Inside, outside, upside down: the fluidity of academic researcher ‘identity’ in working with/in school

Insider-outsider-inbetweener? Researcher positioning, participative methods and cross-cultural educational research

“…This suggests the potential for the consideration of the new term -the 'inbetweener' -in cross-cultural research. This supports Hellawell (2006), Arthur (2010) and Thomson and Gunter (2010), who have argued against the fixed and dichotomous notions of 'insiderness' and 'outsiderness' in conducting educational research. However, the active term of 'inbetweener' recognises that the researcher can make active attempts to place themselves in between.…”

“…However, the active term of 'inbetweener' recognises that the researcher can make active attempts to place themselves in between. This is in contrast to the concepts of liquid identities (Thomson and Gunter 2010) or an insider-outsider continuum (Hellawell 2006;Arthur 2010), which suggest a distinct lack of agency from the researcher theirself. This is in recognition of the fact that on entering the field, much of my identity in this cross-cultural ethnographic research was given to me by the wider community, who saw me as the mzungu.…”

“…Hellawell (2006) and Thomson and Gunter (2010) have reflected on insider and outsider identities in educational research in the UK context. Hellawell (2006) argues that being an insider or outsider relates to individual changing lives, experiences and the knowledge of a particular context and leads researchers to have different gradients of outsiderness or insiderness; neither completely on the outside looking in nor on the inside taking part.…”

“…He continues to put forward the argument that there are, 'subtly varying shades of "insiderism" and "outsiderism" … [and] it can sometimes become quickly apparent that the same researcher can slide along more than one insider-outsider continuum, and in both directions, during the research process' (486). Thomson and Gunter (2010) consider the ways in which they were 'inside-outside-upside down' during a research project in a secondary school in Northern England where young people became active researchers. They use Bauman's notion that identities are liquid, in flux and dependent on the context, to show that the boundaries both between insider and outsider and other identities were often messy and difficult to define.…”

Adoption, adaptation, and integration: renegotiating the identity of educational research through interdisciplinarity

“…Given the different value sets that individuals bring, it becomes especially important that researchers critically reflect on how such assumptions shape individual contributions and their place in the research team. Recent literature about the notion of insider-outsider positioning in educational research has highlighted not only the way that such positioning shifts in different situations and dynamics but also how this is shaped by the perspectives of others, particularly research participants (Thomson and Gunter 2011;McNess, Arthur and Crossley 2015;Milligan 2016). CohenMiller et al (2017) in this issue contribute to this literature by recognizing the importance of discussion of positioning and trust in research teams.…”