1.5 CARACTERÍSTICAS Y PARTICULARIDADES DEL JUEGO.

In section 3.3, I drew on the work of other scholars of race and racism to argue for an anti- racist approach to research. Such an approach is influenced by a feminist epistemological position concerned with the researcher’s own positionality in the production of knowledge. As Angela McRobbie (1982: 52) writes: “feminism forces us to locate our own auto- biographies and our experience inside the questions we might want to ask”. In this spirit, I reflect here on how parts of my own biography – and, specifically, political biography – entered into the research process. There is, however, a careful balance to be struck between dwelling on the things shared by myself and research participants (such as political

background, involvement in certain forms of activism, connections to place), and reflecting honestly on distance and differences. As Back (1996: 23) warns, there is a risk of

reproducing a kind of “radical credentialism” if we assume that our personal connections to places or people provide us with a straightforwardly “privileged, or unique, line of sight”. Back (1996: 24) argues that, as tempting as it may be to lean on, “such

credentialism results in little more than an elaborate masquerade that makes the

uncomfortable experience of social dislocation easier to bear”. In this sense, reflecting on some of the more uncomfortable moments of the research may be an important and productive place to begin.

Whilst not every participant I spoke to was Muslim, much of the research focuses on the lives and experiences of Muslims. I am a white, non-Muslim, and perhaps inevitably, this often led to me wondering whether I was ‘qualified’ to do work on Islamophobia. Nobody I spoke to in the course of the research explicitly suggested that I should not be pursuing the questions I was, but participants would often ask me why I had chosen the topic in the first place; people seemed genuinely curious as to why I – as a white, non-Muslim – was interested in understanding and challenging Islamophobia. Due to my own discomfort about my ‘non-Muslimness’, I found myself navigating the research process in particular ways. For example, sometimes I found myself emphasising the anti-racist dimension of the research, rather than the focus on Islamophobia, and foregrounding my own anti-racist ‘credentials’. At other points I was forced to reflect on my own ‘ethnic’ and political heritage. I reflected, for example, on my Jewish family, from whom I inherited a particular understanding of Jewishness and antisemitism that has shaped my intellectual and political

interest in racism, as well as my involvement in pro-Palestine activism. Attempting to explore how personal biographies might be intertwined with intellectual or political interests is one way of addressing the question: ‘what led you to research this topic?’. Furthermore, it is central to an epistemological approach that recognises the social embeddedness of researchers, including their complicity in structures of power and oppression.

My political education in anti-racism and in left-wing politics more generally was also inherited from my family (Jewish and non-Jewish) and, without doubt, has influenced my involvement in various political activities over the years. Inevitably, my own political background entered into conversations with participants. As should be clear from my epistemological position (outlined in section 3.3), this was not a limitation of the research

per se but does require some careful consideration in terms of how a more reciprocal

relationship between researcher and participant can shape research interactions. At times informal conversations that included questions about my own politics took place before the more formal interview. More often than not, in an attempt to mitigate some of the tensions inherent in my researcher-activist role, I tried to steer conversations with participants so that these more informal conversations took place post-interview. Occasionally, however, this postponement of informal sharing was not always possible, or even ethical, especially where participants wanted reassurances about my motivations for doing the research; for example, in the case of Dan, described previously, who needed some reassurance that I was not working for the police.

The case of an interaction with one participant named Kadhim provides a further example of how an attentiveness to the ‘blurring’ of different roles, including when and to what extent this ‘blurring’ is allowed to happen, shaped the research encounter. I spoke to Kadhim, a participant in Glasgow, after I had interviewed him. We sat in my shared office at the university and he began asking me about what had led me to my research topic. In response I mentioned my background in pro-Palestine activism, since he had spoken about his own activism in this area during the interview. As the conversation progressed, it became clear that I had been involved in some activities and tactics that he had been critical of during the course of the interview, including marches and demonstrations. Kadhim became apologetic, as if worried he had inadvertently offended me by voicing his

criticisms of a more ‘direct’ approach to tackling racism. I, of course, reassured him that I was not offended, but this short interaction was revealing; it is likely that Kadhim would have moderated his own answers in the interview had I told him more about my own political background beforehand.

At the same time, this sharing on my part changed the dynamic of the research

relationship. This was particularly clear in my conversation with Kadhim, where it felt as if such mutual sharing acted as a ‘leveller’. The implicit but shared understanding that came from a discussion on pro-Palestine activism was that we were, at least in some ways, political allies rather than researcher and participant. It is difficult to say what the

consequences might have been of establishing this sort of relationship before the interview. It is unlikely that Kadhim would have spoken to me in the first place had there not been at least some implicit understanding of mutual political interests. As Bonnett (1993: 197) argues in his research on anti-racism, the “display of sympathy with anti-

racism/multiculturalism” was an important part of the way he approached the interview process and created an environment conducive to participants being open about their own “political commitments”. On the other hand, these relations of ‘reciprocity’ (see Oakley 1981), and in this case political solidarity, also raise the question of what such relations might obscure for the researcher. It is possible, for example, that a shared political vernacular with participants could contribute to concepts and understandings being taken for granted within an interview. In such circumstances, the use of an interview guide, which in the case of this research ensured that a particular set of questions are asked across all interviews, might serve as a useful counterbalance to this. In this sense, then, my

research approach attempted a careful negotiation between researcher reciprocity, reflexivity, and the use of particular strategies to try and mitigate some of the potential pitfalls of politically-committed and unavoidably ‘messy’ qualitative research.