Positionality statements

the academic freedom case against making them an expectation or requirement.

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

Below are a few thoughts on the issue of positionality statements in academic publishing. This was prompted by a recent exchange of views on an e-mail list for academics. It’s rather a niche issue unless you work in a university, but, as I argue, consequential nonetheless.

Positionality statements

Positionality statements have become an accepted part of academic life over the last 25 years. They are statements of the author’s identity and lived experience placed near the start of academic articles. These statements are popular in some fields, rare or unknown in most, and very occasionally a requirement. They are more common in the social sciences, but not unknown in other disciplines and fields too. Also, positionality is sometimes cited in funding applications, at the start of talks and in e-mail signatures.

Typically these statements involve references to identity features such as race, gender identity, sex, sexuality, social class (although much less often), (dis)ability and also sometimes other aspects of lived experience. They implicitly or explicitly ‘position’ the author through ‘intersectionality’ – a reference to the matrix of aforementioned identity characteristics, and their intersecting social significance.

As a method

Positionality statements are justified by those using them on the basis that the researchers’ identity characteristics are germane to understanding and judging what is written on the page. Your ‘positionality’ may suggest potential biases. Often the statements imply the ‘privilege’, or lack of the same, of the author, in relation to the people they are researching. They reveal differential ‘power relations’ deemed relevant. The researcher is showing their ‘reflexivity’ in research, and the reader can take that on board in judging the veracity of the analysis.

The philosophical basis for positionality is ‘standpoint theory’. This theory emphasises knowledge claims in research as perspectival - from a specific standpoint - rather than general or universal. By telling the reader about your positionality, they can see more clearly from where, and how, the knowledge is being derived, and consider it’s truthfulness or usefulness in that light.

What is a ‘standpoint’ ?

Of course there are plural, competing standpoints in the everyday sense that people have different ideological and philosophical premises for their research in all sorts of fields. An academic paper will generally express this explicitly or implicitly. That can be important, as anyone reviewing the paper will want to see a correspondence between the premise and what follows from that premise in the paper.

But standpoint theory and positionality statements assume more than that. They emphasise the role of a researcher’s ‘social location’ in shaping their philosophical or epistemological standpoint. Epistemology refers to how we approach an issue: what is taken to be true and how we research to try approach that truth. ‘Social location’ refers to the researcher’s identity characteristics that are deemed relevant.

It is common sense that one’s life experiences, in part shaped by these identity characteristics (although surely most profoundly shaped by access to wealth and education) are likely to be important to the individual in the process through which they shape their philosophical outlook. However, whilst ‘lived experience’ related to identity characteristics prompts questions and is the context within which we develop an outlook on the world, it is the individual that answers these questions and develops their view of the world, their standpoint.

For its critics - and I concur with them - standpoint theory tends to treat the individual as an amalgam of social identities / locations on an intersectional matrix. Many have long been critical of the practice of ‘putting people in a box’ and making assumptions about them based on a ‘identity’. Standpoint theory is a more sophisticated version of the same. It puts individuals in multiple, intersecting boxes … and makes assumptions about them. Your identity is you, and shapes your capacity to think outside of that.

It should be clear that in reality there is no clear correspondence between what is taken to be social location and outlook. It can’t be assumed that someone brought up in poverty will be critical of the political system and neither can it be assumed that a rich person will be in favour of that system. Someone brought up in the global South may well hold what some theorists see as ‘southern’ or ‘indigenous’ views. Similarly, someone from the developed world may hold what some refer to as ‘western’ views. But equally, many researchers in the global south have an epistemological outlook that decolonial critics would describe as ‘western’, and many in the developed world made up of former colonial powers are champions of ‘decolonising’ what they see as ‘western’ knowledge.

So it seems to me that what is important is not a positionality statement where the researcher declares their multiple social identities, but clarity in their epistemological approach. A positionality statement, as an expectation or requirement in a journal, decides for researchers – all researchers, of all backgrounds, a priori - how they should approach the issue. That is simply the promotion of ideological conformity.

