“No but where are you really from?”: Critically examining reflexivity through field notes from a feminist psychological research in Turkey

In this piece, I delve into the notion of reflexivity by drawing from my field notes collected during a feminist ethnographic study on women's freedom dreams in Turkey. I examine reflexivity as a key methodological consideration in critical feminist psychology informed by intersectional, indigenous, and participatory scholarship (Lafrance & Wigginton, 2019). My exploration begins by tracing the historical development of reflexivity in psychology, from early feminist critiques of objectivity to the concerns with power dynamics in research. I then reflect on my own positionality within my research project in the rural regions of Ordu and Muş, particularly in relation to the women I engaged with, their families, and my coresearchers/filmmakers. These reflections bring into focus the tensions that surface around issues of power, differences and the coproduction of knowledge. Drawing on specific examples from my fieldwork, I highlight three key insights: the need to (a) resist reducing reflexivity to simply cataloguing one's positionality through established social categories; (b) embrace a more nuanced and fluid understanding of intersectionality and power within research contexts; and (c) cultivate cultural–social humility and practice radical listening. These insights are essential for fostering more egalitarian relations with research participants and challenging hierarchical structures that often reinforce stratifications.

Reflexivity in psychology

Reflexivity refers to the acknowledgement and consideration of the researcher's identity, role, biases, and potential influences on the research process (Crossley, 2008; Fox et al., 2009). Historically, psychology sought to establish itself as a rigorous scientific discipline, emphasising objectivity, neutrality, and empirical methods, and distancing itself from its earlier philosophical roots (Pickren & Rutherford, 2010). This drive for objectivity led to a focus on quantifiable data, standardised methods, and the separation of the researcher from the research process to avoid “contamination” by subjective factors (Danziger, 1994). The positivist model that dominated early psychological research promoted the notion that knowledge could only be valid if detached from the personal experiences, identities, and biases of the researcher (Henwood & Pidgeon, 1994). Consequently, reflexivity—the examination of the researcher's own role, biases, and influences on the research process—was largely marginalised (Harre & Secord, 1972; Parker, 1994).

With the rise of feminist, critical, and postmodern critiques, scholars began to challenge these positivist assumptions, arguing that ignoring the researcher's identity and positionality can obscure important dynamics of power and influence within the research process. These critiques emphasised how science, as a social process, is deeply shaped by gendered and racialised assumptions in the construction of its theories, methods, and practices (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1995; Rutherford, 2020; Teo, 2010). Some examples of gendered and racialised biases in scientific theories and research include the women-specific diagnosis of hysteria (Harding, 2009; Tuana, 2006), racial biases evidenced in early intelligence testing (Teo, 2010), and the production of a conservative political agenda (Hooberman & Ozoguz, 2022; Lafrance & Wigginton, 2019). Fine (2012) critiques American and European social psychology for their betrayal of “the broad topography of human life-space” (p. 10) due to scientific myopia, stripping people of “the material and political contexts of their lives” (p. 10). More recently, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a formal apology, acknowledging its role, and that of the field of psychology, in fostering, perpetuating, and neglecting to confront racism (American Psychological Association, 2021).

Early feminist psychologists emphasised the researcher's active role in the research process and the influence of the researcher's standpoint (Wilkinson, 1988). In her groundbreaking book on how laboratory experiments came to dominate the field, Morawski (1988) aptly critiqued how the histories of psychology have not studied the relationship between the experimental method and the researchers, and few have identified the social construction of the experimentation paradigm (cf. Danziger, 1994; K. Lewin, 1992; Pickren & Rutherford, 2010). Following Morawski's (1988) critique, Reay (1996) emphasised the importance of reflexivity in feminist psychological research and argued for an ongoing process of self-awareness and self-critique to consider how the researcher's perspectives may influence the interpretation of their data as well as their interactions with their participants. Many feminist psychologists have since critiqued the notion of objectivity in psychological research and have instead adapted feminist and standpoint epistemologies (Alcoff & Potter, 2013; Crawford & Marecek, 1989; Leavy & Harris, 2018; Radtke, 2017; Wigginton & Lafrance, 2019). Within these epistemologies, reflexivity is seen as a resource that is integral to knowledge production, rather than a bias to be accounted for (Braun & Clarke, 2019; Gough & Madill, 2012).

