Browsing by Subject "Reflexivity"

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Open Access
Reading bourdieu with Adorno: the limits of critical theory and reflexive sociology
(SAGE Publications, 2010) Karakayalı, Nedim; O'Donnell, M.
Scholarly activity presupposes a certain distance from the concerns of everyday life, which has both liberating and crippling effects. Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology hopes to undo these crippling effects by making the scholar aware of the limits of his/her ‘liberation’. Through his emphasis on the practical content of social life, Bourdieu provides a powerful alternative to theoretical critiques of contemporary society advanced by sociologists such as Adorno. At the same time, read against the background of Adorno’s ‘critical theory’, this reflexive move itself appears as a limitation. Due to its emphasis on the conditions of sociological knowledge, reflexive sociology tends to subordinate ‘theory’ to ‘epistemology’ and, therefore, hinders the sociologist from imagining a different society. Read together, Bourdieu’s and Adorno’s works provide important insights about two potential dangers that remain on the path of the sociologist. Adorno’s critique of ‘scientism’ implies that adhering to an epistemological principle may not be enough to escape the ‘ fallacious’ representations of social reality, while Bourdieu’s critique of ‘theoreticism’ implies that one cannot grasp social reality without ‘touching’ it.
Open Access
Reflexive reciprocity under an ethics of care: Reflections from the field for refugee studies
(Oxford University Press, 2023-12-12) Zadhy-Çepoğlu, Aminath Nisha
By bringing reflexivity and reciprocity into conceptual dialogue in a discussion about the ethical framework of care in research, this article discusses how ‘reflexive reciprocity’ can be a research tool in migration studies. Taking reciprocity—the dynamics of giving and receiving—as an aspect contextually bound to the refugee experience, I propose that a relationship of giving and receiving helps undermine the inevitable power asymmetries in knowledge production. Reciprocity becomes all the more essential when researching refugee communities where narratives are prompted in a way that mirrors how refugees are elicited to give information within mechanisms of refugee governance, where they narrate their neediness, perform their vulnerability, and justify their deservingness in return for legal and humanitarian protection in traumatic processes that can be a distortion of the norms of reciprocity. This article invites researchers to address reciprocity in research, premised on the idea that an ethical framework of care should go beyond paying lip service to protect vulnerable and marginalized participants. Reflecting on my case study research with Syrian refugee women in Turkey, Ankara, I argue that reflexive reciprocity is both a tool for more rigorous data collection in a qualitative inquiry and a practical application of an ethical framework of care. In exploring instances where I could link reflexivity to actionoriented reciprocity through ‘everyday acts of caring’, I demonstrate that reflexive reciprocity can somewhat balance out the extractive nature of research and thereby contribute to the ongoing discussion about the ‘reflexive turn’ in migration studies.