Reflexive thinking about dilemmas in decolonial ethnographic fieldwork

Abstract

As non-Indigenous teacher educators working as qualitative researchers in decolonial times (Mignolo, 2000), we share our reflexive thinking upon research dilemmas (Delamont, 2005) encountered and experienced in school-based ethnographic research in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (or Indigenous Australian) communities. We take up Coffey, Hallett, James and Power's (2018) invitation to think reflexively (Delamont, 2009) about our field work research methods. In doing so, attention is drawn to research processes involved with observing, narrating and writing lives and experiences. We will specifically discuss sequencing dilemmas (Delamont, 2009), locating the self-as-researcher in the social (Delamont, 2007) and highlight ethical and cultural tensions associated with confidentiality and acknowledgement (Delamont, 2007). We share two distinct researcher recounts of field notes which are used to render visible our reflexive thinking as we attempted to negotiate Western educational research ethics policies and procedures and ways of knowing and being in Indigenous Australian schooling contexts.

As we add to our evolving appreciation of researching in Indigenous contexts and researching with Indigenous peoples, a number of tensions and realisations about field work methods come to the fore. We consider a recount about the problematic of the University imposed official ethical consent templates and the confidentiality/acknowledgement dilemma (Delamont, 2007) that carries through to research output. Another recount recalls the experience of learning that when researching in Indigenous communities, approvals are ongoing rather than finite, conditional and reciprocal. We thus demonstrate that removing the researcher from the metaphorical ‘ivory tower’ (Delamont, 2005) and into the ‘social’ enterprise of the research context (Delamont, 2007) has advantages for the research but also adds to the messiness of the research and the research process (Delamont, et al., 1997). In concluding, we emphasise the need for researchers to formally document the lived reality and points of tension as an important part of the description of research design. We contend that all too often discussions around research methods are tidied up, rather than revealed.