Building on the early critiques of objectivity, and the growing transnational research with the rise of globalisation and neoliberalism, feminist scholars began to highlight the role of power in the research process, drawing on the notion of intersectionality and decolonising frameworks. These frameworks offer means for understanding the intersecting systems of power and oppression that shape individuals’ lived experiences, identities, and social relations (Adams et al., 2015; Cho et al., 2013). The Journal of Social and Political Psychology published a special issue on “decolonizing psychological science,” in which Adams et al. (2017) advocate a “decolonial psychology” to counter the hegemony of Euro-American psychological science and to speak not only to the lives of those in Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies—a critique that raises profound questions about the discipline's claims to universality (Henrich et al., 2010; Roberts et al., 2020)—but also to those who reside in the marginalised contexts of the Global South. The decolonising perspective in psychology focuses on the psyche in the context of multiple axes of oppression, including racialised violence, globalisation, economic injustices, neoliberalisation, and beyond (Bhatia, 2017). Feminism & Psychology has also released its own special issue on “Feminisms and Decolonizing Psychology: Possibilities and Challenges,” which critically engaged with a range of complex issues, including dismantling the power of Whiteness, gendered decolonisation within Muslim societies, and radical visions of decolonial psychology (Macleod et al., 2020).

Within this framework, the practice of reflexivity pays attention to how intersecting identities and power influence both the researcher and the research participants, as well as how these intersections shape the phenomenon being studied (Fine, 1994). Fine and Gordon (1989) emphasise the role of power dynamics in research, unpacking the ways in which difference accumulates through unequal distribution of power. In Decolonizing Psychology, Bhatia (2017) engages in critical reflexivity in focus groups and interviews across four ethnographic locations by calling attention to their privileged location as researcher and by intertwining his self-narrative with the research process at the intersections of “being both a researcher and a native, a migrant and a local, a foreigner and a familiar other” (p. 279).

Drawing on these insights to reflect on the politics of my research within a critical feminist epistemological framework, I engage with my positionality in the following section before considering my research practice. This self-reflexive approach is not only essential for situating myself within the study, but also for enabling readers to discern the nuanced intersections of lived experiences and the specific social and geographical locations I share with my participants. These intersections, particularly around gender, race, class, and location, serve as both points of convergence and dissonance, shaping the dynamics of connection and disconnection throughout the research process. By acknowledging these dimensions, I aim to highlight how my identity and positionality influence the research narrative, allowing for a more textured understanding of the power relations and epistemic tensions at play.

Researcher reflexivity: Reflecting on my positionality

Having been trained in traditional psychology in the UK, or what Wigginton and Lafrance (2019) call “empiricist epistemology,” earlier in my career, I initially adopted the neutral status of the psychologist in scientific experimentation and did not immediately recognise the gendered and racialised ways in which scientific theories, methods, and practice get produced. As a Turkish cis woman, the theories and methods that were being used to “study” the psyche, and the scientific discourse such as behaviour, perception, and cognition of “humans” felt so far removed from my own embodied experience. I vividly remember learning about Kohlberg's (1981) theory of moral development during my undergraduate psychology education, thinking how the hierarchy of morality he outlined was not intuitively clear to me. I couldn’t make sense of why wanting to care for your loved ones was an “inferior” stage of morality, thinking how it would be rare for someone from Turkey to solve the moral dilemma based on the abstract principles of justice and rights. Considering how kinship and affiliative ties are so valued in the culture, I assumed that the moral decision would be based on that, yet the psychological literature was telling me that this is an inferior way of decision making. There was this gap between my embodied, intuitive knowledge and how “subjects” in research were understood through generalisations of experiments done in WEIRD contexts, and I subconsciously internalised the hierarchy: As Turkish people, were we supposed to learn to be logical and moral on a universal level, distancing ourselves from our connections to loved ones, to become “civilised”? Years later, embarking on Carol Gilligan's (1982) critique of Kohlberg's theory on how it privileged the male-centred principles of justice and rights in moral reasoning while devaluing the moral perspectives of girls and women which often prioritise care and relationships, felt like a breath of fresh air. I could feel the gap between my embodied knowledge and theories and methodologies narrowing, and everything slowly falling into place as I discovered the breadth of knowledge in critical feminist social psychology. I then decided to pursue a PhD in critical social psychology, and acquiring the conceptual tools to acknowledge and understand the social construction and the social process of psychological knowledge in the field felt theoretically, epistemologically, methodologically, and intuitively liberating.

