Boundary-making in feminist research: new methodologies for ‘intimate insiders’

Abstract

In the past 20 years, feminist geographers have gone to great lengths to complicate notions of 'the field' and make clear that the field is not an easily bounded space. This body of work has demonstrated the complexity of field spaces, explored ways to destabilize boundaries, and traced the power relations between researchers and participants. Ultimately, this work takes the breaking down of boundaries as an inherent good in field research, and, subsequently, little work has focused explicitly on the utility of physical and emotional boundaries that develop in field research. Our experiences as feminist geographers who reside in our fields show there is much left to understand and subsequently disrupt regarding the boundaries of 'the field.' In this article, we build on the concept of 'intimate insiders' to discuss the complex negotiation of doing research in the places where we have created personal lives and our sense of community. We often found ourselves struggling to define the physical and emotional boundaries of 'the field' on the outside for the sake of our participants and ourselves. In this article, we reflect on boundary-making as a specific feminist methodological practice for addressing the complexity of fieldwork. We discuss the techniques and strategies we used for conducting research in the communities in which we are long-term community residents. In the tradition of feminist methodology, we draw from our research experiences in State College and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to reconsider how producing distance through boundary-making has the potential to benefit our participants, our projects, and ourselves.

Doing fieldwork the Chinese way: a returning researcher's insider/outsider status in her home town

“…On the other hand, the frequency with which they bumped into acquaintances in Dali made me feel like an outsider in comparison, as did their way of introducing me as ‘a graduate student from a Canadian university’ to potential participants. This in‐between position facilitated my research by allowing me a ‘distance’ from which to maintain my neutrality towards my participants (Cuomo and Massaro ). For example, I insisted on interviewing people whose responses a ‘pure insider’ might not consider valuable.…”

“…Campbell et al . ; Cuomo and Massaro ; Kohl and McCutcheon ; Kusek and Smiley ). However, relatively little literature has discussed situations in which two researchers with different positionalities meet in a physical ‘field’, or how such arrangements could influence research.…”

The audacity of the ocean: Gendered politics of positionality in the Pacific

“…I want to claim PhD supervision as ‘field work’ following the recent paper of Cuoma and Massaro (2016) that builds on a tradition of feminist geographers troubling the notion of fieldwork and its location in geography. Cuomo and Massaro (2016) describe practices whereby as ‘intimate insiders’, they engage in boundary marking to manage pre‐existing relationships. I argue that by considering PhD supervision as field‐work, particular forms of ethical engagement, and following Cindi Katz (1994: 67), ‘multiple positionings of intellectuals and the means by which knowledge is produced’ are made apparent.…”

Transnational Sex-Positive Play Parties: The Sexual Politics of Care for Community-Making at a Kinky Salon

“…The stress of fieldwork can be something that I found best dealt with by attempting to create healthy boundaries for myself the researcher, and the subject. According to Cuomo and Massaro (2014), "boundary-making serves an important role in creating emotional and physical distance between our participants, our field sites, and ourselves that can prove beneficial even in contexts when the researcher might not consider themselves an 'intimate insider'" (2014:103). Similarly, I felt a need to "create physical and emotional boundaries to construct" myself as a researcher "in the eyes of… participants" (Cuomo and Massaro, 2014:95 Scholars urge researchers to rethink the boundaries of the field as related to the researcher who co-creates boundaries particularly when navigating social relations (Smith, 2014).…”

“…4 For autoethnography, see:Crang & Cook, 2007;Gorman-Murray, 2007; Newmahr, 2008. 5 For insider/outsider relationships in the field, see:Browne, 2003;Cuomo & Massaro, 2014; Taylor, 2011. 6 For the embodied researcher, see:Bain & Nash, 2006;Billo & Hiemstra, 2013;Cupples, 2002;Ellingson, 2006;Longhurst, Ho & Johnston, 2008;McDowell, 1992; Smith, 2014.…”