“What sort jumper is that, your wife has terrible taste mate.” Positionality and the everyday within two Scottish prison gyms

Matt Maycock, PhDInvestigator ScientistSocial and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow

“Positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases just as we are denouncing the power structures that surround our subjects.” (Madison, 2005, 7)

Positionality• Positionality is how people are defined by

• location within shifting networks of relationships that are subject to analysis and change.

• race, gender, class, and other socially significant dimensions.

• As Reinharz (1997) indicates, researchers have multiple identities apart from those associated with being a researcher.

• “We are simply forbidden to submit value judgments in place of facts or to leap to ‘ought’ conclusions without a demonstrable cogent theoretical and empirical linkage” (Thomas, 1993, p. 22).

• A focus solely on suffering, injustice, and power struggles are not enough in their political aims. There must be a shift from just politics to politics of positionality (Madison, 2005).

The importance of Positionality

• Noblit et. al. (2004) exclaimed the concern of a focus on social change in critical ethnography, but a lack of focus of the positionality of the researcher:– “Critical ethnographers must explicitly consider how

their own acts of studying and representing people and situations are acts of domination even as critical ethnographers reveal the same in what they study” (p. 3).

• Positionality recognition by the researcher is crucial because it makes the researcher:– Recognize their own power of authority, subjectivity,

biases, privilege, as they are critiquing systems that encompass the subjects they are studying.

– Accountable for research paradigms, and how the research is interpreted and presented.

– Madison (2005)

Critiques of Positionality• Lal (1996) points to the ways in which women’s studies’

scholars invoke the obligatory mantra of self positioning without engaging with their positionality and its impact on the interpretive process—what Alexander (2004: 138) refers to as ‘reflexivity-by-rote’.

• Similarly, Maynard (2002) suggests that reflexivity is a laudable aim but hard to operationalize and achieve in practice. Such a perspective also ultimately runs the risk of becoming solely inward focused as the ethnographer engages in an narcissistic regress of self-interrogations.

• Skeggs (2004) is concerned that reflexivity offers little more than another recuperation of class, the re-making of working-class identities in the image of bourgeois sensibilities of ‘self-possession’. Reflexivity is criticized by Skeggs (2004: 128) for providing a simple panacea that glosses an uncritical reading of power at work in themaking of ‘selves’

• Methodological debates regarding researcher and prisoner positionality have been considered within prison research (see, e.g. Genders and Player 1989; 1995; Bosworth 1999; Liebling 2001, Philips and Earle 2010).

• Subject positions within prison are multidimensional and formed by the intersectional interaction of a range of subjectivities and identities (Coloma, 2008)

• Researcher subject positions have a particular set of consequences for prison research (Phillips, 2010).

• Education is important, as Gray notes as the consequence of the university system makes certain ‘people’ with a “theoretical and intellectual language and conceptual thinking” (2003, 50)).

Prison positionality

The gyms within both Prison A and B is located within the core of each prison. As both prisons are high security prisons, they can only be accessed (either from the prison entrance for visitors or for prisoners themselves) after passing accompanied through a series of locked doors and passageways. Going through the various barriers to get to the gym becomes a kind of routine through which one becomes enveloped within the prison, it envelopes and encloses around you.

The walk to each of the prison gyms passes through various, fenced outside spaces, gardens and various non-descript rooms, but does not include direct passage through any of the prison accommodation areas (halls). On first arriving at the gym, my initial impression was that it was a space in which I felt more comfortable than the spaces I had passed through to get there. It quickly felt relatively ‘normal’, in what was for me  a strange and unfamiliar context (as I had not previously been to a prison prior to being involved in this project). I certainly felt more comfortable being in the gym than on the prison ‘halls’ where prisoners lived (where I sometimes went to interview FIT-For-LifePrisons participants in their cells). I felt less of an intruder, as I was not entering what was essentially someone’s living and socialising space  (Fieldnote extract)

The prison gym context

• My positionality through the various identities I brought to the research – my gender, education, race, class etc. – influenced both how I collected data and its interpretation (Mullings, 1999)

• West (2003) found that being positioned as an ‘outsider’ brought certain benefits in his research with victims of torture in Mozambique’s war for independence. It allowed some of his research subjects to discuss issues that they found it difficult to speak about with members of their community.

• Being a white, married, straight, educated, middleclass, Welsh man had consequences for the sorts of relationships and interactions that I had within the prison gym. This resulted in specific conversations and insights into the lives of the FIT-For-Life Prisons participants and PEIs.

My positionality within prison

• As a man within an extremely hierarchical context, my position in relation to the hierarchies I am examining, evolved over time.

• This was manifested in increasing levels of banter, including frequent ridicule of various jumpers I wore while in the prison. This served to establish my (external) position in relation to this group of prisoners and also illustrates the importance of clothing within the prison context (cf. Ash, 2010).

• In Prison A and B there was an increasing involvement of me within the group of men participating in the FIT-Prisons programme, which often included within sport within programme sessions.

• Building trust and rapport within the prison context is quite challenging, banter is an important way of doing this.

