Interrogating (un)masking in qualitative inquiry at the intersections of critical geographies and spatial justice

Introduction

In critical and postcritical qualitative research, mainstay practices include those we-as-researchers use to anonymize or mask identifying information about the people, places, and organizations we study. Importantly, anonymizing and/or masking identifying information of research sites and participants is often based on the ethical and moral premise that the lives and stories we witness and study are to be kept “under a promise, that promise being that we protect those who have shared with us” (Denzin, 2017, p. 15). As the authors in this special issue explore, the actual practices of anonymizing and masking, as interrelated but distinct practices whereby a researcher hides, changes, or obfuscates details about people and places represented in a research study (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017), are rarely straightforward. Across these papers authors note and draw on literature that has found that while anonymization, masking, and confidentiality are often positioned in a simplistic way (e.g., parenthetically noting use of pseudonyms) making choices about and enacting such practices might be better understood as exceedingly complex.

While using pseudonyms to refer to participants and research contexts may be the most common, taken-for-granted form of masking in qualitative research (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017), other approaches historically used have included altering biographical information; disguising features of context, or creating composite accounts of real experiences. Rationales for the range of these practices include: being a condition of access; an effort to protect participants from harm; and, for many researchers, professional codes and ethics review boards often appear to suggest that masking is required (Guenther, 2009; Lahman, et al. 2015). An additional function of masking has been conceptualized as a “scientific” practice – namely, the abstraction of individual and contextual details so that one person or place can generalize to another (Nespor, 2000). Yet, the question of masking remains a topic of exploration in qualitative inquiry due at least in part to the question of whether masking relationships between participants, readers, writers, and places “lead researchers to unreflectively produce representations of the world that obscure or ignore…connections” (Nespor, 2000, p. 555). Further, as Moore (2012) wrote, anonymization is never straightforward, as “for much of history anonymity did not protect the vulnerable, but excluded women and others from authorship and ownership of their own words” (p. 332). Indeed, even as critical and postcritical scholars pursue the promise to protect (Denzin, 2017), they are never able to fully shelter those with whom they work (Anders & Lester, 2019).

When scholars mask select aspects of participants and sites for research purposes, they must question what might be lost. At least, we argue in this special issue that what might be lost includes at least the possibilities that attention to the specific offers political implications for research (Anders & Lester, 2019), and the significance of positioning research practice as process (Anders, 2012). As critical and postcritical qualitative researchers, how we enact masking practices indelibly guides how we story the places and people with whom we work before, during, and after fieldwork. In this special issue, authors explore whether, and how, a more reflexive interrogation of masking, protection, and anonymity could benefit both the local context – the place – of research and its utility in pursuit of a more just and relational future.

The purpose of this special issue, then, is to explore the taken-for-granted in anonymizing and masking practice in qualitative research through a spatial, or place-focused, perspective. The following sections provide a brief review of literature related to these practices, including a focus on the connection between representation and anonymization/masking and a call for spatial perspectives to support qualitative work that is explicitly critical and political. Then, we provide a brief overview of the nuanced and powerful work authors share in the coming pages.

Placing masking and anonymizing

Qualitative researchers have long been concerned with issues related to representation. The ethical, theoretical, and methodological implications of how and when qualitative researchers choose to represent people and place have been a topic of particular interest for those engaged in ethnographic and historical research (Abu-Lughod, 1992; Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Notably, across time, there have been a range of ways that qualitative researchers have conceptualized and theorized representation of people and place. For instance, there was a long tradition wherein literary writing was thought of as fictional and even false in contrast to “scientific” writing (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Denzin and Lincoln (2018) offer a useful timeline of the historical periods of the field of qualitative research, and in it they emphasize the shifts that have occurred in relation to representation. For example, Bhattacharya (2009), building from Denzin and Lincoln’s framing of the compounding crises of representation, argues that most recently qualitative researchers are in a time of significant work on the authorial positioning of research practice.

Over time, many qualitative researchers have converged around the idea that representations are always already partial (Goodall, 2000), situated, and positional (Noblit et al., 2004). As Koro-Ljungberg (2008) noted, there is a felt “tension between the desire to know and the limits of representation” (p. 231). Similarly, Kuntz (2010) wrote of how in his representing qualitative research, he resisted “complete representation, or the creation of a grand narrative regarding my participants’ lives” (p. 426). Other scholars have highlighted the potential consequences of partial representation, in particular for critical and decolonizing qualitative research (Bhattacharya, 2009). For example, Rallis (2010) offered an illustrative example of an ethnographic study in which participants questioned how they were represented by the researcher, arguing that the participants’ perspectives were not fully incorporated. Significantly, many scholars have argued that some researchers engage an authorial position when writing/representing, bringing with them “colonial agendas” and failing to question “their particular positions of privilege” (Murillo, 2004, p. 156). By and large, much of the methodological literature calls for qualitative researchers to commit to being reflexive about writing/representing practices (Dávila, 2014; Lester & Anders, 2018; Phelan & Kinsella, 2013) and attend closely to the “ethical dimensions” inherent to representation (Pickering & Kara, 2017, p. 299).

