“Navigating the In-Between: A Cross-Cultural Researcher’s Fluid Positionality in West Africa”

Abstract

This article explores the challenges and complexities of a cross cultural PhD student conducting research in West Africa. I discuss how I navigated, negotiated and blurred my insider/outsider experiences as a Congolese-American woman as I engaged with themes oscillating between power, legitimacy, language, gender, and my decolonial and social justice commitments. Reflexive research on Africans studying a secondary non-native African country is seldom discussed or researched. As such, I utilised an intersectional transnegritude theoretical framework to centre and complicate the shared transcolonial struggles and neocolonial realities of myself and my participants. I conclude by positing that, despite the challenges of doing transnational work, reflexively recognising our positionality lends to a liberatory and critical transnational exchange that encourages new approaches to knowledge production for social justice. This article contributes to ongoing discussions of insider/outsider research, positionality, decolonising research, and comparative case study to articulate and dearticulate power dynamics in neocolonial contexts.