3 - Performing Timespace Encounters: Reflecting on Sharing, Voice and Justice in Qualitative Research

Summary

This chapter focuses on the justice of sharing voices and stories, using case studies from my qualitative research. This always partial and challenging process of storytelling will be viewed through performative timespaces of encounter as a means to reflect on the potential for transformative research from the perspective of researchers and participants. Work by Coddington (2017) and others (for example, Koch, 2020) has stressed the need to unpack and critique the relationships between participant voice, authenticity and empowerment in light of feminist and anti- colonial work. Montero- Sieburth (2020), for example, stresses the need to acknowledge that researchers do not ‘speak for the other’ and that allowing participant voices ‘to appear’ does not necessarily bring about justice, change or transformation. To help counter this, Montero-Sieburth stresses the need for researchers to discover their own voices, which forms an important aspect of what this chapter attempts to do.

This body of work therefore discusses the need for critical interpretations of representation and the value and purpose of academic research in terms of how social and political justice is achieved and for whom. I aim to add to such work by viewing interviews I have been involved in as encounters through which voices can be shared, brought to a different audience and potentially be empowering. By doing so, the chapter will engage with the notion of performative timespace (Mavroudi, 2019) in order to highlight how research encounters may be seen as part of an ethical but also emotional project of justice and care. Through this, I stress the need for active reflection and negotiation of power imbalances as we navigate our own positionality as individuals and as part of a research team (Fertaly and Fluri, 2019), the positionality of our participants but also the wider frameworks of universities and ethics committees.

I argue that justice needs to be framed in broad and flexible ways and not just in terms of impact or outcome, but also through the very materiality of doing empirical research and communicating with people in mundane and ‘gentle’ ways (Pottinger, 2020). It is through such communication, ‘deep listening’ (Koch, 2020) and embodied encounters that difference is articulated and grappled with so that we can potentially learn about/ from one another through timespaces.