Listening to the language of the context: problematizing researcher positionality in cross-cultural sport for development ethnographies

ABSTRACT

Despite the significant progress in critical debates around sport for development (SfD) research throughout the last decade, there is still a tendency for researchers to utilise traditional dichotomies such as ‘insider/outsider’, ‘foreign/native’, and ‘Global North/South’ when it comes to reflections on ethnographic positionality. This paper aims to go beyond these by introducing the concept of ‘listening to the language of the context’, which involves a continuous reflection of the power structures involved in the relationships between the researcher and the research site. The development and application of this concept is explained through the use of two examples from SfD ethnographic studies; one located in the Northwest of England and the other in the Southeast of Brazil. Despite their geographical differences, we found that we encountered similar issues when it came to understanding our positionality within the research site, which centred around issues of ‘language’ and ‘power’. Through our reflections, we discuss how we strove to become immersed within the research site by attempting to listen to the ‘language of the context’, which involved both familiarisation of the context beyond the immediate research setting and acknowledging the privileges associated with being granted ‘access’ to settings through NGOs and formal educational institutions. Conclusions are provided regarding how this cross-contextual comparison has highlighted the need to continue the pursuit of reflexive methodologies which amplify unheard voices in SfD, as well as the importance of ‘listening to the language of the context’ at all stages of the research process.

KEYWORDS:

• ethnography
• sport for development
• power
• positionality
• language

Introduction

Researching the field of sport for development¹ (SfD) is often fraught with contradictions. The academic community continues to voice apprehension about the criticality of impacts of development programs which utilise sport (e.g. Darnell, Whitley, and Massey 2016; Raw, Sherry, and Rowe 2021; Spaaij et al. 2018). These criticisms pertain to various elements of the SfD discourse; for example, some have moved to debunk the evangelical rhetoric which helps to sustain the inscrutable belief of the ‘power of sport’ for social good (e.g. Darnell 2012). Others have investigated the evidence-based policy and practice agenda which influences decisions at governmental and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) about future investment (e.g. Coalter 2017). Finally, there are researchers who voice their concerns regarding the methodological approaches used in evaluating SfD practices and impacts (e.g. Kay 2012; Spaaij et al. 2018).

It is the lattermost issue which this article attempts to address. This article responds to calls made by numerous researchers (e.g. Darnell, Whitley, and Massey 2016; Kay 2012; Spaaij et al. 2018) for greater individual, contextual, and sociological critical reflexivity within SfD research. We draw inspiration from Collison et al. (2016), who demonstrate how cross-cultural comparative research can be conducted, synthesised, and reflected upon in a meaningful and impactful manner. In this paper, each author presents the ways in which they investigated what the ‘processes of sports participation’ (Coalter 2017, 147) entailed for SfD participants within two separate studies; one located in the Northwest of the United Kingdom, and the other based in the Southeast Region of Brazil. Despite these geographical differences, as well as differences between our respective genders and ‘localness’ relative to the research site, we both directed our attention towards participants’ personal, social, cultural, and embodied experiences of the SfD programs.

Amidst this discussion, we explore a more active notion regarding positionality in SfD research through the concept of ‘listening to the language of the context’. This concept refers to how an ethnographic researcher might attempt to continuously negotiate the various power structures involved in their fieldwork to work towards addressing power asymmetries with those who are the focus of the research. In explaining this concept in more detail, we discuss how our ethnographic experiences led us to develop this concept within a critical framework. We situate our work within the current corpus of literature devoted to methodological reflexivity of researcher positionality, and in particular to the issues of language, power, insider/outsider debates in qualitative research, and SfD scholarship. This paper aims to critically interrogate the ways in which researcher positionality has been conceptualised in SfD research by discussing a potential way of moving beyond dichotomies and taken-for-granted frameworks through our own unique conceptualisation of ‘listening to the language of the context’, which is drawn from our comparable ethnographic experiences.

Critical reflexivity: researcher positionality in ethnographic fieldwork

The question around reflexivity, and particularly how ‘our subjectivity becomes entangled in the lives of others’ (Denzin 1997, 27) has occupied sociologists (Hammersley and Atkinson 2019) and anthropologists (Clifford and Marcus 1986) for more than 40 years. There is a consensus among contemporary ethnographers that researchers are an integral part of the social world they study (Bridges 2017; Chhabra 2020), as well as a recognition that the reflexive approach serves as a measure for evaluating the validity and quality of our work (Berger 2015; Pillow 2003). Researchers are expected to acknowledge and understand their role in the production of knowledge (Berger 2015); that is, to be conscious and reflect how their position, interests, and feelings shape the research process in all stages (Pillow 2003).

