about Neerada’s life with some intent of a future re-presentation. Does she even understand the structure of Western research, especially qualitative research? Can she really make an informed decision about what can and


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should be re-presented about her? Or am I being patronizing in my assessment of Neerada’s consent to be re-presented in my research? Three months go by. Neerada, although still depressed, has found ways to meet her academic and assistantship requirements. She does not cry as much as she did before, and I have compiled pages of journal data that need checking and verification. I explain to Neerada the structure of my qualitative research, what I am interested in accomplishing with my topic, and the role she plays in my research. I remind her about a similar conversation we had when we first met. In our previous conversation, I had communicated the entire institutional review board (IRB) and research process to Neerada in as much of an accessible and relevant language as possible. Neerada had just smiled, nodded, and said, “Whatever I can do to help, I will. I have a feeling you and I will become pretty close.” I wasn’t sure if she really understood the research process or her specific role, but she seemed agreeable to my project. Neerada had signed the consent form that formally outlined my expectations of her role in the project. The consent form stated that she was going to be compensated for her participation with only a couple of lunches and dinners and some gift certificates to the university bookstore. In addition, I agreed to act as a resource person1 for Neerada as she navigated the lumpy terrain of U.S. culture and academia. As I remind Neerada of our previous conversation about her role in my project, I realize that although she is interested in helping me, we have different interests in my research project, which puts the entire collaborative de/colonizing feminist design of research in jeopardy. Yes, Neerada had signed and agreed to do elaborate member checks with me, read transcripts, and provide feedback on all stages of data collection, analysis, and re-presentation. Yet, when I ask her to look over the transcripts, the journal notes, and my preliminary analysis of the data, Neerada says, “It’s alright. I trust you.” Our relationship has now moved to a blurred space of friendship, sisterhood, and mentorship. As a consequence, Neerada feels assured that I will do right by her and that she can trust me with whatever I choose to represent about her. However, this trust introduces even more dilemmas to the rigor of qualitative inquiry that I wanted to maintain. Why does Neerada trust me? What does that mean? I don’t even trust myself. Why should she? How am I supposed to do member checks if she just trusts me? Yes, I could wave the consent form that she signed at her and remind her yet again about her role. But that did not seem to help the last time I tried. Moreover, if I try to force Neerada to read and remark on the transcripts by reminding her of our agreed-upon expectations, she may respond a few days later and say, “Okay, everything looks good,” without


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reading closely or at all. What value would such member checks have and how will such superficial verification shape the knowledge I want to produce about Neerada’s experiences and negotiations? How might our relationship be affected if I insist on our formal agreement for academic rigor? Am I willing to sacrifice academic rigor for maintaining the blurred relationships of sisterhood, friendship, mentorship, and the researcher and researched? How else can academic rigor and trustworthiness be redefined when consenting, kinship relations and shared cultural understandings intersect in transnational feminist research? I have no way to answer all these questions and decide that I need some input from Neerada, even if it is not detailed member checks. Over a cup of coffee, I ask Neerada, “You know you have shared a lot of personal information with me. How much of that do you feel comfortable for me to share with the academic community?” Neerada seems unperturbed by my dilemma and says, “Really, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you think is best and whatever will help you. I trust you completely. You have been the one person I can count on no matter what, so I am not worried. You should not either.” There is that word, trust, appearing again. I want to shout out loud, “No, don’t trust me, please.” Granting me such privilege becomes more of a burden than a relief. Does she understand what it means to give me such access and permission? Should the researcher play the role of a protector and tell the participant the implications of sharing such information? Am I assuming that Neerada is too naïve and incapable of understanding the qualitative research process, even though I have explained the process several times to her? Is this an arrogant posturing of the agency that I have as a researcher? “If your mother or your grandmother were reading this, what would you not want them to know?” I ask Neerada in the hopes of identifying what information she is most comfortable sharing with an audience that might be judgmental about her actions. Neerada begins to discuss her comfort and discomfort with sharing certain information with her family. As she discusses her past, Neerada begins to show pictures of her family. I had also asked Neerada to take pictures of her experiences in the United States for some photo-elicited conversations. Neerada, an amateur photographer, embraced the idea and took hundreds of pictures. She feels more at ease talking about the pictures than simply emoting about her experiences. I realize that our conversations so far have been more about photo-elicited dialogues than I initially planned for in the research design. The more Neerada’s life seemed to go out of control, the more pictures she took, and the more we talked about the pictures. She would begin a slideshow on her computer with the pictures and then we would move to multiple topics