Since then, as a Turkish social psychologist based in the United States, I have been conducting gender and sexuality research across borders and within the local context of Turkey, focusing on immigrating sexual minority folks in the United States and on those situated in urban and rural landscapes of Turkey. Recognising the impact of the researcher on the research process, and the harmful narratives that are created (or internalised) about my homeland when this impact is not recognised, I attuned to the ways in which I moved in my own communities back at home in Turkey.

I grew up in Istanbul, a sprawling metropolis built over two continents, housing 15 million residents. I observed, engaged with, and grew through the contexts and dynamics that compose the land until I was 18, witnessing the daily tensions of East and West, conservative and liberal, modernity and tradition among the material juxtaposition of minarets and modern skyscrapers, ancient bazaars and bustling avenues with high-end shops of American and European brands. In the context of neoliberal capitalism, along with the rise of globalisation, facilitated by my own move towards what we call “the West” for my education, first to the United Kingdom, then to the United States, these dichotomies began to lose their relevance to me. I noticed how what is considered to be “Western” formed a tight fabric in the context of Turkey and what I learned in the United States included many Indigenous and non-Western scholars who resist U.S.-centric ways of knowing. As an outsider/insider researcher (Smith, 2016), I also recognised the ways in which my home and the research field became blurred when I went back home as a researcher and a local, similar to Bhatia's (2017) process of returning home to India to conduct research. Recognising that the ethnographic research process involves “one's body, culture, politics, thoughts and emotions” (Bhatia, 2017, p. 278), I paid attention to moments during fieldwork, taking notes and recording my observations and reflections, rather than dismissing them. I thus offer these ethnographic vignettes and reflections on fieldwork as sources of knowledge that enriched my understanding of conducting gender and sexuality research in Turkey.

On context and methodology: Reflecting on my research practice

In the summer of 2021, I conducted a feminist ethnography on the liberation of women in Turkey with a small team of co-researchers/filmmakers, including my sister. Feminist ethnography (Davis & Craven, 2022) aims to produce scholarship in various forms, including forms of research that will publicly engage with/benefit the communities we study (Schrock, 2013). With this commitment in mind, we not only conducted interviews and participant observations, but also filmed a documentary about the freedom dreams of women in Turkey. Mindful of the ways in which both research and the camera can further reinforce racial and gender inequality by objectifying and marginalising those that are filmed and studied, I paid particular attention to the politics of representation and location and kept a reflexive account of my interpretations of my participants’ experiences and my interactions with them.

For this paper, I focus on my field notes from two locations: (a) Muş in the Southeastern region of Turkey, with a Kurdish-Alevi (ethnic and minority population in Turkey) family of four women, and (b) Ordu in the Black Sea region, with a family of four generations of women collecting hazelnuts in the fields. I specifically focus on these two locations as these were the regions where the tensions across differences between researchers and participants became particularly visible.

In the early days of June, my sister Aslı, our camerawoman Neslihan, and I stayed with the Kurdish-Alevi family for 7 days in a village up in the mountains of Muş. The village is located on a plateau among various groups of mountains, and it is primarily a Kurdish-Alevi village with a population of 50 people. With its stone-built homes and winding dirt paths, the village is surrounded by a landscape of wildflowers, herbs, and the floating river. Later in the summer, with the addition of a sound recordist to our team, we travelled to the Black Sea region to meet with the family that collects hazelnuts in the fields of Ordu. Turkey provides the largest share of global hazelnut production and export, most of which is from the Black Sea region (Gürel et al., 2019). The village is tucked away on a hill thick with hazelnut groves and tea plantations.

Following feminist epistemologies that challenge laboratory experiments as the only legitimate sites for knowledge production (Doucet, 2018), these locations provided insights into reflexivity beyond the regular interview processes where the interviewer and interviewee meet only for two hours and then go their separate ways. During the ethnographic visits, the interviews were full of family members’ interruptions; there were breaks for food offerings, and we were drinking countless glasses of tea and Turkish coffee. One interview even ended up with me reading a participant's coffee fortune and the participant asking me whether they would make a lot of money from the nuts they collected this year. As my analysis reveals, these chaotic and relational environments provided critical insights into how reflexivity gets played out in such contexts.