Contemporary researchers across the social sciences (e.g. Dwyer and Buckle 2009; Hill and Dao 2021) have focused on reflexivity with regard to the diverse locations researchers find themselves when in the field. More recently issues have been raised regarding the duality of insider-outsider positioning in qualitative research (Bridges 2017; Chhabra 2020). The conceptualisations of what ‘insiderness’ or ‘outsiderness’ means have changed, with the notion that a researcher only has either an insider or outsider view to the research setting gradually being debunked. Merriam et al. (2001), for example, suggest that there is ‘a good bit of slippage and fluidity’ (p. 405) between the insider and outsider positions. The authors go on to suggest that researcher positionality is rather ‘determined by where one stands in relation to ‘the other’ (Merriam et al. 2001, 411).

Although critical reflections upon the insider-outsider debate have been emphasised as highly relevant, especially while researching marginalised, historically objectified, othered and oppressed groups (Chhabra 2020), it is also crucial to understand how the status of the researchers may change throughout the research and how this can influence power relations, conflicts, group dynamics, events, and the phenomena under investigation. Thus, the ‘space between’ (Dwyer and Buckle 2009, 60), ‘sub-identities’ (Giwa 2015), or ‘multiple positionalities’ (Caretta 2015) have been proposed, bringing to mind the multiplicitous and contested positions afforded to ethnographic researchers, influenced among others by critical theory, feminist theory and postmodernism (see Kauffman 1994; Tinker and Armstrong 2008). These positions can shift on the basis of factors such as gender, class, race, education, and sexuality, among others, which can play out differently with different individuals and groups (Beoku-Betts 1994).

Rather than these positions being adopted by the researcher, or being bestowed upon them by others (Labaree 2002), and ubiquitously adhered to throughout their ethnographic endeavours, the researcher’s positionality is more likely to be a continuously changing process resulting from constant negotiations between researchers and participants (Crossley, Arthur, and McNess 2016). However, what is often overlooked within this negotiation is the latent power imbalances involved in these active negotiations, which arise from using different language(s) to work towards mutual understandings. Knowledge of the research participants’ language, or lack thereof, can affect understandings of knowledge within the research (Gibb and Danero Iglesias 2017). Language is essential to convey shared meanings and culture codes, and it is bounded within relations of power between those who speak and/or translate (Hall 1997; West 2005). Palmary (2014) affirms that without critically reflecting upon these issues, researchers risk representing the non-English-speaking world as an ‘infantilized other’ (Palmary 2014, 577). Thus, knowledge of the local language provides not only in-depth understanding and embedded experience, but can also work towards negotiations of relations of power.

Of course, language is not simply a means of interaction between individuals. It is in itself bound up in issues of power, especially within development contexts where dominant discourses are often dictated by those ‘doing’ the development work (Englund 2004). Language is often a tool used by those in positions of power, such as governments, bureaucracies, or NGOs, to ameliorate and even manipulate those who are viewed as being in ‘need’ of development (Ferguson 1994). This has started to be explored within SfD through applying Actor Network Theory (Darnell et al. 2018), although these discussions tend to focus on the macro-level politics of discourse rather than reflecting more on the micro-level impacts SfD researchers might have within the researched communities. As such, we argue that negotiations of researcher positionality should start from the initial point of contact when trying to arrange access to the site of ethnographic research. To become ‘immersed within the setting’ the researcher needs to continue this negotiation of access with local people and communities throughout their engagement within the field, rather than just to consider access being granted through their institution and/or an NGO (as is typically the case within SfD). By continuing this negotiation with the local community ethnographers need not ‘hide’ behind established categories such as ‘insider’, ‘outsider’ or ‘researcher’ to justify their privileged position, but instead can discuss the issues which enable access to the phenomena being studied, such as power and language. Therefore, we aim to find a way to critically discuss our positionality within these negotiations without relying on reductive binaries such as insider-outsider, powerful-powerless, foreigner-native etc., through introducing the concept of ‘language of the context’, which we argue provides the necessary space to discuss the active negotiations involved in researcher positionality and accounts for the participants’ perspectives of the researcher’s contribution to their community.

This concept refers to how an ethnographic researcher continuously negotiates the various power structures involved in their fieldwork to work towards addressing power asymmetries with those who are the focus of the research. This is not simply done through the many ways ethnographers engage in the process of co-production of knowledge with the research participants, but also through improvised and exploratory practices in everyday life that consist of reactions to, and negotiations with, specific situations and circumstances in the field. We focus on language and power as they also relate to ‘voices’ and as such play an essential role in understanding how the divide between dominant and subordinate voices can be constituted and reinforced through development work and discourse (Nencel 2014). We illustrate the ideas behind ‘listening to the language of the context’ by presenting a set of research encounters from our own journeys in the ethnographic field, exemplifying how we negotiated our position and identities throughout the research in order to construct knowledge with research participants to try and understand their perspectives of reality (Beoku-Betts 1994; Labaree 2002). The concept of ‘the language of the context’ then seeks to illuminate the active processes of learning and understanding the unfamiliar events, environment, and powered realities through the perspectives of others through the multiple ‘languages’ used in the field. We believe this concept firstly illustrates how language can work towards addressing power asymmetries within the research, and secondly exposes oppressive power relations through a greater sensibility to those whose voices are often silenced and marginalised, which provides an original contribution to understanding researcher positionality and identity within SfD.