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ranging from loneliness to gendered expectations. As Neerada tries to identify appropriate information for her mother and her grandmother through photo-elicited dialogues, I become aware of the multiple boundaries she identifies as drawn around her and how she accommodates and resists such boundaries, providing me a point of return when I am ethically challenged about selecting re-presentational “data.” Working with Neerada’s comfort of confessional tales through photoelicited dialogues, I begin to engage Neerada in more photo-elicited conversations that I had initially planned. Talking through photography created a dialogical space for us, where Neerada became interested in how I was making meaning of the photographs. She began to coauthor some analytic pieces in terms of what she wanted to tell about herself, even though she was not trained in qualitative research or the myriad of postmodern troublings of transnational feminism. However, she never read an entire transcript or an entire analytical piece that I wrote about her, no matter how many times I suggested that she should at least give my interpretations a quick read. She said that although she was interested in what I said about her and sometimes liked to author pieces about her, for the most part, she did not have that kind of time and, more important, did not think it necessary to question her elder sister who will do right by her in terms of re-presenting her. That kind of suspicion of “truth” is a ridiculous notion to her, she informed me. ◆◆◆

Evocations, Provocations I started this project with the intent to align de/colonizing epistemologies and methodologies and discover moments of impossibility and incommensurability. Hence, in the following sections, I discuss how I situate de/colonizing epistemologies and their effect on qualitative methods used in this study. Because qualitative research is under the disciplinary eye of “scientific” inquiry, arguments for alternate epistemologies and methodologies open up spaces of messiness, contradictions, and tensions to promote academic rigor. Weaved through these discussions remain the limits and possibilities of IRB regulations, ethical dilemmas of epistemological and methodological contradictions, implications for merit and trustworthiness when operating within insider-outsider kinship relations, and a will to give/take up certain ways of knowing and not knowing.


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To give up certain established ways of knowing, I look toward de/ colonizing epistemologies that inform this study. De/colonizing epistemologies represent collective and varied ways of knowing the hegemonic effects of colonizing discourses and their foundational assumptions. Colonizing discourses are those that emerged from the post-Enlightenment European discourses (Smith, 1999) and currently represent imperialistic discourses forcing polarized relations between people, their locations, their categories of identification, and their ways of knowing and understanding the world. These imperialistic discourses continue to create grand narratives that exoticize non-White narratives or push them to the periphery. Because de/ colonizing epistemologies function in spaces invaded by both colonizing and decolonizing discourses, de/colonizing epistemologies represent the interactions of these discourses in challenging imperialism. Thus, there is no pure space of decolonizing epistemologies or praxis, as we are always already colonized through multiple discourses. Linda Smith (1999), speaking from a Maori perspective, describes the colonizing nature of research: The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our “faculties” by filling our skulls of our ancestors with millet seed and compared the amount of millet seeds to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who we are. It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appalls us that the West can desire, extract, and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations. (p. 1)

Whereas Smith’s critique is situated within the context of research done “on” Maori people, postcolonial scholars like Mohanty (1991), Minh-ha (1989), and Visweswaran (1993) criticize similar notions of establishing imperialistic knowledge about the “exotic Third World.” Keeping such critiques in mind, I designed the research and the consent form in both its tangible and fluid versions where participants’ mitigated voices would be honored as much as possible. In addition, I decided that relationships formed with the participant would not be restricted by the moments of entry, exit, and data collection but extended beyond the scope of my academic needs.



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However, although operating from a reductive structure of the IRB and consent form, I realized that de/colonizing ways of knowing and re-presenting the production of experiences in participants’ lives would require asking harder questions than a colonized structure of inquiry allows. This means asking questions about negotiating formal and informal expectations affecting participation in research. Questions about member checks and re-presentation from de/colonizing perspectives not only carry implications for epistemic and methodological shifts from traditional ways of knowing but also inform about contested ethics in praxis. Such discussions disrupt the current understanding of scientific inquiry and highlight the fluid and permanently deferred positions of the researcher and the researched as the consent form and consenting are negotiated through their becomings.

