Think Before You Share: Navigating Power Hierarchies and Decoloniality in Research

by Anna CohenMiller and Almira Tabaeva

Find more posts from Dr. CohenMiller here.

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Khiva, Uzbekistan, Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash

Preface: A disrupting experience during an international student presentation led to this topic. We had initially planned to share right after the event, but realized the topic was too close, too sensitive. Now, after many months, we return to this piece to share about a topic of decolonial research, privilege, and ethics. We write this piece in two parts, each of us narrating our understanding of the experience and how it relates to power hierarchies and researcher responsibility.

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I was writing a chapter about integrating concepts of decolonial practices, power, and privilege (for this book, a follow-up to this one) when Almira and I talked. She shared about an unsettling incident involving issues of research respect, trust, and ethics. As a colleague in the Consortium of Gender Scholars, co-author on topics around gender and equity, and a former PhD student I worked with for years Kazakhstan, I was deeply moved.

Almira is an Uzbek-Kazakhstani decolonial and gender researcher who studies ethics in research and mothers in academia in Central Asia. She shared a poignant and troubling experience of researcher privilege, lack of respect, and questionable ethics. Within the presentation, Almira recounts the foreign PhD student’s research about nation-building in Uzbekistan and the lack of understanding of the dynamic cultural, political and social context of Central Asia. In the presentation, the researcher – who was an outsider to the region – emphasized a negative slant on the context and people, showing photos of dirty areas, such as a derelict toilet outside the home of the local translator who helped in the research. She shared:

I kept silent, but in the end the researcher shared a photo of the translator’s old house, outdoor dirty toilet, saying “Tashkent (the capital city) is not Uzbekistan, the real Uzbekistan is these rural places, where you can meet such toilets”. Everyone looked at me [as an Uzbek woman], so I asked, “What if your translator – as you described them as a cultural guide, who did a lot for you, were here in this audience? How would they feel? Is it ethical to show these photos and describe these details in such a way?” The response was that the researcher had a critical theoretical lens which allowed them to say anything.

The presentation was not about access to water or the use of bathroom facilities. This meant the photos shown, of a toilet, to an international audience emphasized through multimodal means pre-judgments of rural areas with limited facilities and the differences with Western standards. The outsider researcher could be considered as falling prey to what Edward Said would refer to as an “Orientalist” gaze of Central Asia/ Near East or what Patti Lather refers to as a “tourist gaze,” a topic she recounts in my forthcoming book.

Almira: The reaction of Prof. Anna to my depressing experience was like a breath of fresh air, as I had been suffering from the chaos happening inside for the last several days. It was before the presentation that I started thinking about decolonization of gender discourse in Uzbekistan being strongly affected by Northrop’s book, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia and some other studies written by westerners, who primarily relied on biased Russian archives and misrepresented the Uzbek women by diminishing local agencies. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes in her groundbreaking book on Decolonizing Methodologies, “The history of the colonies, from the perspective of the colonizers, has effectively denied other views of what happened and what the significance of historical ‘facts’ may be to the colonized” (p. 76). Smith explains further, it sounds as if, “They came, They saw, They named, They claimed" (p. 80).

One of the aims of social research is to solve the problem and change society as Lynne McLoughlin and Geoff Young discuss, but not to harm and devalue the local context. This experience highlighted the utmost importance of showing respect for the people who participated in your research as you are representing “the people” and “their social life”. Apart from the picture of a “primitive toilet” represented, (which is indeed considered as the norm in majority Muslim societies), the intended message was different, which could be understood only by local people. There was a book on the ground of the toilet, which was used as toilet paper with a picture of Amir Temur - a national hero of Uzbekistan, who we have been taught to admire since childhood. The concept of nation-building in the country was linked to the represented picture. Here, I recalled my recent reading where researchers and anthropologists are described as “Takers and users”, who exploit the hospitality and generosity of native people as explained by Haunani-Kay Trask of colonialism and sovereignty in Hawai’i.

This pain unlocked a secret doorway in my mind by nourishing courage and helped me to enter the dialogue of decoloniality. I am indeed thankful to the other researcher for triggering my critical thinking and transforming my lens. This reflection facilitated the agency to respond to the power imbalances in the creation of knowledge production. As Tlostanova noted, a decolonial option is an “other” paradigm built out of the linear history of epistemes of modernity. Thus, joining the epistemic disobedience, I will be moving onwards decolonizing distorted narratives and representing the diversity and contradictions of local experiences in my research.

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In the end, this example from a research presentation emphasizes the essential need for researchers and practitioners to recognize our great responsibility: (1) in how we interact with community, and (2) what and how we share our research. We need to be willing to critically self-reflect and consider with caution how our research could affect others during the research, or after. And while incorporating the use of the arts, such as photos offers great potential as I have discussed over the years (see here, here, here), it also can cause tremendous division and harm.

Striking moments of research and interaction offer us a chance to consider how we will integrate our experiences for positive change. I’ve been exploring such experiences, pulling together life-changing moments and stories that can have a meaningful impact on our research and selves in positive ways for my new book with Routledge. The transformative learning from life experiences in research – those which are hard, challenging, or positive – offers a potential to move forward to bring about more justice-centered research.

Without recognition of ourselves and the contexts in which we work we can inadvertently fall into reproducing colonial ideals. Power hierarchies within research and in sharing findings can be seen even in international spaces such as conferences intended to highlight and promote diversity and inclusion (see here and here). Tools and approaches, including arts-based research, which can yield great potential for equalizing and promoting voice of those overlooked and marginalized, can also reinforce systemic power imbalances, colonial divisions, and “Othering” those we are learning about.

Thankfully Almira looks back at the experience and sees it as a learning experience, one which perhaps is transformative in nature, a transformative moment in research. The experience re-emphasized her work in decolonial and feminist approaches, led to our thinking deeper about these topics, and hopefully offers guidance for ourselves and others in navigating power hierarchies and decoloniality in research.

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