Agency and the Halfi-Position
Contribution to the 2025 Workshop
Re-Search: A Workshop Exploring the Notion of Research as Theory, Practice and Identity
Organized by Marcia C. Schenck (University of Potsdam) and Morgan Robinson (Mississippi State University)
Reflection on Agency and the Halfi-Position
This reflection essay recalls a workshop on the concept of research as theory, practice, and identity[1]. It has made me reflect on my personal experiences and challenges of doing research in liminal spaces. The workshop has brought forward important issues related to the intentionality and positionality of a researcher, the challenges of the “half-in-position,” as well as ethical and methodological aspects of research, prejudice and bias, and their implication in micro-historiography. Silencing was at the center of the discussion in most of the conversations. Questions about whose story matters, who writes it, in which ways they are made available or obscured and why, have led to interrogating the role of researchers and systemic barriers related to research and archiving practices. All these points resonated with my experience, but in this essay, I reflect on two points: agency and the “halfi-position” of a researcher. I use agency referring to communities’ inherent ability and responsibility to explore and understand their context and comfortably narrate and preserve their first hand experiences and memories. The halfi-position, as I further explained it below, does refer to hybridity not in social identity or cultural norms, but in researchers’ role and position in meeting community goals while disciplinary and systematic inquire roles (scholarly position) competes or contradicts.
Agency
The importance of lived experiences (embodied stories) as enablers for conducting research especially related to marginalized groups like refugees has been highlighted in various writings. The recent Albtran et al. (2024) article is a good example [2],it argues in favor of direct participation that helps to repair or “remake relations of power” (p. 580) between marginalized communities and institutions they rely on. In decolonial research discourses, Maldonado similarly calls for an “epistemic turn” so that the “damne” emerges as a questioner, thinker, theorist, writer, and communicator (p. 24). One of my take aways from this discussion is that such an epistemic turn, besides satisfying intellectual curiosity, could also be used to redefine relations of power and regain agency through authentic first hand stories. Such stories provide different versions that direct intentions and positionalities to contest, negotiate with or counter second-hand stories that are created due to various contextual reasons—scholarly, humanitarian, political, or personal. It is not the data or stories’ sources that matter but the multiplicity of narratives and the existence of local space for discourses and negotiations. As Adelman and Eckert (2024) noted there has never been a settled narrative, but always contestations through entanglement of truths and lies as well as remembering and forgetting. Maldonado borrowed the term “damne” from Frantz Fanon, referring to condemned people, which could also refer to the ordinary or people at the margins in various ways. Such groups of people often are research subjects/objects who carry stories created for but not by or to them,
which mutes their agency.
The dialogue also reinforced my thought of the idea of “disobedience” of the conventional research culture not only in its extractive nature but in its abstractive forms that become senseless or unintelligible for the ‘damne’. This brings up the need for a common space for inquiry that is not constrained by system or methods. In other words, it was a recall for Arjun Appaduria’s the “right to research to everyone”. Of course, the shortcomings of a conventional model of research in its extractive nature to local communities has been recognized and led to the emergence of a participatory research model in various forms and opened doors for communities to engage in research. Several scholarly works in various fields discuss the benefits of community-based research on a number of key issues [3].
So far, however, participatory approaches have been “domesticated in ways that have reduced its transformative potential”[4] and expressed in “populist ways” mainly for development agendas, intended mainly to meet either biological (physical) or psychosocial needs, but not restore agency. In other words, by its design and purpose, it has been more “programmatic” to solve problems rather than being “transformative” to raise social consciousness, satisfy curiosity, or negotiate with other works [5]. Even though some authors (i.e., Gibbs) argue that participatory research benefits refugees by increasing research outcomes due to enhanced research experiences [6], the extent of the benefits and long-term positive impact of refugee-centered participatory research in improving not only development programs and policies remains unclear [7]. Moreover, it is unclear whether such research helps its participants regain agency through meaningful contributions throughout all stages in the process of inquiry. Though efforts have been made by academic scholars to follow the principles of reciprocity and create a balanced mode of collaboration to give space for local voices, in actual practice, the inherent incompatibility of goals, methods, constraints, and contexts have made participatory approach more of a token [8], and community voices have remained silenced or alienated from their agents who embody them.
In relation to agency, I think participatory approaches in practice faces two challenges. First, participatory models between scholars and local participants is often an extension of the top-down scholarship without meaningfully helping local participants to initiate research ideas and leverage local wisdom. Rather, the top down approach inadvertently makes them lose it. Secondly, local participants could benefit little from the information (data) collected and research outcomes, as methods of analysis and abstraction of knowledge production limits them to understand and utilize them. On the other hand, scholars’ sincere efforts to make local participants engage in research make them either compromise their professional and methodological position or lead them to become tokenistic, or play around in between depending on situations. Moreover, research priorities and funders’ requirements, logistical issues, and systemic regulatory barriers together with constrained research schedule and budget make a realistic form of collaboration practically difficult. In short, I think collaboration hardly provides solutions to community level inquiries except reducing the pace of eroding agency.
