Before I ask students to write positionality papers I have to properly establish the terms they need to know to approach the topic.
Establishing definitions
In her 2017 book, Network Sovereignty, Marisa Elena Duarte provides what I have found to be one of the best summations of positionality. Duarte writes,
“the methodology of positionality requires researchers to identify their own degrees of privilege through factors of race, class, educational attainment, income, ability, gender, and citizenship, among others, before seeking the epistemological basis of their intellectual craft. Doing so helps them understand how their way of making meaning, of framing research, within their conceptual universe is tied to their positionality within an unjust world.”
Marisa Elena Duarte, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 135.
In an article on Queer Race Pedagogy, Mitsunori Misawa provides a helpful overview of the central definitions of positionality.
Part of acknowledging positionality requires also acknowledging the intersection of social, cultural, and power dynamics that create the systems in which we participate. The concept of intersectionality originated in Black feminist legal scholarship. Legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term in her 1989 article, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”
In her work on Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins defines the term, writing,
Intersectionality refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation. Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice.
Patricial Hill Collins, Black Feminist Throught: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2001), 18.
Helpful resources:
Weingarten Learning Resources, “Writing Strategies: What’s Your Positionality?” The Weingarten Blog, January 9, 2017.
Johanna Ennser-Hananen, “Coming to terms with ourselves in our research,” Language on the Move, Reclas Ethics Rant #4, July 8, 2020.
Andrew Gary Darwin Holmes, “Research Positionality: A Consideration of its Influence and Place in Qualitative Research – A New Researcher Guide,” Shanlax International Journal of Education 8, no. 4 (2020): 1-10.
“Positionality,” Anti-Racist Teaching Collective.
“Intersectionality, Positionality, and Privilege | Infographic,” Center for Social Solutions, University of Michigan, August 10, 2021.
Savitri Maya Kunze 