Unmastering Research

Positionality and Intercorporeal Vulnerability in International Studies

Bibliographic Data

ID2236638
AuthorsEnrike Van Wingerden (0000-0002-5703-2025, London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume16
Issue2
Publication date2022-06-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Political Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ips/olac008
OpenAlexW4220710694
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited61

This article argues that in order to understand how bodily impressions shape ways of knowing and being, researchers need to enhance claims of positionality through a language of intercorporeality. The notion of positionality is used to indicate the inherent situatedness and partiality of knowledge, but positionality statements also risk affirming a hierarchical narrative structure, leaving out how knowledge is indelibly and dynamically impressed by bodily others, thereby reinscribing researcher authority. Strengthening attempts to resist mastery in doing research, this article theorizes the intercorporeality of research practice on the basis of the bodily experiences of being there, being moved, and being vulnerable. These insights into the intercorporeality of research practice emerge from fieldwork across the West Bank, the Naqab desert, and alongside the Gaza fence. This article argues that intercorporeal vulnerability is at the core of cultivating knowledge, which emerges not only through willful action, but also through nonintentional rapport with objects and (non)human others. Understanding this vulnerability restores a sense of openness and uncertainty by appreciating research practice as always 'in excess' of established categories and always just beyond the researcher's positional mastery

Action (physics) · Epistemology · Linguistics · Narrative · Openness to experience · Sociology · Vulnerability (computing) · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Global Security and Public Health · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Social Psychology

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