Conducting a feminist ethnography in the rural landscape of Turkey: Reflecting on my field notes

This was a question in response to my declaration “I’m from Istanbul” that the husband of Hazal, the Kurdish-Alevi woman who was one of our participants, asked as we were having breakfast in a secluded village of Muş. It might come across as an insulting question, considering the circumstances under which it is used in the United States: usually, it is a white person who asks this question to someone who looks different from them after that person has declared that they are from a particular U.S. location. But it has a contextual meaning in Turkey, reflecting the country's domestic migrational patterns. Istanbul has historically been a city that has drawn internal migrants from many towns and cities across Turkey, mostly due to its economic opportunities (Gürsoy & Badur, 2022). Hence, the subtext usually means: “Which region did your family emigrate from?”

So, when Hasan asks me where I am “really from,” he's asking for my family's journey across the domestic terrain; he is asking for my story. He is trying to get to know me; it is an attempt at connection. If, for example, I had said, “I come from Kayseri,” he might have replied: “Oo mantısı meşhur oranın” (They have good dumplings there) or “Oo bizim Mesut da Kayserili” (My friend Mesut is from Kayseri). I respond by saying: “Nowhere else, I’m from Istanbul.” Hasan does not respond for a few seconds. I notice that this is not a satisfactory answer for him. There is no immediate expression on his face. Silence continues for a few more seconds, and the disappointment slowly becomes palpable from his facial expression.

The disappointment then turns into a bit of frustration, as he asks rather vigilantly: “Tamam da baban nereli?” (OK, but where's your father from?). This is another attempt at connection, another attempt to decipher me through my patriarchal familial history. This question also has a subtext, where he's asking about my kütük (literally: family tree/log), meaning where your family's civil registration is, which depends on where your father was born. Reflecting on kütük, I think about all the matriarchal histories that are erased as women's registration locations change to their husbands’ when they marry. I sense the frustration in his voice as he asks this question, his tone almost protesting: “Why didn’t you understand the question when I first asked it?” I feel incompetent, wishing I could answer the question properly. “Babam Ankaralı” (My father is from Ankara). I pause for a second, thinking how this is not a satisfactory answer. Ankara is another large, urban city. It is the capital and the political, bureaucratic, and administrative centre of Turkey. I need to be more specific. So, I add, “Çankaya’dan” (a huge district in a large, urban city). What a disappointment. And even if we were living in a feminist utopia where he also asked about where my mother was from, that still would not help. My mother was born in Izmir, the largest third city in Turkey, and was raised in Istanbul, that dreaded metropolis again. Hasan does not really respond. He lifts his head and utters, “ha.” The conversation ends there.

When he asks the same question to Neslihan, our camerawoman who travelled with us from Istanbul, she answers: “Adanalı’yım ben” (I’m from Adana). I look over to Hasan and observe a huge smile blooming across his face. Bells of victory ring as he responds, “Ooo Adana! Sen acı seversin, bak bakayım şunun tadına” (“Oh you’re from Adana! You must like spicy food, try this”), passing acuka (spicy breakfast spread) across the breakfast table to her. In the following five days, Nihan's new name became Adanalı (the one from Adana), and everyone in the family, all the uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins, started calling her by this nickname. In the meantime, they kept forgetting my and my sister's names and didn’t have any nicknames for us.

My sister, Neslihan, and I were staying at the family's house and they were extremely kind to us throughout our stay. They were constantly feeding us, always asking us if we were comfortable or if we needed anything. A few days later, I was helping prepare a classic breakfast spread in the kitchen, which involved putting together a spread of black olives, cucumbers, fresh tomatoes, a variety of cheeses, freshly baked bread, jams, and honey. I was in charge of cutting the tomatoes for the breakfast spread, and I asked Yalçın, the husband of Hazal's sister, how many tomatoes I should cut. Yalçın seemed appalled by this question. He stared at me with disbelief as he said: “What do you mean? You know how many people we are. Cut accordingly.” He couldn’t believe how I could ask such a foolish question. How could I not know how many tomatoes to cut? Had I not prepared breakfast for nine people before? I sensed judgment emanating from him. I thought about how he must think how women from Istanbul neglect their domestic duties.