Formal and Informal Consenting The IRBs in U.S. universities offer reductive guidelines about ethical research practices as mandated by the federal regulations in the United States (Bhattacharya & Preissle, 2003) but fail to address many complex concerns in qualitative research (cf. van den Hoonaard, 2002). Despite having a “clearly” outlined consent form that listed all of the expectations that Neerada and I could have of each other, the consent form served only as a fluid guideline rather than a blueprint of our relationship. Through my interactions with Neerada, I had to decide what loyalties I wanted to honor and to what extent I wanted to honor them in terms of my academic training, rigor, and membership in Neerada’s life and living community. As demonstrated in the opening vignette, we diverted from much of the formal agreement I had with Neerada, especially with regard to data collection and re-presentation. Using a transnational feminist (Chaudhry, 2000; Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Narayan, 1997) framework, I wanted our interactions to be conversational, driven by topics that Neerada felt were salient in her life. Yet, most of our conversations occurred through pictures that Neerada took as a way to cope with and author her experiences in the United States while attending graduate school. Situating this study in transnational feminist framework, I did not question the change of Neerada’s preferred form of communication, even though the consent form outlined less photoelicited conversations. It is certain that I am not the first researcher to claim or advocate flexibility and accommodation to emergent methodological issues in qualitative research or any process of scientific inquiry, for that matter. However, how do such accommodations contribute to the knowledge


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produced, and what epistemic shifts need to occur to maintain scientifically rigorous position(s) on the slippery slope of working with people and their ways of accounting their lived experiences? In addition, how do we discuss consenting with our participants, knowing that the formal consenting would always already be inadequate based on shifting discursive influences and occupation of multiple subject positions? Formally, Neerada consented to guidelines that I outlined in the consent form. I consented to do right by her and maintain her dignity. Without a prescribed doctrine of practices that would tell me how I could have done right by Neerada and maintain her dignity, I had to continuously negotiate the differences in our expectations, despite a formal agreement. These differences included time commitment, participation, member checks, and re-presentations from our varied subject positions. Informally, I developed a relationship with Neerada that blurred the borders between friendship, sisterhood, mentorship, advisor, and researcher with contested loyalties. Both of us consented to these relationships informally and therefore all of these relations are implicated in the construction of knowledge, epistemic and methodological shifts, and the contingent foundations (Butler, 1992) on which the formal and informal consenting in a research project rests. It was clear that Neerada’s interest in my project was different from mine. Therefore, her level of participation and time commitment varied from mine and at times decreased beyond our previously agreed-upon understanding. When my formal expectations about Neerada’s time commitment, availability, and participation were challenged, I could have possibly invoked my elder sister or researcher privilege to encourage Neerada to adhere to what we had agreed upon. However, such actions have their potentials and possibilities. What would such a reminder do to the quality of participation and responses? How would such a reminder affect our relationship, trust, and rapport? What does it mean in terms of academic rigor when, as an insider researcher, I choose to preserve my membership and access into the participant’s life and her living community and do not hold her to our formal expectations? What would rigor, trustworthiness, and transferability look like when dealing with negotiations between formal and informal expectations, subject positions, discourses, and contested loyalties while conducting insider/outsider research from de/colonizing epistemologies? Consenting to a research project and holding a participant to what was formally consented to are not driven by fixed understandings. The relationship between the researcher and the researched determines the extent to which data are extracted from the participant and the quality of such data. Although it can be argued that participants need to adhere to what they consented to, situational



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constraints sometimes do not allow such strict adherence. For example, availability and interest can change during the course of the study. Moreover, because I was operating from de/colonizing perspectives, honoring such constraints and working with these constraints became more important to me, rather than insisting that Neerada follow the guidelines outlined in the consent form to the letter. I did not want to jeopardize the kinship relations formed within and outside the scope of the research. It was clear that I needed to modify what Neerada could realistically consent to when she was immersed in the project and remain critically reflexive of her role and the productions of knowledge. In addition, I began to ask different questions of the data gathered from such negotiated consenting from what I had initially expected to inquire. This meant understanding certain incommensurabilities and impossibilities in formal consenting, participation, data collection, and re-presentation within insideroutsider research where the researcher/researched relationship exceeded the scope of the research, while negotiating tensions between the formal structure of qualitative inquiry and participant-negotiated methods of knowing and re-presenting. In the next section, I explore such incommensurabilities between methods and the traditional structure of IRB guidelines, qualitative research, and ethics.