While there is a long and rich history highlighted in the literature of attending to the practices and consequences of writing/representing, some scholars have argued that researchers typically “offer very little, if any, analytical consideration on representational issues in their end texts. Who or what is being represented by an investigation is rarely addressed” (Mantzoukas, 2004, p. 995). More particular to the focus of this special issue, some scholars have argued that anonymization is a process that has received less attention in the methodological literature (Thomson et al., 2005) – despite it being a central practice of qualitative inquiry that informs representation and authorial presence. Nonetheless, there is a growing body of literature that has focused on anonymization practices and highlighted a range of topics, including: the challenges of truly protecting vulnerable participants (Moore, 2012), the importance of situating anonymization practices in relation to cultural contexts (Moosa, 2013), how to respond when participants prefer not to be anonymized (Miller, 2015), and anonymization issues that are particular to a given qualitative methodology (e.g., Barry, 2017), among many other topics. In Surmiak’s (2018) overview of the literature focused on “confidentiality practices,” three types of publications were identified, including those that focused on: (1) guidelines and procedures; (2) difficulties in ensuring confidentiality, and (3) confidentiality when using secondary data. What has been less often written about is how spatially focused theories and perspectives might serve to make sense of the taken-for-granted practices related to anonymization, masking, and confidentiality that aim to respond to the specific, the particular, and the political that the places in which we work, produce, and research demand (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014).

Critical feminist geographer Massey (2005) argued that in attending to space (or the specific context of research and the practices we use to produce it), we are inevitably contributing to a “simultaneity of stories so far” (p. 9) not just about one named place or person, but the ongoing relationships among places and people with/in/outside of what counts as research. An acceptance of our roles as researchers in the simultaneity of stories is also about representation and the explicit choices we make along the way. This contribution to a story of place calls for humility and begs reflexivity, historical interrogation, and an ongoing consideration of the relationships among, between, and beyond what counts as “research” and the ways in which we contribute to how a place is (un)named (and continues to be named infinitely). Tuck and McKenzie (2014), in their comprehensive book on place in qualitative research, offer the ways in which place and spatially focused framing intersects, methodologically, with paradigmatic concerns, arguing that:

while critical place inquiry (like all inquiry) is performative, it is also representative; we cannot escape mental processes of thought and language in data collection or analyses. Efforts to get beyond representation are in danger of being solipsistic and apolitical, and seemingly impossible. Instead…the legitimacy of critical place research can be established by reference to its relational validity, or in other words, its grounding and implications for relations to land, to social context, and to future generations. (p. 19)

A spatial reading (Jackson, 2013) and production of research practices of anonymity and masking offers possibilities to enact, and query, the promise of protection and responsibility called for by critical and postcritical scholars (Noblit et al., 2004). Similarly, De Certeau (2014) argued that the shared social actions one takes in moving through (read: producing) space is of course specific, and that the shared stories made by this continuous movement “opens a legitimate theater for practical actions. It creates a field that authorizes dangerous and contingent social actions” (p. 125, italics added). Considering research practice in terms of anonymization and masking might also be better understood as part of such contingent social actions as researchers move through, and travel with (Roegman et al., 2016), space and time. In this special issue, authors explore how such a stance stretches qualitative inquiry further, politically, spurred by what critical geographer Soja (2013) called a “strategic optimism” and what Tuck and McKenzie (2014), following Barad, called a “politics of possibilities” that is guided by a spatial politics, or a spatially-focused justice framing. Spatial justice, then, promotes responsiveness to the experiences of the specific and its material impacts of violence, inequity, injustice, and, importantly, hope, beauty, and love. Thus, in this special issue, we work to push toward what the spatial has “challenged us to” (Massey, 2005): an examination of the turn to the specific and the political (as a practice of place) functioning as a more reflexive practice of research process that guides ontological assumptions about representing, knowing, being, and doing in critical and postcritical research towards a spatially informed justice (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014).

Overview of articles included in the special issue

The eight articles included in this special issue represent scholars from a range of geographic and social locations and experiences, as well as diverse research contexts where the work “hangs together” through a commitment to thinking through and with critical conceptions qualitative inquiry as a reflexive process steeped in responsibility to justice alongside and as co-constituted with the places in which qualitative researchers do their work.

In the first article, Refuse thy name? Critical reflections on the convention of masking place in rural educational research, Ng revisits longitudinal ethnographic research in Garden City, Kansas that began in the 1980s where the community was named and known from the start. Through a retrospective interview with Don Stull, the researcher who launched the project, and exploration of artifacts from her own time conducting research in Garden City, Ng explores how this rural multicultural “boomtown” was storied not as a place like another place, but as a place that was itself. Using the case of Garden City Ng argues that the “implications of these [anonymization] choices should be critically engaged to recognize their contributions as well as disruptions to a field at large” when thinking about the impact and scope of longitudinal ethnographic research in this rural majority minority community.