After an extensive tour into communities, Margaret J. Wheatley and Deborah Frieze underscored the importance of recognizing the richness of local communities experiences and cultures, and their potential to access their “creativity, intelligence, and inventiveness” within the communities own contextual terms [9]. Such an empathic approach helps to (re)build new approaches and methods that serve communities to restore agency. When such local level inquiries are enhanced, scholarly efforts would not be at the expense of local knowledge, rather they augment each other’s. It also become a space to practice epistemic humility and connect communities with academia. This not only helps mitigate agency and power imbalances, but also becomes a remedy for tokenistic form of collaborations, which often does not organically emerge from below rather from top down in such ways that skills and resources are traded with raw data and first-hand or lived life experiences.
The Halfi-position
On the other hand, when a community researcher equipped with ‘scientific theories and methods’ and technically becomes an outsider, he/she falls into a trap that Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) called a “halfi” position [10]. This halfi-position is not based on social identity, as the case of Abu-Lughod, or on hybridity resulting from professional and cultural influences, as explained by Kirin Nuryana (1993). Instead, it is a halfi-position of a researcher trapped between meeting community goals by ‘laymanizing’ ‘intellectual identities’ and readjusting power relations and connecting locals to a larger space, with scholarly goals of expanding knowledge, advancing a professional career, and complying with disciplinary methodological requirements that systematically guide research.
The two positions—one driven by a natural need to reemerge as a wanderer within the community (or to be a community) for understanding contexts and addressing issues to the extent of basic survival reasons, and the other, originating from intellectual pursuits supported by resources and regulatory privileges—compete at the grassroots level inquiry. The latter appears to be a ‘luxurious’ stance from the marginalized community’s perspective, whose inquiries are basic, not scholarly, or career oriented.
The dilemma of merging the two needs, faced by halfi-position manifests in various steps. It may start with embracing a diversity of experiences and stories instead of reducing them to simple takeaways or lessons, then comes in which ways (de)reconstruct them with different methodological tools in ways that align with existing or intended theories, filtering out certain aspects, silencing, or/and diverting them from the local contexts. When the interest to preserve local ways of producing knowledge mixes with the formal methodological complexities that require background knowledge of certain discipline(s), technical jargon, systematic data collection and analysis skills, it competes with (and mostly overrides) the chaotic local inquiries. In effect, balancing the halfi position becomes a challenge. In most cases, the formalized inquiry overrides and the disguised halfi position becomes in actual sense a method for an extension of academia and facilitates monopoly of knowledge production through the extraction of data and local wisdom. During my research, while I was doing an interview, being trusted as a member of community, I managed to collect deeper experiences and emotions, but their utility is seen only during my presentations in conferences not in the community level dialogues.
In an effort to accommodate the two different and incompatible positions, a compromise of research processes happens and satisfies neither of the local community inquiry nor the rigorous academic pursuit for new knowledge. One example of the halfi dilemma is the effort to filter out stories with fickle memories and emotions, considering them as unrealistic sources for an ‘objective’ inquiry, as if embodied experiences and manifested emotions are not objective in their own ways. Distancing from such experiences and emotions in search of objective evidence, rather than investigating and building upon them while understanding contexts, risks the position of community level inquiry, silencing voices, and leads to echoing existing narratives.
Therefore, instead of trying to integrate community research within academic research in the form of a ‘participatory’ approach, it may be better to recognize their inherent difference in objectives and their incompatibility in methods. Community-level inquiry or research could be seen as a continuously chaotic process (learning through experiences) that has a local scope by its very nature, and is holistic (not disciplinary). It helps to be better aware of one’s context, engage in solving local problems, and/or question injustices. This makes active local participants and also prepares them for higher-level collaborations for knowledge production. Though it is not primarily aimed at new knowledge creation or extension that could also happen in the process – this could also not be ruled out. Such a space allows the culture of community-level inquiry restore, remake power relations, the halfi-dilemma gradually reduces and facilitates collaborations with academic-related research in more fruitful ways satisfying both needs.
Notes
[1] Thank you for organizing such an important workshop and inviting me to take part.
[2] Ahmad Albtran, Pinar Aksu, Zuhair Al-Fakir, Heidar Al-Hashimi, Helen Baillot, Azad Izzeddin, Hyab
Teklehaimanot Yohannes, Steve Kirkwood, Bulelani Mfaco, Tandy Nicole, Muireann Ní Raghallaigh,
Gordon Ogutu, Zoë O’Reilly, and Angham Younes, “Building an Ethical Research Culture: Scholars
of Refugee Background Researching Refugee-Related Issues,” Journal of Refugee Studies 37, no. 2
(June 2024): 579–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feae005.
[3] Please see Kurt Lewin, 1967; Paulo Freire, 2000; Andrew Flinn, 2007; Jacques Derrida, 1996;
Ann C Macaulay 2017, Nina B. Wallerstein and Bonnie Duran, 2006; Gibbs, Lisa, Gold, and et al,
2008
[4] Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (2005). Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics of
Development, p.13
[5] Dona, G. (2007). The Microphysics of Participation in Refugee Research, p. 215
[6] Gibbs, L., and et. al., p. 55
[7] Doná, G. (2007). The Microphysics of Participation in Refugee Research, p. 217
[8] Ahmad A. and et.al., (2024). Building an ethical research culture
[9] Margaret J. Wheatley, Deborah Frieze. (2011). Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into
Communities Daring to Live the Future Now, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, ISBN 1609941136,
9781609941130.
[10] Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Writing against Culture’, in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present,
ed. by Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), pp. 137–54
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