This article was downloaded by: [Memorial University of Newfoundland]On: 04 October 2014, At: 05:46Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Journal of Language, Identity &EducationPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hlie20

Some Impossibilities AroundResearcher Location:Tensions Around DivergentAudiences, Languages, SocialStratificationsVaidehi RamanathanPublished online: 16 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Vaidehi Ramanathan (2005) Some Impossibilities AroundResearcher Location: Tensions Around Divergent Audiences, Languages, SocialStratifications, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 4:4, 293-297, DOI:10.1207/s15327701jlie0404_4

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327701jlie0404_4

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mem

oria

l Uni

vers

ity o

f N

ewfo

undl

and]

at 0

5:46

04

Oct

ober

201

4

REFERENCES

Canagarajah, S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford, England: OxfordUniversity Press.

Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure?: Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodologicalpower in qualitative research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16, 175–196.

Srinivas, M. (2002). The fieldworker and the field: A village in Karnataka. In M. N. Srinivas, A. M.Shah, & E. A. Ramaswamy (Eds.), The fieldworker and the field: Problems and challenges in socio-logical investigations (pp. 19–37). New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.

SOME IMPOSSIBILITIES AROUND RESEARCHERLOCATION: TENSIONS AROUND DIVERGENT

AUDIENCES, LANGUAGES, SOCIAL STRATIFICATIONS

Vaidehi RamanathanUniversity of California, Davis

In this essay on personal situatedness, I address some complexities around how I asa non-Western researcher write about, for largely Western audiences, issues relat-ing to English and vernacular education in my home communities of Gujarat, In-dia. The tensions I am interested in addressing have to do with intricacies around“locating” myself as both insider and outsider in my native communities and theWest. Some issues that I explore are as follows: (a) the importance of stating the“researcher’s” position vis-à-vis who is being written about, (b) the need to movetoward making such “uncovering” a basic element of situated research, and (c)some local issues on the ground that make it impossible for (postcolonial) re-searchers like myself to ever fully “locate” themselves, split as they sometimes arebetween communities, audiences, social stratifications, and languages. These areall issues that have been haunting me for the last several years and that I am tryingto clarify for myself as I go on in the field.

Some aspects of these questions came to the surface recently when I found thatthe editors of a journal scheduled to publish one of my articles had deleted an entireparagraph in which I directly addressed my relative positioning vis-à-vis the teach-ers and students about which I was writing. This was done without my knowledge,and I discovered this deletion when I was reading the proofs. When asked about it,the editors informed me that the paragraph was deemed “irrelevant” by all the re-viewers. Although the rest of the article had occasional references to me and myrole in the “researching scene,” this was a paragraph in which I addressed aspectsof my background more fully and directly than anywhere else. Towardcontextualizing this issue and partially addressing some of the aforementioned

THE FORUM 293

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mem

oria

l Uni

vers

ity o

f N

ewfo

undl

and]

at 0

5:46

04

Oct

ober

201

4

questions, I situate the discussion by providing some details about the importanceof my excised paragraph and the implications of both its presence and its deletion.

The article in question offered a grounded exploration of the divisive role thatEnglish plays in a postcolonial context, namely, India. Specifically, the article de-tailed some divergent pedagogic practices in English-medium and vernacular-me-dium institutional settings, which, I argue, fall along class-based lines in India,with the former being more heavily tilted in favour of the middle class than the lat-ter. In the article, I argue that the Indian middle class has direct access to what I callthe assumptions nexus (Ramanathan, 2005). I provide an excerpt of the article thataddresses this notion. I am providing the paragraph preceding the one that was de-leted as a way of partially contextualizing and emphasizing the importance of thedeletion. The paragraph that was deleted is in italics:

The larger project that this paper is embedded in attempts a relatively holistic sketch ofhowEnglish isembedded incomplexways inarangeofalignedmacro-structures in In-dia, includingcolonial ruling,nationandstate-wide languagepolicies,pedagogic toolsand practices and vernacular traditions. … This interlocking, aligned machinery dove-tails with the values and aspirations of the largely EM Indian middle-class to form whatI call the assumptions nexus that leaves VM students out of its pale (Ramanathan,2003a). This phrase—assumptions nexus—is intended to capture the vast array ofclass-based social practices both inside and outside the home that privilege the mid-dle-class, and that by its very existence subordinate low-income groups. The term in-cludes everything in class-related conventions that inform how and why particularclass groups live and make the choices they do in almost every realm of everyday exis-tence, which includes those related to schooling, child-rearing, literacy practices athome, clothing and public appearances, food, what money gets spent on, body sizes,weight, health, nutrition, and hairdos, and most importantly, in this case, opting for flu-ency in English (sometimes through an English-medium education). Although only avery partial list, these outward manifestations of behaviour are based on and indicativeof a range of assumptions that partially explain why things are the way they are. Overtime, this nexus, comprised partly of the general educational machinery and class-re-lated assumptions, values, and conventions assumes “naturalized” overtones. Iden-tifyingandexploringhowsomeof thesocial cogs in themachinery—languagepoliciesand pedagogic practices in this case—connect with each other to produce particularsystematic consequences—allows us to see how power circulates through the “sys-tem” and is distributed across a range of social networks.