In the second article, The devil's armpit and other tales from the rural rustbelt: Interrogating the practice and process of un/masking in a postcritical ethnography about place, Panos shares an interrogation of the continual decisions she made around masking as part of a four year ethnographic project in the rural rustbelt Midwestern United States. Informed by postcritical ethnography and feminist geography, Panos shares three reflexive stories from her research where masking choices were made, and had consequences. She examines these consequences in terms of their application of relational protection, sustaining whiteness as practice, and in perpetuating colonizing norms. In the paper, Panos explores the “process and practice” of anonymizing and masking that might lead researchers to enact a “limited answerability.”

In the third article, Queering the consent process: (Un)Masking participant identity in risky LGBTQ + teacher ally work, Shelton and Brooks, longtime researcher-teacher collaborators who together examined the work of teaching in K-12 classrooms around LGBTQ + topics, explore the simultaneity of “risk and resolve” in representing research data. Drawing on perspectives around LGBTQ + allyship as they place their work in the southern United States, the authors complete a series of interviews and transcript elicited discussions to examine confidentiality and the specifics of masking and anonymizing Brooks’ experiences as a teacher. Informed by notions of duality and opposition to the norm in queer theory and Barad’s conceptions of intra-action, together they argue that ignoring the careful work of examining confidentiality “potentially violates participants’ and readers’ trust and reifies oppressive systems such as racism and heternormativity.”

In the fourth article, Material counter-cartographies: (Un)mapping (in)justice, spatial wounding and abstract reticulations, Varga, Agosto and Maguregui describe a study using counter-cartography, an artistic methodology informed by the abstract art of Mark Bradford and the premise that “maps are tools of colonialism” (Smith, 1999). Informed by perspectives on school naming, and the norm of school names commemorating colonialism, and spatial wounding they draw on experimental materialism and Soja’s (2013) notion of consequential geographies to generate counter-cartography of schools within a 20 mile radius of the University of South Florida located near the Hillsborough River in Tampa. Their “approach to map(ping)s offers an artistically innovative approach to excavating the (naming) wounds that—if (continued to) remain neglected—stymie communal and tribal healing and further perpetuate dangerous and problematic spatial narratives.”

Phillips and Ferguson, in the fifth article, School sites and the haunting of history: Unmasking the past in field-based research, paired archival and field-based research in urban school settings to illuminate schools beyond simplified context descriptions typical of empirical research. Informed by a tradition of historical research around schooling, the authors are informed by Derrida’s (1994) notion of “hauntology” to explore the ways in which a school’s history animates the current practices of school actors. Together they argue that masking should be interrogated because “norms and practices are implicated in the production of usable and unusable pasts” in terms of qualitative research and in educational activities that produce school sites.

In the sixth article, Place anonymization as rural erasure? A methodological inquiry for rural qualitative scholars, Seelig describes the implications of critical qualitative ethnographic research in rural and remote research sites in terms of anonymization through revisiting a year-long embedded ethnographic project in the pseudonymized Forest Lake, Wisconsin. Privileging the specificity of the rural, Seelig’s work is informed by Harvey’s (2006) theories of critical geographies, and considers how anonymization may operate as a form of neoliberal place erasure with specific damage to ruralities. She concludes with “urg[ing] rural scholars concerned with geographic inequality and spatial injustice to openly discuss the impact of masking or disclosure of rural places in the process of qualitative research.”

In the seventh article, Beyond “doing no harm”: saddle points in anonymization and masking as socialized practices for new researchers, Panos, Uttamchandani, and Lester, two early career scholars and their graduate mentor, use an interactive interview (Ellis et al., 1997) methodology to reflexively engage how new researchers are socialized into masking and anonymizing practices. As scholars informed by critical, postcritical, and participatory research, they suggest that the norms of anonymization and masking might best be taught by resting on saddle points, or points of stillness, hat inform, but do not dictate next steps, as new researchers come to make decisions as part of research constellations made up of mentors, institutional norms, community collaborators, disciplinary research goals, and a broader scholarly community.

In the final article, Methodological interest convergence: research site anonymity’s maintenance of structural racism, Moses offers a pointed exploration of the role of anonymity in maintaining structural racism in qualitative research in higher education settings. Informed by critical race theory, specifically Bell’s (1980) notion of interest convergence, Moses questions here “the tension between the rhetoric and practice of racial diversity in education” when conducting and teaching qualitative research. Offering Institutional Review Boards (i.e., ethics boards) as a site of interest convergence, Moses argues that, ultimately, in qualitative research we must consider that “refusing to question anonymity in relation to institutional oppression shields us from uncomfortable conversations necessary for change to ever materialize.”

What the authors in this special issue come to help us understand is that a static, taken-for-granted, and displaced masking practice holds the possibility of failing to promote the production of our research sites and participants as always and already named and full of meaning and agency, of being in constant production inclusive of and beyond our work. Rather than assuming protection and anonymity are synonymous, the authors here promote a recognition of relational protection as an ongoing challenge of anonymization and masking as practice that should be placed. In this special issue, scholars examine these practices in order to produce a research process that honors the specificity, justice orientation, and political nature of work in various contexts that are inevitably always in relationship with other places and times.

Disclosure statement

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