Member Checks and Fluid Consenting Visweswaran (1994) argues for a de/colonizing feminist praxis that “rests on the recognition of certain impossibilities, or ‘failure’” (p. 13). For example, the will to know in research needs to be troubled with the notion of what cannot be known, a failure of intentions. The failure to know and extract certain information can be an indication of the limits of a framework, methodology, or epistemology. Cautioning against using failure as “success” narratives, Visweswaran suggests that our failures are as much a part of the process of knowledge construction as are our oft-heralded “successes.” Failure is not just a sign of epistemological crisis (for it is indeed also that), but also, I would argue, an epistemological construct. Failure signals a project that may no longer be attempted, or at least not in the same terms. (p. 99)

Situated within this de/colonizing perspective, when my attempts to conduct member checks in traditional formats failed with Neerada, I had to ask different questions about the data. These questions emerged from reflecting


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on what I cannot know and on the limits and possibilities of different approaches to fulfill my desire of what I wanted to know. Asking Neerada to provide a close reading of the transcript or of my interpretations would not only be futile but would compromise the quality of knowledge constructed. Furthermore, the time commitment and the level of participation expected from Neerada were directly related to my level of interest, which was different from Neerada’s. Unable to conduct member checks in a traditional manner to verify the accuracy of my interpretations, alignment of the meanings I made of Neerada’s stories with her understanding became an impossibility. Surely, I am not the first person to embark on these ethical crossroads, which various insider/outsider researchers (Abu-Lughod, 1992; Behar, 1993; deMarrais, 1998; Klor de Alva, 1995; Kothari et al., 2000) have come to in their projects, rife with their own contradictions and tensions, including relationship between the researcher and the researched, messy structure of inquiry, and the shifting meaning of informed consent across time, space, and individuals. Such moments of failure point to impossibilities that can call for shifting research design and methodologies. Such impossibilities called for charting alternate forms of member checks while maintaining a vigilant praxis. Although Neerada did not participate in member checks in a traditional manner, she did use photography to elicit her thoughts, which became the source of verification/contradiction of the meanings made. Having access to Neerada’s living space, cultural rituals in which she participated, and groups in which she socialized allowed me to verify/contest my interpretations. Verification of ideas rather than verbatim accounts emerged as one possibility at the intersection of traditional and flexible forms of qualitative inquiry. This possibility allowed me to maintain my membership in Neerada’s social and academic environments and surrender the will to verify the accuracy of all of my interpretations. I do not intend to imply that surrendering a will to know automatically makes a study dismissive or less rigorous. Instead, it points to what cannot be implemented, tensions between established ways of knowing and limits within praxis, and creating options that respond to de/ colonizing epistemologies in order to generate alternate discursive spaces. Honoring my relationship with Neerada far outweighed the need for maintaining traditional forms of academic rigor. Instead, it prompted me to trouble such rigid structures so that responsive, flexible, and fleeting ways of knowing, verifying, and re-presenting can be legitimized as scientific. Neerada’s negotiations of her level of participation implied that consenting to the research does not fix the manner in which one participates in



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research. Rather, the consent form and consenting are contingent on varied negotiations of multiple subject positions, life events, and a shifting understanding of research. Furthermore, the ethics of re-presentation cannot be without tension-filled negotiations, taking into account the combined subject positions of a well-wisher, a friend, and even an elder sister. An insider/ outsider position complicates the ethics of consent and re-presentation because they are both shifting concepts. Therefore, ethical guidelines within and outside the scope of the IRB regulations should be responsive to the complexities of qualitative research and its need to remain flexible, creative, and contingent in its methods and re-presentation.