This notion of assumptions nexus also crucially informs issues related to mymethodology, including those relating to my choice of two institutions and my con-cerns regarding “speaking for” VM students. These issues have direct bearing onhow I—as an “involved native” and “distanced researcher”—embed myself in thelarger researching endeavour, and it is imperative that I lay these bare, since they in-form the general impetus for this enterprise. I am a native to Ahmedabad (anAhmedabadi), who went to school and college in the city’s EM settings, and had amiddle-class upbringing; I also had—and continue to have—unquestioning access to

294 THE FORUM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mem

oria

l Uni

vers

ity o

f N

ewfo

undl

and]

at 0

5:46

04

Oct

ober

201

4

the assumptions nexus just discussed. Thus, although on the one hand I can be criti-cized for “constructing” VM students—when I am EM and middle-class myself—Ifind myself, on the other hand, now morally obliged to speak for those the larger sys-tem seems to leave behind. Having spent years trying to understand the worlds andworkings of VM teachers and students, I now feel little option but to write about is-sues most pertinent to their realities, especially because—as many VM teachers pointout—they have remained so underrepresented.

I regard the aforementioned italicized (and deleted) paragraph as crucial. Given thesituated nature of my long-term venture and given my heightened consciousness ofmy relative positions of privilege (both in that society and in the West, but especiallyin that society; Appadurai, 2003), I felt doubly incumbent to openly state how the as-sumptions nexus worked in my favour, and deliberately selected the class-related as-pects of my background to highlight because it has direct implications for theclass-related points I wish to make. Also, I wished to call attention to how my ownEnglish-medium (EM) background placed me as a relative “outsider:” although Iwas writing about teaching and learning contexts in Ahmedabad and can thus claim“insider” status, I am still a relative “outsider” to the worlds of “Vernacular-me-dium” (VM) education. Also informing this complex dynamic is my deep sense ofobligation for the numerous ways in which VM students and teachers have openedup their classes and homes to me and have nuanced my understanding of how local,material, and political factors affect what and how they teach, learn, and live. Be-cause VM schooling in the Indian context is on the whole far less affluent, and is gen-erally not associated with social standing or status, and because my own EM, mid-dle-class background is, I felt it imperative to speak not only against my ownprivilege, but also to articulate my anxieties about “speaking for” VM students andteachers,especiallyhere in theWest,whentheyarenothere tospeakfor themselves.

This issue of who assumes the right to speak for whom is integrally tied to the is-sue of where the speaking is done and who are the primary audiences. Writing andspeaking about vernacular students and teachers in the West to a primarily Westernaudienceonly inEnglish,dressed inWesterngarb, runs the riskofmy“stereotyping”here, a risk that is not nearly as present (or present in very different ways) when I amspeaking of such issues to VM teachers and students in India largely in Gujarati andHindi, typically dressed in a churidaar-kurta or sari. Because these dissonances inidentities (Norton 2000), manifested partly in languages, clothes, and audi-ences—an insider to India and outsider here in the West, but also as a relative (EM)outsider to the VM world, although remaining an insider to Ahmedabad—are mostdifficult to reconcile, the need to uncover the complexities around my positioningsseems crucial. For the editors of the journal to excise this piece and deem it “irrele-vant” is to not recognize how some of the intricate positionings of my role as “re-searcher” fall along the very social divides that I was trying to capture (EM vs. VM,middleclassvs. low-income,writingandspeakingabout these issuesonly inEnglish

THE FORUM 295

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mem

oria

l Uni

vers

ity o

f N

ewfo

undl

and]

at 0

5:46

04

Oct

ober

201

4

in the West vs. writing and speaking of them in the vernaculars in my home commu-nity). Although my deleted paragraph may not have come close to offering a com-plex, fine-grained understanding of my role as researcher, it was imperative for thearticle to have it for the simple reason that what we say about others is directly tied towhatwedoordonot sayaboutourselves. Indeed,when theeditors refused to reinsertthe paragraph, I withdrew the manuscript from the journal.