In those moments when I helped in the kitchen in Muş or helped collect hazelnuts in Ordu I was so slow and incompetent that I sometimes became a laughingstock among my participants’ families. My slowness (and my sister's) was noticed by all family members. As we were observing them through our camera, our audio recording device, and my pen and paper, they were returning the favour: observing us without any equipment but with attention to detail. They made little jokes that picked on our slow movements. Witnessing the women in the family cook for a family of nine in one hour, the rice boiling while the salad is chopped to the smallest pieces, the mezzes prepared on the side, all of the action happening so fast, all three sisters of the family moving skilfully as if they were masters of Twister, ¹ moving from one side to the other without disturbing each other, I started to make fun of myself too. I truly am slow; I do not know how to play kitchen Twister, and I don’t possess many of the skills valued here.

In Ordu, among the hazelnut fields, Filiz, the 53-year-old grandmother of the four-generation family, was resting after a morning of collecting hazelnuts. We were sitting among hazelnut trees by a steep mountain slope when she turned to me and my sister and asked us: “Sizin hiç toprağınız olmadı mı? Hep apartman mı yani?” (“You ladies never had any land? It was always apartment buildings you stayed at?”). Looking around her surroundings full of hazelnut groves and then down towards the soil she was sitting on, she told me how her mother would go crazy if she did not touch the soil and asked me if my mother felt the same. I thought about my mother as Filiz pressed her palms against the soil. Considering my mother, raised in Istanbul, who studied computer engineering in Rochester, New York, moving from one concrete jungle to another, mostly engaging with programming software, I said: “No, she doesn’t.” Another attempt at connection wasted. The conversation ended once again.

These moments in between and during interviews reveal our different positionalities as women of Turkey and the dis/connections between researcher and participants. I am a Turkish woman from Istanbul educated in “the West.” My diverse participants had a variety of identities that are different from mine; one key difference being our experiences in the range of urban and rural landscapes. I notice the attempts at connection from my participants, asking me where I’m from, asking me about my mother's relationship with nature, and my unsatisfactory answers halting the shared knowledge that might have developed otherwise. The silence after these attempts is the gap between our experiences, the distance between us, and it makes me question how I am listening to my participant's experiences, especially in relation to areas in which I am not experienced.

On reflexivity, differences, and power during fieldwork

As critical researchers, we are trained to see our position as a privilege when conducting research with our participants. We are trained to be mindful of the power dynamics in research, where the researcher holds all the power in relation to the participants. However, feminist scholars situated in Turkey urge researchers to be wary of U.S.-centric applications of intersectionality, reflexivity, and other theories to subaltern contexts. In her article titled “I Am Guilty, I Am Helpless, Angry and Chagrined: The Emotions, Power and Ethics of Feminist Fieldwork,” Erdoğan (2020) describes the tension between her own emotions and the assumptions of participatory action research by using Jaggar's (2014) conceptualisation of emotion in feminist epistemology. For her research, she spent the years 2013 to 2015 as a “worker” (her quotation marks) in the tomato fields and factories located in the Marmara and Southeastern regions of Turkey. She describes how she noticed that she held an assumption that she should “harbour good feelings” toward the participants, especially women workers. In tracing where this assumption came from, she observed how it stemmed from placing herself in a more “advantageous” position as a researcher. She describes how she got angry at women who took longer breaks, which meant longer hours of work for other women, and how she got frustrated with sergeant women who constantly yelled at others, and asks herself: “How can getting angry at the disadvantaged, not getting along with them be possible for a feminist?” She then traces the origins of this question and leads us to how she places herself in an advantageous position as “educated,” “Turkish” (most women she worked with were Kurdish), and “middle class.” She describes placing herself in an advantageous position as “smugness,” as this is how it made her feel. As she placed herself in this advantageous position, she was ready to do her best to equalise any power imbalances during research. What she realised, however, was that while her membership in these categories was advantageous in her own social circle, it did not matter as much for the workers in the tomato fields. She noticed she was perceived as single, childless, a student, profane (godless), unskilful, and an immigrant (her family had emigrated from the Balkans). In her article, she scrutinises her guilt, helplessness, anger, and resentment at having assumedthat researchers are more powerful than participants.

