Contestations of Self and Other in Researching Religion, Gender and Health among Migrant Women

This essay is a critical reflexive account of contestations over power and ethics related to getting ethical approval for a study on sexual and reproductive choices among migrant women in pentecostal congregations in South Africa. We found that despite the feminist method and theory that undergirded the proposed study, the University Ethics Committee regarded the researcher’s insider position as an obstacle to scholarly inquiry. Notwithstanding the marginal position of religion and theology in humanities and the social sciences (McCutcheon 2003), we found that a number of issues related to procedural ethics and power emerged as obstacles in the research, seemingly because the project was to be conducted by a migrant woman of colour. We contend that it is not uncommon that women, and black women researchers in particular, are required to demonstrate competency as if they are imposters or space invaders to the academic culture (Ahmed 2012; Mirza 2015). Similarly, where similar proposals using, for example, mixed methods and emic approaches might be welcomed as methodological innovation, our experience has been that insider/ indigenous methodologies are too easily dismissed as incompetence, or as being provisional and lacking substance (Smith 2006; Burgess-Proctor 2015). We propose to review a particular case study to show how ethical approval and governance processes intended as scientific gatekeeping, can serve to undermine the emergence of local and gendered ways of knowing and being. Thus in this article we argue that ethic committees’ biases result in (a) privileging positivist knowledge schemas over indigenous and feminist approaches; and (b) entrench particular gendered and racialised ideas about the emic researcher; and (c) in this case, re-inscribe narrow paternalistic ideas about migrant social worlds, agency, and self-fashioning. It is our intention to map the pedagogical trajectories and tensions that were sparked by the ethical issues faced by us as scholars of colour, and finally we will show how we sought to navigate these obstacles, as researcher and supervisor