This complexity of how the “researcher” rhetorically positions himself or herselfis also partly shaped by several intersecting dynamics in the researcher’s home cul-ture, and I explain this point in relation to the issue of caste—a most contentious so-cial structure—and English education. In my own writing about this issue(Ramanathan, 2005), I have struggled with whether and how to write about my owncaste positioning, and my ambivalence around this issue stems from both personalandsocial reasons.Partofmydiscomfort stems frommyownprivilegedcaste status,as indicatedpartlybymylastname—becauseallHindu lastnamessupposedly indexcaste positionings—that I really took for granted. I am a Tamilian Brahmin, and it iswith a lot of trepidation (and shame, given the historical atrocities and colonizationassociated with this caste category) that I even acknowledge this. Certainly, in India,I would not ever overtly mention my caste background.1 Indeed, there would be noreason to mention it, because Hindu readers can (allegedly) read my caste from mylastname.Beingself-reflexiveabout this issueactually runs thehighriskofassertingmy caste “superiority” instead of mitigating it; although “upper-caste” readers maynot turn a hair, “dalit” readers may resent my overt mention of it. Yet, when I am writ-ing or speaking in the West about my work in India, I feel the pressure to mention mycastepositioning,partlybecause issues involvingcaste stratificationsarenot (neces-sarily) present and Western readers need to know about these issues as much as theyneed to know about gender and class.

So, a question to think about, then, is as follows: Are we all as situated researcherspositioned around a variety of different (ethnic, social, [cross] linguistic, audi-ence-related, ideological) stratifications both in our home communities and outsideit? When we do speak of issues in our home communities to audiences outsidethem—something that many of us academics are now doing—which set of dynam-ics should dominate the researcher’s “location(s)” and representations in the discur-sive text? In my case, should my writing be shaped by ethics of my home communitywhere talking about caste issues is troubling and fraught, or by the rhetorical de-mands of the audience in the West? What is the middle ground here? One view of themiddle ground would be precisely the one I am currently engaging in right now: be-ing open about tensions and conflicts both in my home community and rhetoricalneeds in the West, of directly addressing some of the relevant, shifting, uneven, intri-cate, and myriad positionings of the researcher herself (Bolak, 1997; Morgan, 2005)through a “double consciousness” (Radhakrishnan, 2003). Another view would befor the researcher to recognize what and how much to say to the home communityand what and how much to say to a Western audience. There are, of course, differ-

296 THE FORUM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mem

oria

l Uni

vers

ity o

f N

ewfo

undl

and]

at 0

5:46

04

Oct

ober

201

4

ences, but both exercises require tact, sensitivity, an awareness of subterranean ech-oes, and a sense of “when to leave off saying a thing.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the participants of this forum for indulging my request to speak collectivelyabout self-reflexivity and the editors of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Ed-ucation for recognizing the value of what we want to say. I also thank SugunaRamanathan and Alastair Pennycook for comments on an earlier version of thispiece.

ENDNOTE

1One could, of course, argue that silences around caste issues are themselves “caste-ist.”

REFERENCES

Appadurai, A. (2003). Knowledge, circulation, and collective biography. In J. Assayag & V. Benei(Eds.), At home in diaspora: South Asian scholars and the west (pp. 28–51). New Delhi, India: Per-manent Black.

Bolak, H. (1997). Studying one’s own in the Middle-East: Negotiating gender and self–other dynamicsin the field. In R. Hertz (Ed.), Reflexivity and voice (pp. 95–118). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Morgan, B. (2005). Poststructuralism and applied linguistics: Complementary approaches to identityand culture in ELT. In J. Cummins & C. Davison (Eds.), The Kluwer handbook of international edu-cation. Norell, MA: Kluwer International.

Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity, and educational change. NewYork: Longman.

Radhakrishnan, R. (2003). Theory in an uneven world. London: Blackwell.Ramanathan, V. (2005). The English-vernacular divide: Postcolonial language politics and practice.

Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

PERFORMING THE PERSONAL

Alastair PennycookUniversity of Technology, Sydney

I explore in this article ways in which the personal is performed in writing researchin relation to an understanding of reflexivity and positionality. I have used here anumber of the articles in Norton and Toohey’s (2004) recent volume, Critical Ped-

THE FORUM 297

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mem

oria

l Uni

vers

ity o

f N

ewfo

undl

and]

at 0

5:46

04

Oct

ober

201

4