Problematizing ‘researcher identity’ in SfD

SfD researchers have recently engaged with critical discussions on researcher positionality in cross-cultural SfD research (e.g. Collison et al. 2016; Darnell, Whitley, and Massey 2016; Spaaij et al. 2018). Innovative approaches have been used to provide a more nuanced understanding of influences impacting the way researchers are positioned, or position themselves, in the research. For example, Forde (2015) combined autoethnography and art-based methods to present a critical personal narrative from his fieldwork in South Africa, going beyond one of the oft-used dichotomies such as ‘white saviour’ used vis-à-vis project participants from the Global South. Dao (2020, 2021) also utilised autoethnography to explicate the complexities of identity, language, and positionality involved in SfD ethnographic work. As an American born Vietnamese person, Dao tried to disentangle the complexities involved in ‘returning’ to the country of his family’s origin to conduct SfD research. He offers nuanced insights into moments of acceptance and tensions in negotiating the Vietnamese communities, which goes beyond simply ‘speaking the language’ and involves understanding the social, historical, and political implications associated with his presence in these communities. Similarly, McSweeney (2019) went beyond insider-outsider conceptualisations and linked his reflections to colonialism, power and identity, illustrating how the self of the researchers can be complicated by a postcolonial history.

Post-colonial theory was also adopted by other authors in SfD research (Hayhurst 2016; Lucas and Jeanes 2020) to provide reflexive insights into the researcher relations with and position within targeted communities. In adopting this lens, scholars have also started to pay attention to less frequent issues such as language choices and skills as part of the awareness of one’s social position. For example, Chawansky (2015) and Hayhurst (2016) critically interrogate their positionality and identity as ‘knowing subject’ that can be reinforced due to the lack of language skills while researching in foreign contexts. Specifically, Hayhurst (2016) focuses on the complexities related to translation of participants’ experiences into English, and how this can reproduce neo-colonial relations of power. Similarly, Oxford (2022) unpacks how it was important to her to understand Spanish language during her research to understand gender negotiations and relations in Colombia, yet still she felt like a ‘superficial insider’ (p. 5). This further highlights the tensions between the broader context in which the research takes place (i.e. Global North, Global South) and parties involved (i.e. researcher and participants), provoking significant concerns regarding ‘othering’, objectification, and institutionalising of SfD participants (Tiessen 2011).

With an array of thought-provoking debates on power, reflexivity, and researcher positionality emerging in the SfD field, we join this chorus of scholars in problematising how this has previously been done through the lens of dichotomies such as us-them, insider-outsider, North-South, foreign-native, privileged-oppressed, as these notions tend to reinforce cultural ‘othering’ and Western dominance in SfD research. For example, Global North practitioners and donors are often portrayed as ‘benevolent saviours’, while Global South recipients can be regarded as passive others and ‘in need of salvation’ (Darnell 2012; Mwansa and Kiuppis 2021; Tiessen 2011).

Against this backdrop, we argue that critical engagement with ethical and methodological issues regarding negotiations of the identities of researchers vis-à-vis the researched deserves continued reflection. We agree that traditional binary distinctions are lacking appropriate tools for capturing and theorising the fluidity and complexity of the researcher’s positionality and their engagement with research participants regardless of the social, cultural, and political context. However, we argue that both theoretically and empirically a more active exploration can be achieved which helps us to understand the purpose of reflecting upon researcher positionalities within ethnographic development research, such as that of SfD. We attempt to do this through our conceptualisation of the ‘language of the context’, which has been constructed through a retrospective cross-comparison of two seemingly very different ethnographic SfD studies. We move on to outline these two studies next.

Context of the studies

Field 1: United Kingdom

David conducted an 11-month ethnography in the Greater Manchester region of England in four different sites, named here as Pencey FE College, Morningside Community Centre, Sternwood Training Ground, and Hawthorne Ridge Community Centre, each of which ran a Sports Leaders UK (SLUK) Community Sports Leadership Award (CSLA) Level 2 course. Data collection involved observations of the running of each course, during which handwritten field notes were taken, followed by multiple interviews with the course participants (n = 9) and singular interviews with the course facilitators (n = 5). As all the participants and the researcher were native English speakers, all interviews were conducted in English and lasted between 30–90 minutes. The interviews took place in different spaces outside the course location, including at different leisure centres, cafes, pubs, colleges, and youth clubs across Greater Manchester. He lived in the Greater Manchester area for the duration of the ethnography and engaged in several informal interactions outside of the course with the participants when invited, such as talking on the street, travelling on public transport, and attending an award ceremony.

David identified as a White, British male, from a comfortable yet working class background in rural Yorkshire, aged 25 at the start of the ethnography. While in the research field itself, he was predominantly there to observe the courses rather than participate in them, although they took part in selective activities such as initial icebreakers or when activities had an odd number of participants. He also engaged the participants in informal conversations and took notes in different spaces throughout the research setting, although for the majority of the course he sat or stood to the side of the session in order to write observation notes.

