African women migration researchers and the question of reflexivity

Abstract

Reflexivity has received a lot of attention in recent years, but there is little on how to initiate reflexivity amongst those who are not familiar with it. This paper explores how to initiate reflexivity work and what difference it can make to the initiates in how we research and what we write about, and how this work can be done collaboratively between women in different locales. It breaks new ground by drawing on duo-reflexivity between three African women migration researchers reflecting on their role in collaborative research. In doing so, it unravels the complexities of insider-outsider status in global-North/South research and shows the importance of intersectional reflexivity, which addresses gender, social class, nationality, research setting, and discipline as we researched migration and inclusive growth in Africa. The paper unpacks gender as a category and how we approach it, how we experience it as part of our daily researching lives, and as a research topic in Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria. Furthermore, we throw a global South perspective on taken for granted categories such as income to show how reflexivity is important when researching migrants and non-migrants for a global audience. The paper ends with some thoughts on our experience of undertaking this reflexivity exercise. We offer this as an invitation to researchers, especially those from the global South, who may also be new to reflexivity.

Keywords:

• Africa
• duo-ethnography
• insider-outsider
• migration researchers
• reflexivity
• women

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Giles Mohan and Gunjan Sondhi for their useful comments and questions on our draft. Their contributions have substantively improved the paper. We also thank the many migrants, host country nationals, civil society, entrepreneurs, and government officials in the partner countries whose contributions made the underpinning MIAG study possible. We thank the wider MIAG team for their support and comments on early drafts of this paper. The paper benefitted from comments received at the 6th Annual Lagos Studies Association conference. OO is grateful for questions raised during her presentation. All errors and omissions remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper resulted from the Migration and Inclusive African Growth (MIAG) project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under the GCRF scheme [ES/S000550/1].

Notes on contributors

Omololá Olarinde

Omololá Olarinde is a university-based researcher at Elizade University, Ilara-Mokin, Nigeria. She has published on the intersections of migration and labour, gender, governance, inclusive growth and decoloniality. Her current EU funded research studies “how migration decisions are made: diverse aspirations, trajectories and policy effects (DYNAMIG)”. She is part of the ESRC funded Migration for Inclusive African Growth (MIAG) research.

Parvati Raghuram

Parvati Raghuram is Professor in Geography and Migration at the Open University, UK. She writes on gender, migration and development and on postcolonial theory. Her most recent AHRC funded project is Decolonising Peace Education in Africa where she is looking at education, social reproduction and care ethics. Africa. Her other research includes work on the IT sector and on international students. She has co-authored Gender, Migration and Social Reproduction (Palgrave).

Delali Badasu

Delali Badasu is an Associate Professor at the Regional Institute for Population Studies and former director of the Centre for Migration Studies, University of Ghana. Her research interests are population and health and migration and development, with most recent research team membership on ‘Contribution of Immigrants to the Economy of Ghana’ and ‘Migration for Inclusive African Growth’. She led the team of consultants who developed Ghana’s Diaspora Engagement Policy.

Gorrety Yogo

Gorrety Yogo is an early career researcher focused on Migration and Development. She has led and supported various projects in terms of proposal development, research methodology, budgeting, policy briefs, concept notes, blogs and reports at the African Migration and Policy Development Centre (AMADPOC), International Migration for Migration (IOM), Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY) and the Youth Cafe. Gorrety enjoys writing, self-publishing and charity during her personal time.