Researching Racism: The Colour of Face Value, Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners in social work value qualitative research for the opportunity to engage with issues of social justice including relations of power, and attention to the political, historical and social relations of difference. Interview narratives are all too often accepted at face value as authentic, true voice, representing experience without analysis of what is being represented politically. An analysis of the relations and operations of power provides additional contextual insight to face-value analyses with further opportunities for understanding and social change. When left uninterrogated, face-value analyses are permeable to the reproduction of knowledge without critical analyses of race, ability, sexual orientation or gender and can perpetuate modernist ideas that knowledge is observable and transparent and (re)institutes Western/Eurocentric knowledge as dominant/superior. This paper explores critical reflections on our research and provides a discussion of some of the opportunities identified from our research experiences. Through a discussion of the representation of voice as a production in progress; an attention to analyses for historical, social and political positioning; and a critique of face-value analyses, a conceptual framework is offered that may assist researchers to resist reliance on or accepting of analyses as transparent that eludes an analysis of racism and other forms of discrimination.