Field 2: Brazil

Between 2017 and 2018, Eva carried out 11 months of ethnographic research in two NGOs, named here as Bola Dourada and Felicidade, located in two low-income communities near Sao Paulo, Brazil. To protect the identities of research participants and the organisations involved in this research pseudonyms have been used. The aim of the research was to understand the impact of sport projects on transformation of gender relations and the role of sport to challenge gender stereotypes. Bola Dourada, served six hundred children and youth aged 7–21, and offered mainly football, volleyball, and rugby. Felicidade served to around one thousand children and youth aged 8–16 and provided football, skateboarding, capoeira, and judo classes, among others. Both initiatives used sport as an educational and social, personal, and community development tool. Data collection involved semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with diverse stakeholders involved in both programs, precisely with male and female recipients and interns (n = 15) aged 11–23, with project coordinators (n = 10) aged 18–45, interviews with international volunteers (n = 4,) aged 28–35, with the parents of participants (n = 9) aged 40–60. With Brazilian research participants, Eva conducted interviews in Portuguese, whereas English was used with non-Brazilians.

The ethnographic study involved participant observation in the community settings, followed by ‘observant participation’ of sport (mainly football) sessions several times per week which enabled her to compare information obtained in recorded interviews with what was observed. A significant part of the participant observation happened in the community and other relevant settings; the family homes of participants, for instance. Therefore, extensive written field notes were recorded that documented conversations and detailed descriptions of what was observed and said – specific facts, concerns, and emotional responses – as these became critical for shaping the process of observing, delineating new directions of research, and reformulating interview questions.

Developing ‘listening to the language of the context’

Upon discussing each of our SfD ethnographic experiences when meeting at a conference, we both realised that there were interesting similarities in our encounters, despite such seemingly different contexts. With further discussions taking place over Microsoft Teams, we critically reflected upon our own and each other’s experiences to problematise these similarities further. We realised that relying on traditional ethnographic dichotomies were not sufficient in explaining how we encountered such similarities despite the differences in our studies, leading us to identify characteristics such as power and language as being defining features. This is what led us to propose the ‘language of the context’ as being a concept which provides more purposeful reflections on how we might understand our relationships with participants, funders, and other stakeholders within SfD and ethnographies more widely. To explicate this further, we now move on to outline key reflections from our ethnographies and demonstrate how the ‘language of the context’ can be applied, before providing further discussion.

Listening to the language of the context 1: SfD in England from a native’s perspective?

Although from an international view of SfD I might be considered as being a ‘native’ throughout my ethnography, as I am a white British male who was of similar age to most of the course participants and spoke the same first language (i.e. English), in many ways I was a ‘cultural foreigner’ to the contexts I encountered. In trying to understand the ‘language of the context’ that I was both researching and living in I encountered various stumbling blocks. One significant aspect was that at different times, and in different spaces, various ‘vectors’ of my personal identity did not intersect with those of the participants (Chhabra 2020). The importance of these vectors differed depending on the situation and social location we were in, but they included aspects such as my working-class background from rural Yorkshire being juxtaposed to the working-class urban background from Greater Manchester that most of the participants had. While physically there is little distance between the two areas in the UK, there are many demarcations of historical, cultural, and geographical differences between the areas, which often possesses greater significance to post-industrial working-class communities in the UK (Kirk, Jefferys, and Wall 2012). Other signifiers such as my education, race, and age, being either too old or too young in different situations, were variances which meant that engaging with and forming relationships with participants proved more difficult than anticipated in some circumstances; for instance, my (relatively old) age seemed to be a barrier from the outset when attending the Pencey FE course:

I head towards the reception, which involves battling my way through various social groups conversing around the main entrance, directly in front of the doors. I notice a few quizzical looks, even though I’m dressed fairly casually so as to avoid looking too much like a member of staff. Beneath that I have on a checked shirt, slim fit jeans, and red plimsolls, but the first item seen is my coat, which veers more towards practical as opposed to trendy. Along with my more mature face, I seem to be giving off the impression that I do not belong at the college, and definitely not as a student, which makes me feel conspicuous.

There was a lingering sense of distance throughout my interactions with these participants, which may have been because of the more formal nature of the setting and the more disciplinarian tutor-student relationships which already existed. It may also have been because I did not encounter the participants from this particular course outside of the research setting, which was an educational institution, meaning that their associations of me would have been bounded up within the power imposed by both the college and the NGO running the SfD course. It was also notable that all of these participants were younger than me (aged 16–19), and the language they used was typically a mixture of education-specific terms relating to their Further Education course and local colloquialisms; for example, terms specific to the region such as ‘mithering’ and ‘mafting’² were frequently used by the participants, which were outside of my personal lexicon at the time. However, I was able to develop these relationships during the course by listening to their stories (usually during lunch breaks when away from the course tutors), understanding their relationship with the college and the SfD course, and by including a discrete amount of casual swearing within our interactions. This effort to understand their recognition of power within the setting, their reasons for being there, and their use of language, can ultimately be understood as me trying to understand their ‘language of the context’.