The academic freedom case

I would certainly not oppose positionality statements as a practice. I am arguing on academic freedom grounds against journals and academic institutions formally recommending or mandating it as best practice. But colleagues who see value in positionality statements should, I believe, support this view too. It does not require you to see knowledge as neutral. But it does insist that the process through which we develop knowledge in research journals is at the very least formally neutral, encouraging or at least enabling people to pursue the truth as they see it, not as you, or I, or a particular editor, may see it.

Also, if you think positionality is an important perspective, then do you really want it to be ‘gatekept’ as an expectation, ‘best practice’ or requirement ? Surely better to let it be something that people adopt or reject, justify or critique, as a part of their own intellectual standpoint. The expectation of positionality has in some contexts reduced it to a perfunctory and performative virtue signal, a declaration of authenticity based on your identity, rather than a heartfelt and deeply considered epistemological commitment. JS Mill warned that ideas shielded from critique in similar fashion would become ‘dead dogmas’.

I’ve twice been asked to include positionality statements on papers , and refused, giving my reasons. On one occasion that meant the article was rejected. In the other the editor accepted my push back and published. I thought the latter involved a fair exchange of views. When I’ve reviewed articles that adopt the practice, I’ve found positionality can be extrinsic to the research itself, in which case I’ve not really seen it as either a positive or negative; as make or break. But where it is part of an epistemological outlook – an approach to the pursuit of knowledge - I’d judge it in the context of the internal consistency of the author’s paper.

I am not inclined towards positionality statements. When you speak or write I am interested in what you say. As philosopher Anthony Appiah argued: “When people speak, they speak ideas, not identity. The truth value of what you say is not indexed to your identity. If you’re making a bad argument, it’s a bad argument. It’s not bad because of the identity of the person making it.”

To argue this is not to be blind to social position. There are great inequalities in the world. We should strive for a situation whereby talented people from any background get the best chance of education and to use that education. Avoiding the formal or moral prescription of particular epistemological approaches such as positionality does not resolve material inequalities, but certainly is not antithetical to striving for this noble aim. Freedom of thought as a principle has tended to benefit those struggling for human liberation and equality, and is itself a manifestation of these goals.

Radical positionality ?

A number of colleagues seem to view positionality as ‘radical’, pro-‘social justice’ or some similar formulation. I think these associations are mistaken, but also indicate the performative character of some positionality practice.

Positionality and standpoint theory, I have argued, sees standpoints as linked to social location - a range of identity characteristics. The relationship between the individual and their background and culture is obviously very important. But positionality associates the individual’s outlook with social location and thus downplays their agency. Are we to assume that indigenous people are represented by ‘indigenous culture’, either as researchers or research subjects ? What of the indigenous colleagues who seek technological solutions rooted in modern science, rather than indigenous knowledge, to poverty ? Or what of the indigenous research subjects who view their culture as oppressive? Have they betrayed their positionality and ceased to be authentic members of their indigenous community ? Should all lesbian women share the same ‘standpoint’ on sex and gender due to their sexuality and lived experience ? Clearly they don’t. They exhibit a range of approaches to the issue, rooted in different worldviews, or ‘standpoints’ - first and foremost, as individuals.

The association of social location with outlook is of a piece with today’s identity politics. It involves claiming, or denying, authority (moral and epistemological) based on who you are, not what you say.

As for Marxism, positionality was not at all an issue in Marx’s day (one colleague claims a lineage from Marx to today’s positionality). Marx was concerned with the ‘position’ of a social class in relation to capital as a social relation, and the way material and social relations shape consciousness historically.

Positionality discourages the researcher from looking outwards at social relations, and encourages an inward orientation towards the researcher’s own identity. It is not by chance that the rise of positionality statements correlates to the decline of class politics, or indeed any political or philosophical narrative that claims to enable the individual to look outwards and transcend the limits of their background.

Conclusion

Standpoint theory is itself a particular, contested standpoint, and positionality a practice that follows from this. Neither should be cautioned against nor banned in academic journals’ submission guidelines; these should be open to the different approaches that exist within the field or discipline.

Exactly the same applies to a disinclination to declare positionality. If a journal declares positionality statements to be recommended, ‘best practice’ or even mandatory, it is ‘taking sides’, a priori, and ceases to be open to competing perspectives (the same applies in a university department’s declarations or a research methods course). This simply encourages ideological conformity and censure of dissenting voices in a world lacking alternatives.

END