The role of reflexivity in conducting discourse analysis is paramount to thinking critically and continuously about how the production of knowledge is likely to impinge upon the research process. Whilst adopting this analysis allowed me to interrogate the discourses within the texts, as discussed above, it also challenged me to think about competing discourses, and the tendency to privilege some discourses over others. In this way, I represented a very real threat to merely propagating particular discourses, uncritically and unknowingly. It was important for me, then, to reflect on the knowledge that I drew upon to make sense of the texts, but also throughout the research process.
Whilst reflexivity is a salient feature during the analysis it was also pivotal throughout the research process, especially in the preceding stages such as the data collection. For instance, relying solely on the Life Orientation sexuality education manuals and materials as a form of data collection, in order to investigate constructions of gender and power relations, meant limiting the discursive field in which this topic is spoken about in less formal and taken-for-granted ways. Hence, incorporating the popular music that learners listen to and the classroom observations helped to broaden the discursive field and thereby allow for alternative and/or competing discourses regarding sexuality and sexual socialisation to surface. Therefore, a discourse analytic approach sensitised me into thinking reflexively about the knowledge that I drew upon and what this would actually produce at every point in the research, from conceptualising the research questions, literature review and theoretical framework to the data collection and analysis procedures. In this way, the stages that precede the analysis cannot be underestimated for the influence that they have on the type of data that will be produced.
My role as both a researcher and psychologist were instrumental for informing how I collected and analysed the data. These roles are heavily steeped in various academic and scientific discourses that cannot be regarded as an objective and a value-free way of selecting the most appropriate data collection and analytical strategies. In fact, Parker (2002) argues that subjectivity and experience are
spaces for critically engaging with scientific knowledge as an objective source. This inversely allowed me to draw upon the roles that I occupy, as opposed to shying away from them by thinking through how they construct my experience of the world. In relation to this, Walkerdine (1990) talks about the researcher paying attention to their subjective experiences with regard to gender, race and class during the research process, in order to be as rigorous as possible. Engaging with my subjective experience of the data helped to reduce the extent to which power relations were re-enacted between my perceived expert role and the passive role of the research participants. This was especially important for conducting and analysing the classroom observations.
Equally important for all three sources of data is what Wilkinson (1988) refers to as engaging in disciplinary reflexivity: the capacity to reflect on the research one conducts from one’s academic discipline. When looking over, observing and analysing the data, I found myself often drawing on psychoanalytic terms and concepts, as well as developmental theory and processes in order to describe participants’ patterns of interaction, feelings, images, objects and sounds within and across the data. This was based on my training as a counseling psychologist within community and psychiatric institutions that are driven by psychoanalytic schools of thought.
In relation to this, Rose (1985) talks about the ‘psychological-complex’ which suggests the reducing of social processes to psychological ones, based on knowledge and practices that psychology produced, in order to establish itself as a legitimately scientific discipline. I was acutely aware of this during my research process. However, I also found myself drawing on social constructionist terminology, which represents the discursive turn within psychology to avoid essentialising social categories, such as gender, that psychoanalysis and cognitive-neurosciences slips into. Therefore, I had to pay attention to what felt like a conflict at times, between psychoanalytic and discursive-steeped discourses surfacing in my mind, in order to explain the data. I had to refrain from allowing these competing discourses to interfere with and/or restrict the data from speaking more naturally, and so I relied on Foucault’s necessary and sufficient conditions that make knowledge possible. This meant contextualising the data as thoroughly as I could, but also bringing the competing discourses that surfaced in my mind into conversation about constructing the data in particular ways.
The classroom observations represented more of a physical manifestation of exercising reflexivity, as I was actively involved in constructing these as data. The discourses I drew upon in order to describe the classroom interaction had much to do with how I positioned myself in relation to the educator and learners, which immediately positioned them in relation to me, and vice versa for them. To them, I
represented a middle-class Indian male student from the Department of Psychology at Rhodes University completing a PhD. The educators were aware of this, based on the permission forms and letters of consent that I shared with them, and the introductory meetings held with them. The learners were made aware of this when the educator would ask their permission, no later than a day before, for me to observe them, and again upon introducing me to them on the day of the observation. I dressed in smart-casual attire on every visit to the school, which made me look professional compared to educators who were clad more casually. This distinguished me even further, along with my socio- economic, socio-cultural and racial background, from the communities and schools of the educators and learners, which was very different to the context from which I come. Within the classroom observation context, there may have been several ways I was positioned, based on my position as a young man who comes from a privileged background, is educated and seen as an expert. This impacted on the way in which the educators and learners positioned me and vice versa and therefore I had to be very aware of my position in relation to the educator and learners during the classroom observations, in particular. This had implications for addressing the shifting and contradictory relations of power during the observations between me, the educators and the learners.
During the interviews, my reflexivity was central to analysing learners’ and educators’ conscious and unconscious investments in the gendered positionings invoked through their talk. Reflexivity here is about the intersubjective dynamics between the interviewer and the interviewee. The copious notes I made throughout the interviewing process, of how the interviewees and I subjectively experienced each other, enabled me to engage and unpack the intersubjective dynamic of the interview more deeply. This type of reflexivity lends itself to making interviewees’ emotional worlds come alive, in a way that takes the researcher’s subjective experience of the intersubjective encounter very seriously, as it underscores the psychoanalytic notion that one can only know another through one’s own subjectivity (Frosh & Saville Young, 2008). At the same time, the reflexivity pays attention to the intersubjectivity of the encounter. This is then triangulated with the interviewee’s personal history of significant relationships in order to provide a particular reading of the participant’s subjectivity. The interview as a relational context allows the researcher access into the social and discursive worlds of interviewees, in order to illuminate their emotional worlds that are represented through personal investments, conscious and unconscious, in particular storylines or ideas, which reflect broader discourses that specify subject positions that are taken up and/or resisted.
However, relying upon psychoanalytic theory, as a reflexive tool that represents a psychosocial approach to analysing interviewees as defended subjects who consciously and unconsciously invest in
subject positions made available by discourses, can be counter-productive to the overall project of reflexivity. From a strong discursive point of view, psychoanalytic theory struggles to accommodate competing discourses due to narrow and rigid ontological and epistemological claims that individualise and pathologise the self and subjectivity, which immediately privilege and close off interpretations it makes from competing ones (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008; Georgaca, 2005; Wetherell, 2005). In this way, reflexivity can become about justifying interpretive claims that remain psychoanalytically aloof to multiple and contradictory ways of reading the data.
The uncritical use of reflexivity, when drawing on psychoanalytic theory, has implications for allowing the voices of interviewees to speak in ways that challenge the discourse that I use in order to construct them and myself as particular objects and subjects of enquiry. To guard against this, I took steps to ground my psychoanalytic interpretations of the interview material within my reflexivity and triangulated this with evidence from the texts that reflected participants’ words. Grounding my psychoanalytic interpretations in my reflexivity and the text prevented me from drawing on psychoanalytic discourse in ways that are top-down, which individualises and pathologises interviewees, and limits competing discourses from drawing out interviewees’ material and discursive contexts. In these instances, I tried to avoid the role of the expert interviewer who had access to a discourse that allowed me to establish psychological truths about interviewees. Therefore, my reflexivity talked to the specific intersubjective encounter with participants rather than constructing ‘psychological truths’ about their conscious and unconscious investments in specific subject positions, and generalising this to other areas of their lives.