The SfD course which took place at Pencey FE college was particular within my ethnography, with it being the only located in a formal educational institution. However, even though the other courses took place in community centres, there were still issues to navigate in terms of power relations, given that my ‘access’ to these courses were granted through the NGO responsible for organising the SfD course. As such, my relationship with the participants was already one based on difference:

At the end of the session, I was given the opportunity to ask if anybody wanted to volunteer to take part in interviews for my research. People seemed interested and receptive to the idea, and gave a round of applause after I finished, which completely took me by surprise. I think this was indicative of the positive relationships I’d built up over the delivery of the course. Reflecting more on it though, I realised that people had asked me numerous questions during the course, a few about my research, but mainly to check what tasks they were supposed to be doing and whether what they were doing was on the right lines. Despite my repeated insistence that ‘I only know as much as you do!’, a few course participants in particular kept seeking reassurance from me that they were on the right track or explaining why they had done something a certain way. Even though I’d hoped to avoid it, it seemed as though I was being viewed as an expert about the course content, or even worse, as being ‘sent from [the NGO]’.

It is a given that issues of positionality, power, and knowledge are issues to consider within all ethnographies (Merriam et al. 2001). However, an issue less discussed in SfD ethnographic research is how the researcher came to gain access to the site of research. Such a discussion prompts reflections regarding the power relations involved in the researcher’s relationship with the SfD NGOs. Before entering the field I did recognise this as a potential issue, as it was the NGO who granted me permission to enter the participants’ worlds on the SfD course, not the participants themselves. I tried to mitigate this by moving to live within the local community where the SfD courses took place in, as well as trying to broaden the participants’ associations with me beyond the SfD environment by participating in local events, attending social gatherings, and travelling on public transport with them. When it came to talking to them for interviews, these took place in locations chosen by the participants across the local community, including in cafes, pubs, and different community centres, to try and ‘hear’ their voices within their own spaces. I tried to understand the ‘language of the context’ by trying to immerse myself within the local geographical, social, and cultural contexts of the field, none of which required ‘access’ to be permitted by the NGO, only the participants themselves. Although I strove to position myself as not being in a position of privilege or power by separating myself from the NGO, the SfD course, and the tutors, many of the participants still seemed to conceive me as a ‘non-course attendee’ at least. To go one further, I would suggest that my positioning as a researcher was the defining characteristic of the relationships I made with participants – while there was a lot of friendliness and personal information exchanged, the notion that we were primarily talking to generate data for my research never seemed too far from the surface of our interactions. This would be reinforced by comments throughout the fieldwork such as ‘feel free to use that’ and ‘this will be good for your project’, or similar. While this did not come across as being superficial, it could help explain why the participants continuously sought my feedback on their work for their CSLA qualification, and subsequently career advice, as they were seeking something ‘in return’ for their input into my research. As a result of their perception of my knowledge base due to my education level, participants were keen to gain access to networks or resources that they believed I had, regardless of how I tried to position myself throughout the ethnography (Chhabra 2020). This brings up the issue of the impact the researcher has upon the context they are researching, as well as the issue of greater equilibrium in the power balance between researchers and participants, where perhaps there should be a more equal ‘give and take’ scenario when it comes to exchanging contributions.

These examples demonstrate the fluidity and complexities involved in being an ‘in-betweener’ (Chhabra 2020), or in the ‘space between’ (Dwyer and Buckle 2009, 60) within the research setting, while providing deeper reflection on the crucial role various personal, social, and cultural signifiers play in attempting to address power asymmetries with the participants by trying to understand the ‘language of the context’. This goes beyond simply acknowledging a fluid positionality by invoking an active negotiation with the deeply-rooted histories and identities associated with the research field that the researcher encounters (Merriam et al. 2001); in the examples I have discussed, not anticipating the ‘language of the context’ excluded me in certain scenarios and forced me to reflect on my own understandings of these social and cultural settings, despite being considered a ‘native’ by many traditional ethnographic taxonomies. However, by striving to understand how each individual was situated within and engaged with the ‘language of the context’, I felt as though I developed a friendly bond with a number of the participants over the course of my ethnography, which resulted in many of the interviews including lengthy discussions of personal circumstances and insights into their world-as-lived.

Listening to the language of the context 2: challenges and opportunities as a European in Brazil

Conducting fieldwork in Brazil from a position of White, young, middle-class, educated, central-European woman required to acknowledge that, contrary to the situation David encountered, I was entering the field from the position of what could be denominated as a ‘privileged Global North outsider’, in terms of historical, geographical, cultural, and social background. My access to sport initiatives and projects was granted through the NGOs. Although this sometimes created a pressure to interview certain individuals or to make ethnographic observations only chosen by the NGO educators at specific sport workshops, I still had many opportunities for in-depth experience within the project and the community. I lived within the community for a more extended period, volunteered, and spent time with youth after or before the sport sessions. However, two steps were necessary to understand the participants’ perspective of reality within these interactions and circumstances (Beoku-Betts 1994; Labaree 2002), that is, to negotiate my positionality through learning the ‘language of the context’.