In my research, I have come to observe a similar pattern. The identity categories I would typically list as privileged positions, such as my education in “the West” and my position as a U.S.-based researcher, did not matter to my participants. In their eyes, these categories placed me in a nonadvantageous position: when they learned that I am unmarried, live so far away, and that I read books for a living on top of that, they mostly felt sorry for me. What mattered to them was the urban/rural distinction, which did not occur to me before this interaction, which reflects my own privilege, my hegemonic conceptualisation of intersectionality, and what Nakata et al. (2012) call the “conceptual limits of my own thinking” (p. 121). How I interpret the moments of tension and disconnection that arose around my urban background is that my participants and their families recognised my “smugness” in coming from Istanbul and the hierarchies I potentially harbour unconsciously between urban and rural landscapes, and that they tried to destabilise that hierarchy by dismissing my hometown and by connecting with someone else from another relatively rural place. I interpret these remarks as attempts to reconsider/reevaluate my power by making me recognise other categories that I should attend to, such as my birthplace, my relationship to the land, and my tomato-cutting skills. This has been a key takeaway and a lesson that I carry forward as a researcher in recognising my role in constructing knowledge about (for) the “other” (Fine, 1994) and in attempting to balance power dynamics by recognising what my participants highlight into the research.

This is not to disregard the advantageous role of the researcher, but rather to complicate the notion of power in research to recognise the perception of our participants in relation to power rather than going in with the assumption that the researcher always holds the privilege. As Ahonen et al. (2014) argue, we must seek ways to recognise the multiplicity and fluidity of difference in research, to resist generalisations through objectification and categorisation. Foucault's (1976) conceptualisation of power as a force that ebbs and flows between social agents is useful for unpacking the power dynamics and differentials in contentious moments during research. The fluid notion of power is also taken up in other subaltern psychological research, such as van Schalkwyk et al.'s (2014) work investigating power/powerlessness in domestic violence survivors in South Africa, which moves beyond dominant narratives of women who survive domestic abuse towards perceiving the complexity of women's subjectivities “postabuse” and recognising their shifting sense of power in relation to their abusers. My research suggests applying the fluidity of power and the complexity of subjectivities to the researcher–participant relationship as well.

Differences between participants and researchers have historically reinforced stratifications, especially in feminist research. Acknowledging the different positionalities and the variety of struggles women face depending on their race, class, age, and sexual orientation has also led to studying the issues of women across the globe, as patriarchal traditions and practices such as veiling, polyamory, and child marriage were of concern for the “sexually liberated” women in the West. The dominant transnational feminist narrative has been constructed as one of the Global North “saving” women in the Global South in pursuit of “liberation”; and this dynamic has been replicated over and over again in which the “liberated sisters” in WEIRD populations rescue those in the “developing” world, treating women across diverse settings as powerless, ignorant victims (Kagıtçıbaşı, 1995). In her article concerning the discourses of solidarity attending to the collapse of the Rana Plaza in Savar, Bangladesh, in which over 1,100 garment factory workers were killed, Siddiqi (2014) discusses how First World feminists were publicly showcasing their solidarity with Third World workers. Siddiqi (2014) argues how the antisweatshop campaigns that subsequently followed rested upon the power of the prosperous northern consumer to “save” poor Third World women through the former's ethical and sustainable consumption practices. Siddiqi (2014) characterises such moves of solidarity as “vertical,” highlighting the power asymmetries between the two groups involved.

Attending to how such vertical dynamics and categorisations can lead to harmful constructions/consequences, I keep in mind Siddiqi's (2014) question of how to envision solidarity from our specific locations with women “elsewhere,” or with women that may hold different intersectional identities, without reinforcing hierarchies or turning to politics centred around “saving.” Throughout the research process, I attended to the question of how we can form horizontal relations between researchers and participants, while at the same time attending to the structural forces that keep these hierarchies in place.

