Beyond the insider/outsider: negotiating researcher’s positionality and reflexivity in the field

Abstract

This intervention paper examines the lived realities and methodological complexities of conducting fieldwork in rural Indonesia, focusing on the geographies of extractive industries and transparency in natural resource revenue management. Drawing on personal field experiences of interviewing people ‘back home’, the paper interrogates the constructed and negotiated nature of "the field," challenging the notion of the field as a neutral or bounded site. Through a reflexive feminist lens, the paper explores how the researcher’s positionality, shaped by ethnicity, gender, education, and local cultural norms, dynamically shifts between and beyond the insider and outsider statuses. The paper discusses how, throughout the field experience, the researcher’s positionality and reflexivity influence access, power relations, and data collection and interpretation. The paper also highlights the representational dilemmas faced when amplifying community voices, particularly in patriarchal and multilingual contexts. By situating these experiences within broader debates on the politics, practices, and ethics of fieldwork in geography, the article proposes four interventions to acknowledge the ways researcher’s continuously shifted positionality into methodological training and practice.