Knowledge Decolonization à la Grounded Theory: Control Juggling in Research Situations

ABSTRACT

Knowledge production is not free of political connotations. The researcher defines and moulds the research situation in which she will be gathering the data. Simultaneously, she will be also conditioned by the ways the situation is constructing her as a researcher. I shall elucidate some of aspects that influence how research situations are constructed based on the examples of my own empirical work. I will show some of the multiple negotiations contained in the process, influenced by the fact that I was a Spanish urban young woman doing research in a rural region of Bolivia for the German international cooperation for development (DED). Two sorts of control will be outlined and an argument for control juggling within a decolonial move of humanizing research will be sketched. I shall argue that Kathy Charmaz’s constructivist Grounded Theory is flexible and systematic enough to make space for other ways of knowing, to grasp these subtle multifaceted processes of constructing a research situation while facilitating the necessary reflexivity for transformation purposes, contributing to a wider project of decolonizing knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge decolonisation
• Grounded Theory
• collaborative research
• research situations
• control juggling
• humanizing research

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. I use ‘North’ and ’South’ in a metaphorical sense using the political value of it purposed by Mohanty (2003).

2. I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me clarify this linkage.

3. Later on the GIZ, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit.

4. The 23 individual and group interviews were from very open to semi-structured and took place with men and women from 20 to 50 years old, often from a middle-class background, mostly from Germany. The reasons for being involved in this institution were varied and their problematic position – in which they were partly structurally ‘trapped’ – has been analysed in depth elsewhere (De Eguia Huerta 2017). Broad data was gathered since I lived in the facilities while they were trained with them and beyond the interviews, many varied sorts of interactions took place.

5. They were 1 woman doing coordinating tasks in the city and 5 men doing the field work in the indigenous communities, to which they partly belonged. Very broad data was gathered through very open interviews and many interactions during the weeks I shared with them.

6. 14 agro-leaders from 4 communities were interviewed and visited in their plot and/or house. I often spent some days with them and accompanied them to the field. Big amounts of data were gathered during these interactions.

7. Postdevelopment is a ‘school of thought in development theory which is fundamentally critical of the very idea of “development” and promotes alternative ways of thinking and acting beyond this idea’ (Ziai 2012).

8. I thank Bob Dick for his very illuminating comments helping to enrich this article.

9. I also followed the same procedure for the people I interacted with, reflecting about their background, possible interests or perceptions they could have, amongst others, that could play a role in the way the constructed the research situations in which we were involved. This is however not the point I am trying to make in this article: Charmaz’s Gt has the potential to accompany the researcher in a decolonial move and make space for diverse ways of knowing, amongst others, because it pays attention to positionality and power dynamics at the micro level of knowledge production.

10. I have elsewhere explained my role as an external researcher during my field work phases with the DED, my institutional disconnection, and the challenge of mostly being only tolerated, and in any case maintained far away from any power over decisions (De Eguia Huerta 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria De Eguia Huerta

Maria De Eguia Huerta is currently Global Director of Lighthouse gGmbH, working on social-ecological sustainability action and research with civil society organisations. In the past she was a postdoc involved in the CCP Project (Complexity or Control? – Paradigms for sustainable Development) researching on the methodological foundations of transdisciplinary research at the Leuphana University in Germany. She also worked in a transdisciplinary project as a postdoc researcher at the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia, Spain, at the UNESCO Chair “Women, Development, and Cultures”.