Re-Presenting Within a De/Colonizing Discursive Space When I asked Neerada how she would feel if her mother or grandmother read about what she told me, my intent was not only to conduct member checks but also to identify nuggets of re-presentation. What stories did she want to tell without affecting her dignity? Perhaps, her mother or her grandmother will never read any of my work, but my obligation to her dignity kept me hounding mercilessly for stories that can/cannot be re-presented. Because my knowledge of Neerada’s narratives extended beyond the scope of my role as a researcher, I questioned the ethics of re-presentation of information that transgressed the boundaries of researcher/researched and entered that of sisterhood and friendship. Grounded in transnational feminism, I was critically concerned about the contested space of collaborative participation and imposing a self-serving expectation on Neerada, especially when she trusted me. On one hand, my academic training implored me to verify the information, and the meaning I was making of it, and invite the participant to author her stories. On the other hand, without Neerada’s engaged participation, I had to ask what secrets I wanted to reveal about Neerada and the production of her everyday life experiences. Knowing that missed and misunderstandings are always already contingent on the readers’ dialogical interaction with the re-presentation, my writing became the hybrid space of contested loyalties to various academic and cultural gatekeepers. Writing through/against/with contestatory subject positions, Neerada’s lack of desire to participate according to the consent form becomes a subject of analysis itself. Neerada’s negotiations, along with my Western academic training, made me reevaluate some of my crucial ideological assumptions in terms of academic rigor and trustworthiness. The production of knowledge,


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using the fleeting concepts of consenting, member checks, and participation, is always already suspect. Re-presentation of Neerada’s production of experiences,2 then, is akin to seeing through a broken looking glass. Very rarely does a looking glass reflect what we hope to see. The re-presentation from such messiness inhabits mirrored spaces that are not only fractured and refracted but also shattered into shards, leaving it to the writer and the reader to piece them together to tell tales with indistinct ends, beginnings, and middle, with a temporary composure that is fraught with contradictions. My other concern was how I might produce the participant as the “Exotic Other,” backward in her understanding of the progressive structure of Western philosophies of research and scientific inquiry. Writing in English about people whose first language is not English indicates a deeply established mental and epistemological colonization, concepts that are hard to imagine and articulate in their entirety. To de/colonize such epistemic influence, I imagined the primary audience of this research to be people of South Asian origin, to imagine an accountability emerging out of hybridized discursive de/colonizing subject positions. Yet, it is difficult to identify the intersections of colonizing and decolonizing discourses without becoming yet another Third World broker (Chow, 1992), making the Exotic Other more tangible, understandable, and consumable. Rey Chow’s reminder became an instrument of vigilance in re-presentation of the participants. The task that faces Third World feminists is not simply that of animating the oppressed woman of their cultures, but of making the automatized and animated condition of their own voices the conscious point of departure in their interventions. This does not simply mean they are, as they must be, speaking across cultures and boundaries; it means that they speak of the awareness of “cross-cultural” speech as a limit, and that their own use of the victimhood of women and the Third World cultures is both symptomatic of and inevitably complicitous with the First World. (p. 111)

Simply put, informed by Western discourses, it is easy for me to become automatized and essentialize oppression, liberation, and agency through/ with/against my de/colonizing epistemologies and methodologies. As a transnational scholar in the United States, I am painfully aware of my complicated positioning in conducting research on/with other female Indian graduate students. Despite my best intentions to de/colonize my work, I cannot remain neutralized in what I produce, because it is always already colonized through my British/Indian/Canadian/U.S. upbringing, training, and presentation of my work in the colonizer’s language to Western academia. I think of telling you a compelling story with identifiable characters so that



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you can understand my dilemma of how to write from this messy space filled with chaos, multiple realities, and stories that behave in untamed ways. I realize that there will be multiple moments where you and I will/will not come together in the same spaces of epistemology and methodology. In those moments, we will always already be an Exotic Other to each other.

Implications for Scientific Inquiry in Qualitative Research Because qualitative inquiry is contingent, contested, and often blurred with multiple subject positions and subjectivities, scientific inquiry within qualitative research and the current contestatory discourses by the National Research Council (NRC) implore me to reflect on the question of quality in qualitative research. I fear that a doctrine of quality in qualitative research would seem prescriptive and disciplinary and would carry the danger of limiting creativity and making qualitative inquiry vulnerable toward co-optation. Yet, as a qualitative researcher, I struggle with and adhere to continued vigilance in praxis to maintain academic rigor, trustworthiness, and transferability in my research. Scientific, then, becomes a term that is situational and unfixable within qualitative research and calls for contingent methodologies, emergent designs, and critical reflections about subject positions and the need to inhabit them. Therefore, any regulated normalizing of research that privileges one way of knowing over others should be suspect in its acts and intentions. Dismissing multiple ways of knowing is akin to dismissing people’s lives: their realities, sufferings, and accomplishments. I will not repeat arguments previously made by other researchers (Bloch, 2004; Flannery, 2001; Lather, 2004; Lincoln & Cannella, 2004; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998; St. Pierre, 2004) that challenge the trend toward a reduction of epistemologies, a monolithic understanding of truth, and a fear and consequent backlash against the proliferation of diverse forms of qualitative inquiry in educational research. I align with those who value the kind of scientific inquiry that opens up spaces that work with the potentials and pitfalls of various ways of knowing and understanding the world. As a consequence, this article highlights the impossibilities of certain structures of qualitative inquiry and the reductive IRB guidelines to effectively address multiple ethical and methodological concerns that arise from working with de/colonizing transnational feminist perspectives. The discussions in this article are intended to legitimize scientific praxis that is critical


