In this post, Dr Nilakshi Das introduces her new article, ‘Positionality in Oral History Research: Proximities and Paradoxes of an “Insider” Status’, recently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
Drawing on thirteen life-history interviews with South Asian scientists who trained in post-war British universities, the article asks what happens to the familiar ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ distinction when a researcher shares a broad regional identity with the people they interview.
It argues that insider status is not a stable category but a shifting, relational condition, and that reflecting on our disciplinary training matters as much as reflecting on our biographical identities.
The article advocates for a more nuanced application of positionality in historical research and analysis—one that is fluid, reflexive and critical of exclusive knowledge claims based on demographic sameness. Nilakshi’s article is now available, Open Access, via FirstView in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
Historians and social scientists have long debated whether the researcher is best positioned as an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’ to the people they interview.
Insider status is thought to bring closeness and narrative depth, outsider status to bring distance and analytical clarity. Positionality statements, in which researchers set out who they are in relation to their subjects, have become a valued practice in critical, feminist and de/postcolonial scholarship.
My new article, ‘Positionality in Oral History Research: Proximities and Paradoxes of ‘Insider” Status’—published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society—argues that the declarative positionality statements risk becoming formulaic when the categories they rest on are treated as fixed. Insider status, I suggest, is not a stable identity but a relational condition that shifts from one encounter to the next.
The article challenges the normative assumption that social, demographic and cultural attributes based on my ‘shared South Asianness’, as a South Asian researcher in the UK studying previous generations of South Asian students, were sufficient to establish insider positionality. By South Asianness, I referred to shared regional affiliations shaped by the histories of decolonisation, postcolonial state formation, common cultural values, linguistic familiarity, and shared experiences of educational mobility.
In some instances, ethno-racial proximity of interviewing members of one’s own community helped establish rapport and reduce intersubjective distance, positioning me as ‘someone who already knew’. The intersubjective dynamics of these encounters were also manifest through reciprocal questions about mobility, belonging and return, such as ‘are you British or Indian?’, ‘where is your family now?’ and ‘are you planning to live there (UK) long term?’
In other instances, distance was as significant as closeness.
Insiderness, in this sense, is always conditional, shaped by socio-political histories that divide as much as they connect.
Some accounts were shaped by the experiences of political ruptures as two interviewees had returned home after the Bangladeshi Liberation War of 1971, or experiences of navigating the Indian Emergency of 1975. I was a temporal outsider collecting narratives shaped by generational experiences that I encountered only through the mediation of historical research.
Insiderness, in this sense, is always conditional, shaped by socio-political histories that divide as much as they connect. In fact, South Asianness as a regional category itself emerged partly as a product of colonial classification. Therefore, I remained attentive to how implicit assumptions of shared identity can cause either over-interpretation or misunderstanding during interviews and in the subsequent data analysis process.
Identity, though, is only one part of positionality.
In my TRHS article, I argue for attending to another part, which I call ‘theoretical positionality’.
Theoretical positionality asks how disciplinary training shapes what we study, how we design our project, what we consider historically significant and how we analyse evidence.
Where identity-based positionality asks who the researcher is, theoretical positionality asks how disciplinary training shapes what we study, how we design our project, what we consider historically significant and how we analyse evidence. It does not displace identity-based positionality but operates alongside it, as disciplinary training shapes interpretations regardless of biographical proximity.
My training in global history led me to situate personal testimony and lived experiences within broader socio-political histories of decolonisation. I found myself drawn to the largely unexamined histories of academic migration and mobility of South Asian students in the post-war era and to the question of what their mobility as scientists and researchers had meant for postcolonial scientific knowledge-making. Following Bourdieu, I try to interrogate the ‘scholastic point of view’, the unexamined assumptions that academic discipline installs in those it trains.
It is well-established that a researcher’s philosophy, personal experiences and interpretative frameworks shape research process and outcomes. My research is no exception in that my theoretical positionality—the engagement with decolonial and postcolonial history, the use of life-history, the choices of languages and questions posed—all informed how stories were elicited and interpreted.
