Persona non grata: dilemmas of being an outsider researching immigration reform activism

Abstract

Sociologists may encounter myriad obstacles in the research process that affect the research design and outcomes. There is, for example, a certain measure of resistance and hostility experienced in sociological research on distasteful social movements that is seldom acknowledged or included in published findings. The present analysis explores the emotional conflicts between the research program and the 'gatekeeping' activities of research respondents and the professional academic community in the USA. Politically sensitive, even volatile subjects such as the US immigration reform movement may rest on the classic affective/cognitive dichotomy found in sociology. I suggest that moralistic or politically positioned emotional resistance complicated the research process in two ways: 1) academic associates and mentors likened involvement with the immigration reform movement to scholarly complicity that marginalized the study's validity; and, 2) activists were inherently distrustful of the research and its goals given what they claimed to be a history of misinterpretation and scholarly 'bad press.'