First, I needed to disentangle myself from the NGO setting and re-work my initial position and identity ascribed to me by others, given my entry into the field through the NGO. The access through the NGO provided only ‘formal’ acceptance of my position in the lives of the youths I interviewed and trained. I was continuously avoiding the use of ‘emancipatory language’ (Englund 2004) daily used in one of the NGOs when communicating with project participants. The way some Western volunteers and the founder of the NGO spoke about participants perpetuated neocolonial power relations by suggesting that local knowledges and practices were inferior to thosefrom the Western world. In addition, I made myself more visible and present beyond the limits of the SfD organisation. I participated in events such as personal anniversaries, family lunches, or other sport events that were important for youth outside the project. This allowed me to have daily contact with youth and their families and also create new situations of trust in which some of the assumptions could be debunked. For example, as Roberta revealed:

Those people—foreign visitors, gringos—they say they come here to do research and get involved in the project, but actually, they never talk to us and they never take a community bus as you do. They are distant. They would never spend time with us outside the organization as you do. They come in their private cars or buses with dark windows, and in the afternoon, they go away…. But with you, you know, sometimes, I just forget that you are not Brazilian.³ (Roberta, Brazil, March 2018)

During a casual conversation while waiting for the bus in one of Sao Paulo’s urban peripheries known as poverty-stricken and crime-ridden, my gatekeeper, Roberta, all of the sudden revealed the nature of my positionality in the field in its complexity. She contrasted me with other ‘foreign visitors’ or ‘gringos’ she met before as a member of the SfD project. Moreover, the term ‘gringos’, used for foreigners in Portuguese, was already burdened with multiple meanings, which I discovered only over time. Those encounters have been defined by physical and emotional distance – evidenced in this context by an absence of trust in researchers who ‘never talk’ to them (her or other project participants), who come with ‘private cars’ expressing social status and power through ‘dark windows’, exacerbating an existing state of alienation.

Once I managed to create stronger bonds through shared moments with youth such as Roberta, I needed to focus more on power dynamics and language aspects. Roberta shared her perspective with me in such a casual situation, and made me aware of the different relationship between us, the building of which was by no means guaranteed. We had things in common – both young women, enthusiastic about sports, protagonists of feminism and gender empowerment. Still, it was not until the conversation about other aspects of our identity, such as class, race, and sexuality, I realised that I was dealing with more specific power hierarchies. Sometimes I was even too distant to the reality of local community. I conducted the majority of interviews with non-White participants, both women and men. Here, being a White woman presented barriers in understanding the particular forms of oppression and experiences in women’s lives. In some situations, women themselves emphasised my Whiteness as problematic and rendered me as someone who cannot fully understand their realities. When talking about racism, poverty, homophobia, and how they affected female project participants’ daily lives, power asymmetry and a number of non-shared experiences reminded me of a complexity inherent to my positionality, and that a woman that shared identity with the participants could arrive at different understandings in these research situations (Beoku-Betts 1994).

There are always power imbalances in ethnographic research (see also Hayhurst 2016). I found it difficult to disengage from my ‘Global North’ identity, and the asymmetrical power relations which comes with it. For example, in the middle of the generosity expressed by many families which invited me to their homes and let me to interview them, one could identify within their narratives the rhetoric of ‘benevolence for the “Northern” saviour’ and ‘gratitude for the assistance’ (see Spivak 1984). Adriana, mother of Jessica who participated in Bola Dourada’s sport session, many times repeated, ‘You foreigners [meaning me and other international workers], leave your country to come here to help our community. We are so grateful for having you here. We only have to thank you’ (Adriana, 46 years-old, November 2017, Campinho).

Regarding the second step in accessing the language of the context, researcher positionality is a result of the interplay between static markers, such as race, gender, or class and non-static markers, such as language and personal experiences. My ability to speak Portuguese was one factor that significantly affected the quality of interactions with research participants. I knew people in the project perceived me as not ‘foreign’ or ‘other’, and they were more open when they realised I spoke their native language. They usually commented positively on my language skills and accent. They also confessed that it was challenging for them to guess whether I was Brazilian coming from other parts of Brazil or whether I was a foreigner speaking Portuguese. Moreover, I was also able to comprehend their perspective as well as work towards addressing power imbalances. International volunteers usually spoke English with project participants and aggravated colonial power relations (Palmary 2014). I argue that to understand participants’ language and realities, it is essential to adopt the language of the participants to negotiate circumstances and positions to create necessary familiarity with those we study. The used language is bounded by relations of power between those who speak and/or translate (Hall 1997; West 2005). Similarly to Hayhurst (2016), during my fieldwork some terms, including empowerment, were not present in the vocabulary of female participants. But what I mean here is to adapt to the participants’ language to understand their world and reality, thereby making ourselves more sensitive.

