Mapping Superpositionality in Global Ethnography

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5337650
AutoresLogan D A Williams (0000-0002-3964-2356, Michigan State University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen43
Número2
Páginas198-223
Fecha de publicación2018-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0162243917711005
OpenAlexW2620536086
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas42

Science studies scholars often study up to high-tech elites who produce and design scientific knowledge and technology. Methodological tension begins when you pair a desire to study down to less economically developed countries, with the desire to study up to high-tech elites within them. This becomes further complicated when the ethnographer and his/her informants share professional interests and credentials. In these situations, the researcher has high status because of geopolitical privilege. However, the researcher is neither a high-tech elite nor a local cultural elite. How might the ethnographer successfully access and navigate field sites imbued with these unseen power differentials? There are currently no visual mapping tools to enhance the process of reflexivity by feminist ethnographers, as they consider their globally embedded multiple, hierarchical, and situated positionality. This reflection methodology piece provides a tool to consider this phenomenon, as it exists across the Global North/South divide of power. Such a tool would be useful to northern ethnographers to better strategize ethics and access while avoiding complicity with structures of inequality and empowering their southern interlocutors

Autoethnography · Complicity · Elite · Epistemology · Ethnography · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Reflexivity · Situated · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Gender Studies · Law · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Social Science and Policy Research