Putting yourself in? Bourdieu’s reflexive project

Bourdieusian reflexivity can be read first as the requirement for researchers to be aware of their own habitus, such as their own predispositions, knowledges, and competences while undertaking research, in order to produce if not objective, then honest and open research. This adherence to or belief in epistemic reflexivity is presented as a regulative idea which should undergird intellectual and methodological practice. For example, in The Weight of the World Bourdieu and colleagues (1999) argued that understanding and taking account of the nature of the interview–interviewee relationship was of key importance in conducting an interview and eliciting a meaningful response. This reflexive approach is central to being able to evaluate the findings of the research, and is best served through what is called ‘active and methodical listening’. This apparently contradictory process requires an empathic, supportive, and in some cases imitative relationship, allied with ensuring that the interviewee feels that they are in control of the interaction. Such a recommendation is about ensuring that research never becomes unthinking and complacent. The obsession with reflexivity, obvious in the latter half of Bourdieu’s career, is neither an obsession with himself (or the self of the researcher), nor an obsession with words and theory, but an obsession with doing science right: It fastens not upon the private person of the sociologist in her idiosyncratic intimacy but on the concatenations of acts and operations she effectuates as part of her work and on the collective unconscious inscribed in them. Far from encouraging narcissism and solipsism, epistemic reflexivity invites intellectuals to recognize and to work to neutralize the specific determinisms to which their innermost thoughts are subjected and it informs a conception of the craft of research designed to strengthen its epistemological moorings.

Epistemology · Reflexivity · Social science · Sociology · Philosophy · Social and Cultural Dynamics