Using "Positioning" Theory to Analyze a Female School Teacher's Experiences with Care Work during COVID-19 in India: Towards Decolonizing Feminist Research

ABSTRACT

The past few decades have been marked by growing awareness about the need to move beyond Anglocentric/Eurocentric epistemes, to instead engage in intellectual projects that effectively (re)present the voices and consciousness of marginalized populations (Manion & Shah, 2019). The term decolonizing research methodologies has thus come to acquire a central place within feminist research in the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE), with rallying calls to foreground the complexities and uniqueness of the lived realities of women through non-hierarchical and non-dichotomous modes of meaning-making (Lugones, 2010). However, methodological literature on decolonizing feminist research is largely linked to the data collection phase, with limited engagement with how to effectively analyze data once it is collected. This study demonstrates the use of positioning theory, a form of discourse analysis, as a decolonial analytical framework to investigate the micro details of a female school teacher's experiences with care work during COVID-19 in India. The analysis revealed the shifting, often contextual nature of the identities that the participant claimed for herself throughout the narrative, such as a pampered daughter, critical observer, adjusting daughter-in-law, guilty mother, and strategic choice maker. The study ends by making a case for the potential use of positioning theory towards decolonizing feminist research because of its ability to draw attention to the multiple and/or contradictory identities that participants claim for themselves throughout the discursive interaction.