WHAT IS REFLEXIVE OPENNESS?

Beyond the now generally accepted utility of fieldwork to study politics and questions of power (Schatz Reference Schatz2009), reflexive openness asks political scientists of all empirical stripes to foreground sustained reflection on ethical practice in our work with human subjects. At its core, reflexive openness requires scholars to understand the relationships that underpin our research as part of an iterative process of knowledge co-production. As such, I understand reflexive openness to be both a process and a product of researchers’ ongoing self-assessment of how their work is unfolding in terms of goals, strategies, and design, along with an accounting of amendments made along the way. Said otherwise, reflexive openness asserts a minimum standard of ethical practice beyond the approval of a researcher’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). This matters because some political scientists approach IRB approval as a procedural checklist of consent, confidentiality, and so on, rather than as a product of an ethical sensibility (Fujii Reference Fujii2012, 717; Thomson Reference Thomson2013a, 14; Thomson Reference Thomson, Thomson, Ansoms and Murison2013b; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2012).

Reflexive openness therefore is more than the theorizing of researchers’ role in the production of knowledge. It also must include—as we collectively advanced in MacLean et al. (Reference MacLean, Posner, Thomson and Wood2019)—three additional commitments on the part of researchers, without which the work is neither collaborative nor reflexively open. First is recognition that research is a continuous process rooted in researchers’ self-examination of their relationships to research participants and the broader context in which the research is conducted, from the design and implementation stages. Second, beyond the field and during the publication process, researchers provide a clear and compelling statement on the ethical choices they made during fieldwork, preferably in the body of the text. Third—and for me perhaps the most important for its expansive definition of “the field”—the principle of reflexive openness “is universal” in that it stands “regardless of subfield, methodology, topic, and empirical context” (MacLean et al. Reference MacLean, Posner, Thomson and Wood2019, 1). As our working paper argues, taken together, a commitment to reflexive openness incorporates these principles before, during, and after fieldwork while also engaging editors in a dialogue on publishing statements of ethical practice (MacLean et al. Reference MacLean, Posner, Thomson and Wood2019, 10–13, 15).Footnote ³

I understand reflexive openness as an epistemological stance, in which the creation of academic knowledge is coupled with research ethics in the sustained “…negotiation of social relations essential to research with participants” (MacLean et al. Reference MacLean, Posner, Thomson and Wood2019, 11). For me, reflexive openness embodies a flat ontology, meaning that throughout the research process, the knowledge of both the researcher and the researched is equally valued and weighted (Häkli Reference Häkli2020). Although the goal of putting the knowledge of both parties on an equal footing often is difficult to achieve, researchers can seek—as part of their reflexively open practice—to portray those who participate in their research as knowers of their own lives. The caveat is to ensure that this more-equitable footing does not put participants in harm’s way (MacLean et al. Reference MacLean, Posner, Thomson and Wood2019, 15–17). In this way, reflexive openness contributes to the decolonial turn in the social sciences, broadly understood as research focusing on how colonial systems of power affect the lives of once-colonized peoples and in collaboration with these individuals and communities (Leonardo Reference Leonardo2018; Mama Reference Mama2000; Mbembe Reference Mbembe2000; Smith Reference Smith2012). A commitment to reflexive openness also can provide “insight into people’s relationships with each other and with power” to remind political scientists, and the broader discipline, of the complexity of being human and that the humanity of our research participants is best understood and explained through collaboration (Parkinson Reference Parkinson2018, 39).Footnote ⁴

HOW IS REFLEXIVE OPENNESS COLLABORATIVE?