The distance between my participants’ experiences and mine—along with other agents such as my sister and the extended families of our participants, who were mostly present during the ethnography—allowed me to acknowledge my assumptions, limitations, and preconceptions along the stratifications within one culture. Considering that reflexivity involves a continuous process of questioning one's positionality, our construction of knowledge, and the power dynamics in research (Pillow, 2003), humility must form the foundational fabric of this process. Tervalon and Murray-Garcia (1998) define cultural humility as acknowledging that one cannot possibly fully understand every person or every aspect of their identity by knowing certain traditions or facts about their culture. In this research, I have come to experience that humility is vital even while conducting research in one's own culture. In fact, it is arguably more indispensable as there is the danger of cultural essentialism when one is conducting their research at home, where the lines of home and fieldwork get blurred and one can make assumptions about how their own personal experience reflects others’ experiences from the same culture. Cultural humility requires the acknowledgement of one's limitations and the willingness to learn from others, particularly from the research participants. The practice of humility can thus help researchers to remain open to the perspectives and experiences of their participants, fostering a more ethical and respectful engagement.

As I recognise the differences between my participants and me, our attempts at connection, and the unintended disconnections, I tried to actively challenge polarisations that might further reinforce the differences between us. In research investigating the experiences and identities of rural girls, Crann (2021) emphasises the need to move away from the urban–rural binary, as girls reveal a variety of rural positionalities. In my research questions and throughout the research process, I renounced the use of comparisons and binaries, such as whether an urban woman is more “liberated” than a rural one, rejecting the dichotomies of “liberated” versus “unliberated” and “rural” versus “urban,” while recognising our different experiences around the axes of urban–rural landscapes. Renouncing rigid binaries also invited me to pay attention to areas that my participants cared about (e.g., being married), to learn about experiences I do not know much about (e.g., skills in the kitchen), while simultaneously attending to my own beliefs and cultural identities (e.g., why did I not recognise these categories/skills as important?).

Embracing humility for a more nuanced and embodied understanding of reflexivity in research rests in the foundation of actively listening to participants. As Shay (2002) argues, researchers tend to categorise, analyse, and interpret as soon as they hear the participants speak in qualitative research. Shay (2002) urges researchers to actively listen before engaging in any of these processes and to resist “mental binning” altogether. In this vein, Gilligan and Eddy (2021) describe radical listening as directing researchers to pay attention to the unexpected, to notice what they did not anticipate or what surprised them. By embodying cultural–social humility and by embracing radical listening, I instead asked my participants to elaborate on the experiences in which I might have preconceptions or have little to no experience, with attempts to replace judgment with curiosity (Gilligan & Eddy, 2021). To me as a critical social psychologist, radical listening is one of the foundations of conducting critical feminist research, a crucial way to resist stratifications, polarisations, and hierarchies that are constantly reproduced in research.

While I do find embracing humility and engaging in radical listening to be useful tools to conduct feminist psychological research in subaltern contexts, I am also reminded of McDowall's (2021) work recognising how we do not yet have the language or tools to find a pathway out of the complex relationship created by social, political, and historical circumstances which impact “Indigenous peoples’ (and indeed all peoples) lives” (p. 10). In this process, I find embracing humility and engaging in radical listening as tools for practicing what Pillow (2003) calls uncomfortable reflexivity, which acknowledges the imperfection of the representations we make in the construction of knowledge, arguing how questioning the personal in the formation of such representations can make us better account for people's “struggles for self-representation and self-determination” (Visweswaran, 1994, p. 32). Uncomfortable reflexivity is thus a perpetual process of noticing moments where we can engage in open, exploratory, and creative inquiry in these difficult intersections (Nakata et al., 2012), and cultural humility and radical listening are the practices that allow us to stay open to keep thinking, reflecting, and learning.

Concluding remarks

I offer a nuanced understanding of reflexivity in feminist psychology, especially for research conducted in non-Western, subaltern, majority world, and/or Indigenous contexts. I expose the conceptual limits of my own thinking, such as my inability to recognise differential experiences in urban and rural landscapes, while actively resisting perceiving these as rigid binaries. Through this research, I was able to recognise critical feminist conceptions of reflexivity that push beyond naming categories that are typically listed, such as age, race, gender, and class, towards uncomfortable reflexivity that recognises how the representations we construct in research are imperfect. The critical examination of reflexivity thus offers ways of having more nuanced and fluid understandings of representation and power, recognising how research is a process of making and remaking meaning together and how reflexivity makes that process visible. To foster more horizontal relations and avoid further stratifications that typically occur in psychological research, I offer embracing cultural–social humility and active and radical listening as means of shifting how we conduct research and relate to/with our participants.