My Evolving position

• “Aye, my first impressions, I thought you were coming tae teach us as well, so I was like ‘oh, when’s he going tae get in,” like, ken, tae, but no, I didnae realise that you were just, like, researching it, but no, but apart fae that aye, it was, everything was good, aye, aye.”

• “Think aboot things that you can do where the weakest is not going tae be embarrassed or feel awkward to the extent that they don't want tae come back, like P7 did. I mean, I don't think, certainly not from your point of view as the leader, there was none of that emanating from you”

• “…a lot a cons will come up and ask you a lot o’ questions, like the guy that owned the fish and chip shop, he asked you tae go and find things oot, know P11? An’, so they’re aye, they will come and ask a lot of questions there’s some weeks you were getting crowded.”

First impressions

As Sallee and Harris III indicate the gender of the researcher has important implications for “data collection and rapport building with male participants” (2011, 409).

“But as I says, sometimes you’ve got tae curb it because what I just says at the start there. There was a young lassie sitting in here hersel’.There was for one or two of the sessions.Maybe, I don’t know, fourteen, fifteen guys, and what I was trying tae say there was a wee bit o’ respect where it’s due. That’s—there’s nothing wrang wi’ that.”

“Fuckin’ young lassie’s just coming aff the college, she’s sitting there—it’s nice enough for her to come in wi’ yoursel’ and you’re maybe saying a wee bit too... In my opinion I think maybe too, too inappropriate things,. I cannae remember the specific things. But a few things were a bit embarrassing, know? And even other guys in the group were saying it when we were going up the road. Going, “that was a bit fuckin’ embarrassing—”

Duneier’s (2004: 103) ‘a different social position can have a serious effect on one’s work, and one can do better work by taking them very seriously’.

Gender

For some prisoners my not being part of the criminal justice system was an advantage:

• “I mean you spoke tae us like a normal person. Ken some people would say, “right”. You could’ve been apprehensive because you’d—and then but the thing is you were speaking, and ken, you were asking questions, and that, and you made it an interesting. You made it interesting to be there as well. Ken what I mean, and it—also because you were saying to yourself, “right, well there’s a bit of research here,” ken what I mean? This is, this is a ?? university that’s taking heed. We were all learning. We were all learning. I was learning. You were learning.”

• “Doesnae make a difference because you’re taking the time an’ effort tae come in, actually do something for the prisoners. D’you know what I mean? A lot less hassle, a lot less shit you get in here. So like people like yourself, prisoners actually kinda appreciate like you’re making an effort. But then… As I says staff are here for one thing only, a job. An’ a lot o’ them.. I know, but yous could, yous wouldn’t have tae come intae prison. Yous could do this probably, I know you might be doing this for like... But yous can do this anywhere.”

‘Connections’

These quotes indicates some of the limits of the extent to which it is possible for me to be accepted by the prisoners taking part in the programme. So while I was in some senses an ‘outsider’ (following Simmel’s (1950) notion of the ‘stranger’), this was within certain limits, I was not a prisoner but also not a members of staff. The quotes below indicate that for some of the prisoners taking part in the FIT-For-Life programme, I was located closer to their constructs of ‘staff’ within the prison.

• “Naw, naw they look at you as just like part o’ the jail, because there’s things that they know that they cannae speak to you aboot, like the last few questions on this consent form, know what I mean, ‘I understand if I disclose any information aboot any intention to harm myself or other people, or otherwise threat security, the research team have to pass it.; Noo, the cons know that, so they know Aye, even although they’ll tell you things, they think, they know there’s still that barrier there.”

• “Even though you’re coming fae university, they find it easy tae talk tae a con. I think is better because it’s a con talking tae a con so a con’ll listen mair fae a con and it’s easier for them tae talk to the con and you understaun better fae a con I think.” 

‘Disconnections’

Being seen as a Prison Officer (or ‘screw’) had a range of negative implications as POs were uniformly not trusted and often disliked:

• “See I’m the type o’ person that’s like, you’re no’ meant tae talk tae the staff, so I stick by the rules through my uncle’s been in the jail years ago an’ a’ that so I’m like an old school con, d’you know what I mean? I don’t, I go tae the screws an’ ask them for parole forms, toilet roll an’ that’s it.”

• “Don’t really talk tae the staff in the hall. Just talk tae them if I need to speak tae them an’ that’s it. They get on wi’ their thing, you do yours. I’m no’ here tae be sociable with the staff. The staff arenae here tae be sociable with me to be honest with you.”

• “No’ the hall staff. PTIs definitely ‘cause obviously you’re talking tae them, you’re getting information fae them, they’re telling you what, best way tae dae your training is. Ken they’re helping, they are helping you a lot more ‘cause you are doing this course.”

The implications of being viewed as similar to a ‘screw’

• Questions presented in Madison (2005) that reflection of positionality (“reflexive ethnography”) force the researcher to ask:– What am I going to do with the research?– Who benefits from the research?– How am I an authority in such a manner to

make claims based on the research?– What changes will come from the research?– How does my past relate/influence the

research?

– This creates a situation where critical ethnography can strive to critique objectivity and subjectivity equally (Goodall, 2000).

Questions

Matthew.maycock@glasgow.ac.uk

Thanks

www.matthewmaycock.com