Gender, ethics and empowerment: Dilemmas of development fieldwork
Section snippets
Power gradients between the researcher and the researched
Since the early 1980s, challenging questions have been directed at geographers, social anthropologists, sociologists and others who carry out social research in Third World contexts. Post-development commentators such as Escobar (1995), for example, criticise the way in which development discourse has been constructed so as to legitimate the voices of Western ‘experts’ while undermining those of local people. More specifically, England (1994) asks “… can we incorporate the voices of ‘others’
Ethical dilemma one: is it inappropriate for men to conduct research with third world women?
The main question considered in this section is whether gender should determine if an individual should carry out research with Third World women. Oakley (1981) argues that shared gender encourages respondents to respond freely and openly to a female researcher. Similarly, Nancy Hartsock devised standpoint theory which proposed that “… due to women's position within the sexual division of labor and sexist oppression, in general, women would have greater insights as researchers into the lives of
Ethical dilemma two: is research by outside women on third world women necessarily exploitative?
While Hartsock's standpoint theory, described above, suggests that women are in a better position than men to conduct research with other women, this idea has been heavily criticised in recent times. If we reject essentialist notions about the ‘natural’ inferiority of women, then we must also reject essentialist notions that it is ‘naturally’ more appropriate for women to study women's situation. Standpoint theory has been criticised, in particular, for failing to recognise arenas of difference
The potential value of research which crosses the bounds of one's own identity
The above discussion has argued that cross-cultural and cross-gendered research with Third World women need not be ethically inappropriate. Thus we concur with Kobayashi (1994), who argues that:
… the question of “who speaks for whom?” cannot be answered upon the slippery slope of what personal attributes—what color, what gender, what sexuality—legitimize our existence, but on the basis of our history of involvement, and on the basis of understanding how difference is constructed and used as a
Can research be an empowering process for third world women participants?
Some commentators are now starting to suggest that participation in the research process can actually be an empowering experience for research participants, especially those who face significant social disadvantage. Cotterill (1992), for example, suggests research can be therapeutic, and Opie (1992) claims that this is especially true if interviewers encourage participants to reflect on their experiences and to understand how the system which disadvantages them can be challenged. England (1994)
Conclusion: can ethical dilemmas in cross-gendered and cross-cultural research be resolved?
Ethical issues which arise in relation to cross-cultural and cross-gendered fieldwork situations deserve to be pondered and questioned seriously by all scholars of development studies. Criticisms from postmodern discourse have played an important role in alerting researchers to potentially exploitative relationships that can develop with their research participants. These warnings should not, however, necessarily deter male or female researchers from Western countries from engaging in
Endnote
The term ‘Third World’ is used, as intended by Alfred Sauvy who coined the term, to suggest a world which is “excluded from its proper role in the world by two other worlds”, not to imply that it is in any way inferior (Hadjor, 1992, p. 10). The term ‘Third World women’ is used here reluctantly, however, and as little as possible, because it suggests a false homogeneity (Mohanty, 1988, p. 77).Reinharz Davidman 1992
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