Fieldwork Site: National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India. Over several weeks in 2023, the author visited sites in Assam, Bangalore, New Delhi, Pune and Mumbai to undertake interviews. Remote interviews were also conducted ith participants from Bangladesh based in Dhaka, and interviewees of Sri Lankan and Indian origin settled in the United States. Photograph the author’s own.
Positionality also extends beyond self-reflection into the embodied labour of maintaining self-efficacy and relational trust as a researcher.
Reflecting on fieldwork in India, I show how the experiences of the field shaped conditions under which historical knowledge is produced. Institutional guidelines on gender-based safety protocols often proved practically and ethically inadequate. Institutional risk protocols designed for protection can inadvertently destabilise the relational ethics which underpins oral history research.
These tensions often revealed that the field begins prior to the interview encounter itself in anticipatory measures that structure the conditions of encounter.
Fieldwork Site: The Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, India, Photograph the author’s own
My interviews kept returning me to the familiar question: ‘do I have to be one to know one?’
Empathy and trust emerge through ethical engagement rather than demographic sameness.
While shared regional, linguistic and cultural affiliations created common ground, in-group membership is not a prerequisite for eliciting emotionally resonant narratives or ensuring interpretative depth. Empathy and trust, after all, emerge through ethical engagement rather than demographic sameness.
Insider oral history cannot be sustained as a fixed empirical and epistemological category. Instead, it is a contingent, historically situated condition, always partial and never absolute, and it asks of the historian a reflexivity that reaches beyond who we are to how we have been trained to think and analyse our data.
References
- B. Fay,Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science: A Multicultural Approach (Oxford, 1996),9
- A. Tooth Murphy, ‘Listening in, Listening out: Intersubjectivity and the Impact of Insider and Outsider Status in Oral History Interviews’, Oral History, 48 (2020), 39.
- E. Ademolu, ‘Birds of a Feather (Don’t Always) Flock Together: Critical Reflexivity of “Outsiderness” as an “Insider” Doing Qualitative Research with One’s “Own People”‘, Qualitative Research, 24 (2024), 344–66.
- K. Gani and R. M. Khan, ‘Positionality Statements as a Function of Coloniality: Interrogating Reflexive Methodologies’, International Studies Quarterly, 68 (2024), 1–13.
- P. Bourdieu, ‘The Scholastic Point of View’,Cultural Anthropology, 5 (1990), 381.
- P. Summerfield, ‘Oral History as a Research Method’, in Research Methods for English Studies, ed. G.Griffin (Edinburgh, 2013), 48–68.
About the author
Dr Nilakshi Das is a historian of science researching postcolonial migration and mobility. Nilakshi’s PhD thesis—‘Becoming a Scientist: South Asian Students in British Universities and the Making of Postcolonial Scientific Lives, 1950–2000’ was completed this year and funded by an ESRC DTP Joint Studentship at the University of Leicester and Warwick.
The oral histories conducted as part of her research are intended to be archived in the British Library’s Oral History of Science Collection.
Nilakshi previously read for an MSc in Education at the University of Oxford and an MA in Sociology at the University of Manchester, funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Submitting an article to Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Transactions is the flagship academic journal of the Royal Historical Society, published by Cambridge University Press. Today’s journal publishes a wide range of research articles and commentaries on historical approaches, practice and debate. In addition to traditional 10-12,000 word research articles, Transactions also welcomes shorter, innovative commentary articles. In 2023, we introduced ‘The Common Room’—a section of the journal dedicated to commentaries and think pieces by academic historians and historical practitioners.
The journal welcomes submissions dealing with any geographical area from the early middle ages to the very recent past. The journal’s co-editors and editorial boards are interested in articles that cover entirely new ground, thematically or methodologically, as well as those engaging critically on established themes in existing literatures.
From 2024, all articles accepted for publication in Transactions are published open access, without a charge for any author or reader. This ensures content published in Transactions can be shared, circulated and read by the widest possible readership. We very much hope this initiative will encourage a growing range of submissions from authors, worldwide, including those who practice history outside higher education, in related sectors or as independent researchers.
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