The discipline has already begun to embrace the primacy of relationships in research, as evidenced by APSA’s April 2020 “Principles and Guidance for Human Subjects Research.”Footnote ⁵ Reflexive openness is a collaborative methodology because it heightens a researcher’s awareness of relationships as the product of collaboration in all stages of the research process—from design to dissemination—each stage of which is marked by its own ethical concerns (Cronin-Furman and Lake Reference Cronin-Furman and Lake2018; Lake, Majic, and Maxwell Reference Lake, Majic and Maxwell2019; Thomson Reference Thomson, Sriram, King, Mertus, Martín-Ortega and Herman2009; Reference Ansoms, Bisoka and Thomsonforthcoming).

As an ethical sensibility, reflexive openness as collaborative enterprise requires both patience and flexibility on the part of researchers to work with their participants. “Working with” asks the researcher to commit to humility and to carefully building—and maintaining—the relationships that are the foundation of any collaborative project. In my work, I draw on more than 15 years of collaborative research practice with conflict-affected individuals in Kenya and Rwanda. I have been motivated by an intellectual curiosity and personal desire to study and document the lives of people who historically would otherwise remain unknown or whose stories are told—often narrowly, incorrectly, or without context—by local elites or foreign humanitarians. Central to this mode of understanding politics and power from the perspective of those who are subject to it are systematic and careful efforts to recast the distinction between the researcher-as-authority and the participant-as-subject. In narrowing this distinction, reflexive openness deepens and makes plain what scholars already know but sometimes take for granted: that academic knowledge develops from specific social and political contexts and in collaboration with a variety of actors, most notably the people who consent to take part in our research.

Context—whether historical, political, social, or otherwise—is a critical factor in challenging what we think we know, or what we think we need to know, about a particular event, place, or people. Such knowledge is best gained in collaboration with a host of actors and, indeed, primary and secondary sources, including archival work, as we read for misrepresentations or silences, to ask why our research participants’ lives are presented as they are. Reading “against the grain” in this way provides an avenue for reflexively open collaboration to precede fieldwork. It allows political scientists to foreground the human, to situate individual lives into larger (and perhaps grander) national histories, as I did in my first book (Thomson Reference Thomson2013a).

Indeed, as social scientists know well, the production of knowledge is preceded by what we think we know—that is, our biases and assumptions—which in turn determine our methodology and methods. The practice of reflexive openness can illuminate the intellectual distinction among epistemology, methodology, and method as the foundation of collaboration. With whom and how we collaborate is a product of our understanding of what counts as knowledge and who holds it (Harding Reference Harding1987; see also Krystalli Reference Krystalli2021). In this way, reflexive openness asks political scientists to think deeply through and write carefully about their epistemology—specifically, who can know what and under which circumstances valid political science knowledge can be (co-)generated, without essentializing our participants. Method is a technique for gathering and analyzing information that becomes data through reflexively open interpretation. Information is gathered by listening, watching, and studying documents and other materials (e.g., film, newspapers, and websites). Researchers then organize data through the conceptual frameworks that we, as scholars committed to collaboration, bring to the information to look for patterns or themes. The choices that researchers make of how to use these methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups, and archives) are their methodology.

Drawing on my publications as an example, I contribute to the interpretative tradition of political science (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2012). My scholarship is focused on understanding how systems of power structure the lives of individuals and how those who are subject to power experience it in so-called times of peace. This concern means that I draw on a number of disciplines, including anthropology, feminist-security studies, history, law, and politics. My main source of data is fieldwork (methodology), meaning that I talk to people (epistemology) who have experienced violence about those experiences using life history and semi-structured interviews (method). I also draw on archival material where it exists (i.e., state and non-state, print, electronic, and visual) to contextualize what people tell me and to put their narratives in historical perspective (method). My research uses these sources to offer a glimpse of everyday life after violence to provide nuanced, and often first-person, analysis to dominant narratives of how mass violence occurs and what is needed for individuals and communities to recover from it (methodology).