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about the iterative nature of epistemology, methodology, and methods, through ruptures, contradictions, and tensions. Nevertheless, the discussion in the NRC (2002) report proposed that evidence-based research should be able “to describe the physical and social world scientifically so that, for example, multiple observers can agree on what they see” (p. 25). However, such a characterization of scientific inquiry leads to a superficial understanding of complex issues such as race, class, caste, gender, and the politics of location that affect people diversely in their lives. In addition, such characterization assumes a homogeneous understanding of methodology, methods, implementation, and negotiations of multiple un/planned circumstances while conducting research. By discussing the way a participant might negotiate her role in the research, the difficulties in loyalties of a Western, transnational, insideroutsider researcher, and the multiple ways re-presentation is always already colonizing, I open up discursive spaces where academic rigor, trustworthiness, and transferability are shifting, contingent concepts fraught with their own limits and possibilities, instead of telling tales to promote universalized understandings. Seeing the participants’ negotiations and production of experiences through a lens of universalized understanding would be un-seeing them and silencing whatever is left of their mitigated voices in this study and would be an unethical, co-opted act violating the expectations of care and concern practiced in various spaces of educational research. Reducing the participant to universally agreeable categories would have been impossible. Whose knowledge do I use as a benchmark to set up anticipated agreements? To whom do I look to anticipate head nods? Whose science do I borrow? Whose science is a “legitimate science” for understanding the production and negotiation of the participants’ experiences? Whom do I silence when I align with what is deemed scientific in current discourses that attempt to regulate ways of knowing? As Sandra Harding (1991) argues, Critiques of Eurocentrism by African scholars, African-American philosophers, African-American feminists, and Third World writers have brought into focus the importance of considering on whose questions of Western sciences, philosophy, and social studies of sciences (including feminist ones) have centered the necessity of historicizing “science,” “women,” and “feminism.” (p. viii)

Being a native researcher in Western academia is a complicated position to be in if the goal is to disrupt certain imperialistic Western assumptions about knowledge, inquiry, and science. Thus, Harding (1991) suggests, We need a more complex understanding of how the development of Western sciences and models of knowledge are embedded in and have advanced the



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development of Western society and culture but have also led to the simultaneous de-development and continual re-creation of “others”—Third world peoples, women, the poor, nature. Science and knowledge will always be deeply permeated by the social relations through which they come into existence, but it is contemporary social relations that create and recreate science and knowledge today. The sciences that gain world ascendancy in the future are unlikely to be so distinctively Western and androcentric as are the dominant tendencies today. (p. ix)

Harding’s suggestion clearly points to scientific inquiry that interrogates the use of andro- and ethnocentric Western discourses to create liberatory possibilities for people who have been constructed and reconstructed as cultural Others. Scientific inquiry, in its current form, is derived from the hard (imperialistic) sciences that are proclaimed to be the benchmark of academic rigor and trustworthiness. However, as Harding states, we need a broader understanding of science and scientific inquiry to respond to the diversity of the world and its people instead of (re)producing them in Westernized images. To develop a broader understanding of science and scientific inquiry, the current discourses proliferated by the NRC need to be challenged and interrogated continuously to expose the many pitfalls embedded in those monolithic ideologies. Scientific inquiry that employs qualitative methodologies examines the iterative relationship between epistemologies, theoretical framework, research design, data analysis, and re-presentations and offers limits and possibilities of various ways of knowing/understanding the world. Implications for practice include exercising care, caution, and vigilance in making decisions in research as the researcher aligns with certain theoretical frameworks and methodologies. Aligning with transnational feminism allowed me to integrate serendipitous ways of collecting data to capture the saliency of the material conditions of the participants’ lives. Employing a technique like photo-elicited conversations allowed insights that serendipitous conversations did not, thereby identifying an alternate source of information. By highlighting the tensions and contradictions of traditional inquiry, an absence of a pure decolonized space, fluidity of the consent form, and implications in re-presentation from de/colonizing perspectives, the scientific structure that calls for universality, transferability, and strict adherence to IRB guidelines and consent form is permanently disrupted. The ethics of de/colonizing research lie in such ruptures that highlight potentials and possibilities of inquiry, ruptures that ask the hard questions that the IRB did not ask, ruptures that are of critical importance to resisting colonizing ways of producing knowledge. Scientific inquiry in qualitative research, then, cannot be