Another episode from the field diary reflects on issues of power, in addition to language and fluid positionality, and demonstrates that speaking other’s languages also requires to adapting to the specificities of the situation. It was the afternoon after a skate session when Marcelo, the local coach, turned to me and asked, ‘Would you help Fernando to fill the questionnaire?’ As he explained, the younger children knew how to read; however, it was difficult for them to read as fast as adults. As it was the end of the class, the coach found it effective to ask me to help. Without hesitating, I agreed and sat next to the Fernando, who was around 11 years old. He was holding the paper questionnaire in his hands. I had already done this before and had not thought of it as something problematic.

I started to read, slowly, in Portuguese, the first question followed by three answers from which he was supposed to choose one option. As I finished reading and was waiting for him to reply, the young boy looked at me and said, ‘I don’t understand you. What language are you speaking?’ I was surprised with his answer as I did not expect such a reaction. I told him it was Portuguese and that I was foreigner, so my accent could have been different. Fernando started to asked questions where I came from, and suddenly it seemed that he did understand me. Some children had more intense contact with foreign volunteers/visits and were used to their accent. However, younger project participants have never spoken to the foreigner and had troubles with their understanding of an unusual way of speaking. I asked Fernando whether he preferred to fill the questionnaire alone, and he agreed.

This episode demonstrated that my efforts to work towards power imbalances through the language in the field were sometimes complicated. Understanding the local language is not an isolated aspect, but again, rather bounded to other markers of researcher’s identity. I previously uncritically assumed that speaking the Portuguese language would make invisible or inhibit my privileged position and status, however, in some situations the opposite occurred. There are at least two critical ways that can offer understanding of the situation described. First, local coaches might use another language as a strategy for avoiding the complexity of the formal vocabularies of questionnaires created by adults and/or donors, and adapt the way they speak to children or, second, my efforts to negotiate my status through language did not result in the desired and intended outcome due to stronger forces of other aspects of my identity, such as race, class and gender that were not possible to disconnect from language aspects.

Discussion

At first glance our two studies would appear to contain more differences than similarities, but upon greater critical reflection through the application of the ‘language of the context’, there are several issues which proved to be challenges that we both encountered during our time in the field. We have chosen to focus more specifically on two of these issues, power and language, due to their potential transferability across wider SfD and ethnographic studies, as well as due to the need for conciseness.

Firstly, power relations manifested asymmetrically in multiple forms in both our studies. In the case of David, even if his own background bore certain similarities with those of the research participants, the fact of being a ‘researcher’ in a privileged position of knowledge prevented him from being fully accepted by the participants throughout the research journey. Although he tried to immerse himself within the local community and disengage from the disciplinarian tutor-student relationships, cultivating conditions for reciprocity or deconstructing his authority ‘myth’ was not always possible. His positioning as a researcher defined the relationships for most of his interactions, which was especially visible in the expectation to ‘give back’ to participants. Eva also came to the field in a position of a ‘privileged researcher’ but being from the Global North region also reinforced power asymmetry and brought more clarity in terms of her own identity as unfamiliar with the research setting. More specifically, the ethical concerns about power and knowledge resonated with issues of benevolence and historically established neo-colonial relations.

Here, is it important to discuss and explore how researchers practice reflexivity and engage with research participants (Pillow 2003). As SfD researchers, we are inevitably positioned within dominant development discourses, the North – South divides, and Western-centred notions of development. What is evident from both research journeys is that the established binary distinction in qualitative research, such as insider-outsider, foreign-native etc., should not provide us with comfort but instead alert us about our own practices (Pillow 2003). As Spivak (1984) states, as researchers, we should be more ‘vigilant about our practices’ (p. 185), that is, vigilant about how we negotiate our (Northern) identity in order to avoid placing ourselves uncritically as ‘foreigners’, and therefore escaping from acknowledging our own complicity in North – South politics. Although reflexivity of our own positions brought us to an awareness of multiple asymmetrical relationships in the field, finding our position as different yet entangled within the field contributed to reshape our identity as a (privileged) researcher.

Yet, a researcher’s position is not fixed but dynamic in accordance with the negotiations and reconstructions of the research relationships (Kim 2012). In this respect, the second point – use of language – is another similarity to draw upon from both of our experiences, particularly in how its use provoked a wider negotiation of our relationship with the participants in relation to issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and geographical belonging. For Eva, the issue of language was a more obvious issue to reflect upon, given that she decided to learn and speak a foreign language to try and engage with the site of her research, as recommended by Collison et al. (2016). In doing so, she was able to foster a strong relationship with various people within her research setting, providing her with more of a mutual meeting point with participants than they had previously encountered with ‘foreign’ or ‘Global North’ researchers. While she still faced issues through her use of language in terms of building the rapport she desired at times, there was still the feeling that by speaking the native language within the context of her research she was making an active attempt to interact and understand the context. This also appeared to be helpful for moving beyond the boundaries between positions at times which, despite the different social and cultural context to hers, were not clearly defined (Merriam et al. 2001). However, for David, language was just as important a signifier in terms of his positionality within the research setting, especially in terms of his relationship with the participants. While he would be considered ‘native’ in traditional notions of positionality as a result of researching in the same country where he lived and grew up in, the discrepancies in language between himself and the participants actually frequently cast him in the position of ‘other’ or ‘non-participant’. The use of language placed a focus on the differences between himself and the participants, such as education level, rurality instead of urbanity, even UK geographical difference being from Yorkshire rather than Greater Manchester.

