Eighteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Social science researchers have long deliberated on the challenges and possibilities associated with being an insider or an outsider in qualitative research. This is primarily because in qualitative research, the stories shared, how they are told and the narratives that get formed by the researcher are influenced by researchers positioning (social, political and economic). Drawing on the ‘insider’ experiential insights of three qualitative researchers who conducted 40 interviews with second-generation Ethiopian and Eritrean youth in Canada this paper revisits the insider-outsider discussion within both the research (data collection and analysis), and the knowledge dissemination process. First, the paper complicates binaries (insider-outsider; privileged-oppressed, us-them) and second, presents how both the research and knowledge dissemination process demonstrate the ways in which the researchers came to occupy the space in-between (Hellawell 2006). Critical reflections across various stages of the research process provided epistemological insights thus elucidating how the methodological direction of the study was relative to the positioning of the researcher on a continuum between the insider and outsider. This paper critically engages with these concepts, and how the continual state of fluidity in positioning allowed for knowledge dissemination process that goes beyond the conventional research outputs in the form of conference presentations and academic papers to one that is generated and driven by study participants (i.e. digital media).