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complacent in established forms of academic rigor and trustworthiness. Rather, it should create spaces for dialoguing about impossibilities, where failures occur, previous ways of doing and knowing become inadequate, different questions are asked, different methods are used, and the will to know and extract information through researcher-driven designs is continuously challenged and, if needed, abandoned. I propose that people need not always agree about findings and interpretations for educational research to be scientific. Instead, if educational research opens up spaces for dialogues, multiple ways of knowing, and collaborative learning across paradigms, we might get a better picture of “what works” than the current moves to purge databases of research that do not align with the U.S. administration’s agendas. To that end, we need methodologies that depart from colonized ways of knowing and measuring the world, its people, their actions, and their experiences to avoid further inscription in imperialistic terms.

Ethical Implications for IRBs From Transnational Feminist Perspectives The ethical issues that transnational feminist researchers deal with in the field are not well addressed in the current reductive structure of IRBs. Thus, in this section, I will outline some implications for IRBs, emerging out of those issues, and how I took them up within the context of my research. I do not position myself as a prescriptive voice in de/colonizing transnational feminist work. Instead, my wish is that through discussing these implications, we can dialogue about constructing some IRB guidelines that would be helpful for qualitative researchers who situate themselves in de/colonizing transnational feminist epistemologies. There might be issues that are also transferable to other epistemological positions of qualitative researchers such as critical theorists, postcolonialists, and so on. In this current moment of qualitative research, we are met with a fluid, contingent, multilayered, voiced, and contexted production of knowledge and re-presentations. Therefore, there needs to be a space in the IRB guidelines that addresses the implications of fluidity and the contingent nature of qualitative research. Specifically, from a transnational feminist perspective, I was invested in collaborative knowledge production and re-presentation and could not anticipate that building a trustworthy rapport and kinship relation as an elder sister would have a reverse effect on such an objective. Because participants are not similarly aligned, or invested with their researcher in terms of



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epistemology and subject positions, the formal consent form can only serve as a fluid guideline that gets contested and negotiated throughout the research process. Thus, in IRB guidelines, there needs to be some mention about the fluid nature of consenting to the consent form and ways in which the researcher might envision possibilities of departures. However, not all possibilities can be identified ahead of time. As a consequence, there needs to be some mention of how the researcher intends to handle emergent issues surrounding the consenting relationship between the researcher and the researched. For example, one such mention could include documenting emergent issues surrounding the fluidity of the consent form as data in the methods section of future publications. Another mention could include that the researcher will attempt to elicit member-check consents through alternate methods if the participant wants to negotiate his or her role in reading through transcripts and re-presentative pieces. Mentions of serendipitous ways of data collection could also be helpful while not having to outline all possibilities, but at least creating a space in IRB guidelines that acknowledges that the consent form is just a starting point from where multiple negotiations would take place through the course of the research. For example, in my research study, I had to use alternate forms of data collection such as participant observation, multiple conversations, peer debriefings with people who knew the participant, and photo- and objectelicited conversations to identify points of dis/agreements in ways I wanted to construct the production of the participant’s experiences. Although the participant coauthored some descriptive pieces about her, she refused to go through the re-presentation pieces and the transcripts in their entirety based on the trust that she placed in me as her “elder sister.” I had to consider how I might be honoring her dignity without coming across patronizing and assuming that she needs to be taught about the limits and possibilities of the re-presentation pieces that I constructed through our blurred relationship as a researcher, friend, and elder sister. Evidently, the mention of using pseudonyms and fictionalizing identifiable details as mentioned in the consent form fell short in the process of honoring the participant when she placed her trust in me and shared information with me that transgressed the boundaries of the researcher and the researched. Thus, I had to relentlessly pursue ways in which the participant might want to author herself, not only in my academic spaces of publication but also in spaces where she might feel the gaze of expectations and be able to articulate such expectations. It is not my intent to suggest that all qualitative researchers should identify spaces of critical gazes to verify knowledge construction and re-presentation. Rather, by presenting my