These considerations of power and language throughout our engagements with participants in the field demonstrate the intertwining complexities involved in how researchers can ‘position’ themselves within SfD and ethnographic research. While traditional reflexive tools have relied upon dichotomous positions, such as ‘insider/outsider’, ‘Global North/Global South’, and ‘foreign/native’, our reflections have demonstrated how these are problematic in helping to fully capture the multifaceted tensions involved in navigating the ethnographic landscape. Instead, we propose that ethnographic researchers strive to understand the ‘language of the context’, which we posit to be a constantly active process by which the researcher attempts to understand the context they are researching. Understanding the ‘language of the context’ utilises self-awareness, empathy, immersion, and frequent reflection from the researcher while in the field, whether that field is 1 mile or 1,000 miles away from their home.

Although we both struggled to see a reality the way participants did, it is our ethical and methodological responsibility to acknowledge the limitations of our own knowledge. The ‘language of the context’ in our ethnographies refers to more than the ability to observe naturally occurring phenomena (Van Maanen 1988). If we are to observe ‘on the ground’, we also need to understand the events and phenomena we saw, and how they were affected by the development discourse further reproducing power relations. Hence, understanding the ‘language of the context’ allows researchers to ‘listen’ and capture cultural norms and rules to attempt to comprehend participants’ experiences situated in life as it goes. However, the examples above also illustrate that it has limits given factors such as gender, class, and ethnicity that are part of our intersectional identities. In recommending the ‘language of the context’ is used in place of locating ourselves either as ‘outsiders’ or ‘insiders’ vis-à-vis research participants, we are proposing a concept which is to be used in conjunction with participant-focused and critically-reflexive ethnographic methodologies, rather than as a methodological approach in itself, to strengthen our understanding of the voices of participants.

Conclusion

Through our analysis, we argue that both theoretically and empirically a more active and reciprocal conceptualisation is needed to understand the multiple researcher positionalities, interpretations, and power relations in development ethnographic research. We propose that ‘listening to the language of the context’ is a useful concept in helping to reflect on these complex positionalities by enabling the researcher to continuously reflect on their relationship with the participants and their community before, during, and after their engagement with it. Rather than just focusing on issues which only matter to the academic community through introspective reflexivity, as most conceptualisations around positionality tend to do, instead we propose that reflexive awareness should consider issues including potential power imbalances, use and understanding of language, and relationships with the various social actors who enable ‘access’ to the experiences encountered throughout the researched community.

There is no guarantee to the researchers that they can avoid unintended positioning by others or that the particular location negotiated and achieved by the researcher in the field will provide them with understanding of the participants reality in form of the ‘real truth’ (Forde 2015). While we do not pretend to have remedied this issue by introducing ‘listening to the language of the context’, we hope to provide researchers with a more appropriate conceptual tool to consider the fluctuating engagements they experience throughout the ethnographic journey. We feel as though these lessons can be of wider benefit to the SfD research community, as well as practitioners at regional, national, and international levels. Wider ambitions for future research based upon ‘listening to the language of the context’ involve extending discussions regarding neo-colonial practices in SfD (Darnell 2012) and how instead SfD can move towards decolonisation practices (Kay 2012). While we have engaged in conversations which impinge on these issues relating to the Global North/Global South divide and the reliance upon Westernized practices, there is a much deeper discussion to be had regarding SfD practice and ethnographic research which forefronts the voices of those being researched more thoroughly.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Charles University SVV [260596]; Sports Leaders UK .

Notes on contributors

David Steven Scott

Dr David Scott is a Lecturer in Sport Development in the Division of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Abertay University. His research interests can be broadly situated within sport, sociology, existential-phenomenology, emotions, and development studies.

Eva Soares Moura

Dr Eva Soares Moura is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Her empirical work focuses on sport for development programmes, with a particular emphasis on gender, empowerment, environment, and the context of Latin America.

Notes

1. To avoid protracted debate, which is beyond the scope of this article, the term ‘sport for development’ is used to encapsulate the overlapping (yet also distinctive in their own right) bodies of work which include ‘sport for development and peace’, ‘sport for change’ and ‘sport for youth development’.

2. ‘Mither’ means to make a fuss, moan, or pester someone. ‘Mafting’ refers to a warm, sticky, and uncomfortable temperature or climate. Both are recognised as Northern English colloquial terms by various English dictionaries.

3. The original quote in Portuguese was translated by Eva to English.