This brief scholarly biography illustrates that political science field research is not different than that undertaken by colleagues in cognate disciplines. In this regard, a commitment to reflexive openness also is a commitment to read beyond our discipline to plumb relevant insights from other literatures. Questions of power and ethics are fundamentally human questions, not those that are unique to political science (Fujii Reference Fujii2012). At the same time, it bears mentioning that the discipline of political science can be elitist (particularly in the United States) about who is able to do fieldwork, where they go, the types of questions they ask, and which methods and approaches they employ—some of which are far more valued in the discipline than interpretivism.

Understanding the line between method and methodology emerges as a reflexively open space to work out how we can do what we do, with whom, and how. Central to the distinction between method and methodology is making collaborative space for self-dialogue about reflexivity and positionality (Bouka Reference Bouka2015; Soedirgo and Glass Reference Soedirgo and Glass2020). Thinking deeply and in a sustained way about the role of self in all phases of the research process allows us to ask questions that mediate our positionality as part of collaborative work, lest researchers misunderstand or undervalue their role in producing knowledge that is co-created with their participants and other interlocuters (Vlassenroot Reference Vlassenroot2020). For example, what type of assumptions underlie how we approach the field, the questions we ask, the relationships we make, and how we listen to and engage with research participants and others? Is the way that we gather and interpret data consistent with how we think knowledge should be created or disseminated, or with how our participants think their knowledge should be documented and published? Moreover, to whom among our participants and interlocuters do we owe an answer? Is how we interpret our data to make claims about the way things are consistent with what our collaborators told us?

These questions raise thorny ethical issues that deserve consideration in graduate methods courses; by dissertation, hiring, and promotion committees; and by journal and book editors. It thus follows that as part and parcel of a reflexively open practice, researchers do not have the right to intervene in people’s lives without considering the power implications of what they are doing and why. No one is obligated to speak with us; neither should we force ourselves into their lives to ask questions that further our career without benefit to our participants. My body of work addresses these questions in varying degrees because a reflexively open sensibility is a practice that takes time to develop, both personally and professionally (Ansoms, Bisoka, and Thomson forthcoming; Thomson Reference Thomson, Sriram, King, Mertus, Martín-Ortega and Herman2009; Reference Thomson2013a; Reference Thomson, Thomson, Ansoms and Murison2013b; Reference Thomson2013c; Reference Thomson, Parashar and Parpart2019). At the same time, it requires humility and patience because those who are reflexively open must remain open to the idea that collaboration can challenge our findings, especially when our participants dislike or disavow our analysis of their lives (Quatrini Reference Quatrini2020).

In my work, reflexive openness has been a collaborative exercise that highlights the challenges and opportunities of research as a social activity involving human interactions. Even archivists engage other researchers, curators, and archivists; none of us works alone. In embracing the complexity of their humanity, researchers also must include in their ethics statements and findings the difficult emotions that often belie the tidy research narratives that write-up and dissemination often require. Guidance on doing so is available in the Vision Statement of the current (and all-female) editorial board of the American Political Science Review (American Political Science Association 2020).Footnote ⁶

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Reflexive openness is a practice and a sensibility. It stands as potentially revolutionary for the mainstream discipline of political science, as a bold step toward a discipline that values nontraditional ways of knowing and doing. It asks researchers to reflexively engage the ethical implications of their work for themselves, for their participants, and for other field-based relationships at all stages of the research process, from design to publication. To practice reflexive openness is to embrace uncertainty and to welcome an attitude of wonder and humility to the research process while remaining committed to self-reflection as a form of personal and disciplinary accountability that may slow the overall time to publication. In cases in which the risks of publication are too high for our human subjects, reflexive openness as collaboration method provides an avenue to withhold our findings from publication while we work with our collaborators to determine when and if they can be published and where and when.

At its center, reflexive openness is collaborative in the narrow sense of “working with.” If the concept is to take root in political science, we must commit to work through difficult and perhaps uncomfortable disciplinary conversations to flatten the hierarchies of knowledge and difference that characterize the Western academy, starting with colleagues who supervise and mentor graduate students, hiring and promotion committees, and editors.