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negotiated outcomes, I want to highlight the negotiations around the consent form and its role in research. Hence, by making room in IRB guidelines for multiple possibilities of ethics around member checks and decisions that might influence re-presentations, conversations about rigor and trustworthiness could be addressed in terms of qualitative research design, practice, and re-presentation from multiple epistemological perspectives. Beyond the methodological issues of verification of understanding of meanings constructed lies the issue of insider/outsider research conducted from de/colonizing a transnational feminist perspective within an institution in the United States for mostly Western academic audiences. I had to discard a section in my initial IRB application where I detailed the ethical complexities of production of knowledge from my contested positions of being the insider/outsider researcher. Apparently, Dr. “lab-coat-wearing scientist in chemistry” in the IRB meetings would not really care for such details that do not have any substantive bearings on the IRB approval process of research. As far as the IRB is concerned, I probably did not follow everything I prescribed in that outline to the exact letter. Nevertheless, I am also not in fear of my participants suing me or my academic institution for my negotiated implementations of the guidelines in the IRB consent form. The blurred and contested spaces of colonizing and decolonizing discourses are contestatory for an insider/outsider transnational feminist researcher, especially when gatekeepers have to agree to the legitimacy of production when they might not be similarly positioned. Yet again, it becomes the Other’s responsibility to inform, educate, and legitimize the rigor, merit, and trustworthiness of the Other’s work with time and effort invested in serving the agenda of colonizing discourses while attempting to subvert, challenge, and break them apart. This is an extremely complicated position, mired with academic goals of promotions and tenure. Thus, insider/outsider researchers have to negotiate what these playing fields should look like for them, in order for them to practice rigor and ethics in their research, especially when one has to consider that cross-cultural dialogue can never be transparent and that the researcher may un/wittingly animate and automatize issues of oppression, liberation, resistance, and agency from colonizing perspectives, therefore accepting that the will to know and produce knowledge about the lived experiences of the participants transparently is more of an impossibility and a colonizing posture, despite the shared formal understanding outlined in the consent form. Hence, discussions, guidelines, and ethical praxis that disrupt such forms of colonization should be formally inserted in the IRB to legitimize the diversity of qualitative research in its current moment and create epistemic and methodological



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shifts. In my dissertation, I outlined the ethical burdens of my contested loyalties and how those contestations informed my decisions about what I wanted to tell and the secrets I wanted to preserve about these women’s lives so as to not knowingly create further missed and misunderstandings of the Exotic Other while acknowledging that the participants are always already Othered through my re-presentation. To summarize, I propose that we create spaces in IRB guidelines that address the fluid and messy nature of qualitative research. Such spaces should discuss issues about the shifting and negotiated meanings of the consent form and multiple approaches to verify meanings and alignment of consent around data analysis and re-presentation. Furthermore, IRB guidelines need to include how issues surrounding differences in understanding the research topic and methods would be addressed and honored by the researcher, thereby going further than protecting the identity of the participants. Finally, the IRB guidelines should be open to the contested ethical positionings of an insider/outsider researcher working from de/colonizing a transnational feminist perspective (or any other insider/outsider perspective) to challenge the will to know and present the care and concern with which a researcher approaches his or her study. These guidelines should not be taken as another grand narrative or regime of truth. Instead, they should be understood as fluid starting points to establish the rigor of methodological messiness with which qualitative researchers engage in their work to negotiate ethical issues of knowledge production and re-presentation.

Notes 1. Acting as a resource person implied that I will help Neerada get all her international paperwork in order, take her around town, help her do her errands, and try to answer any logistic and/or procedural questions that she might have about how to navigate through her program and graduate school as an international student. 2. I re-presented the participant’s negotiations in multiple one-act front- and back-stage plays, which are currently under review for publication.

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Kakali Bhattacharya, PhD, is an assistant professor of qualitative research methods at the University of Memphis, housed in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research. A recent graduate from the University of Georgia, her interests include globalization of higher education, de/colonizing qualitative research methodologies, transnational feminism, and technology-integrated pedagogy, methodology, and instruction.
