A Literature Review on the Vulnerability-As-Reflexivity Framework
As the final essay of my first-year HHP course and my second year of study overall, I wouldn’t call this a perfect ending—according to the feedback, the analysis feels somewhat disjointed in places. Still, I’m glad I had the chance to write on this topic, especially since I’ve spent the entire year doing exactly that: writing about myself
Introduction – Mapping Vulnerable Reflexivity
In the Malta Immigration Documentary project, rather than focusing on the immigrants themselves, I turn my attention to the researchers – namely us – in order to explore the vulnerability and reflexivity of the ethnographer in the field. This interest can be traced back to Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer, a book that exemplifies and legitimises the researcher’s vulnerability while insisting that such self-exposure can be essential to the argument.[1] According to Behar, vulnerability is fundamentally about reflexivity: drawing on feminist writers’ reflection on the subject and subjectivity of their work, she argues that it allows researchers to expose their own position of observation.
However, the critique of vulnerable writing as a form of reflexivity has by no means been settled. For instance, in her article, Pillow questions how reflexivity, as a methodological tool in qualitative research, is defined and used.[2] Although Behar insists that vulnerability is not merely rhetorical self-exposure – that it must function as a genuine analytical component – it remains necessary to consider the outcome of this methodology: whether vulnerability actually enriches academic rigour. To assess this outcome, we need a framework for evaluating a methodology itself – one that treats method not as a neutral instrument but as something that actively shapes the knowledge it produces. In their article “Tool Criticism and the Computational Turn”[3], van Es, Schäfer, and Wieringa reflect, in the same reflexive spirit, on the use of tools within digital humanities methodology. Drawing on Bovens’ account of accountability,[4] they distinguish between the transparency and accountability of the research outcomes. Introducing accountability into methodological reflection offers a useful lens for the discussion of vulnerability-as-reflexivity: although the objects of critique differ, we can still treat vulnerability as a methodology and ask whether it amounts to a transparent declaration or a genuine relation of accountability.
Returning to the feminist researchers’ reflections cited by Behar, their concern is whether the representations of their subjects respect or betray them.[5] This is not only a reflection on the outcome of their work, but more importantly, on the dynamic between the researcher and the researched. Yet the notion of accountability invoked above, and its application in van Es et al.’s article, remain confined to the academic forum (such as peer review); because it has not been extended to the researcher-subject relationship, this concept carries certain limitations – we need to further ask whether the sanctioned use of reflexivity may instead reinforce the modernist/colonialist presuppositions it was meant to challenge.[6]
Building on this logic, this paper focuses on vulnerability-as-reflexivity within the current affective turn, arguing that what the reflexivity delivers is either the transparency (a visible location) or the accountability to the wrong forum (the academy), rather than accountability to the researched. This asymmetry cannot be resolved by method or reflexive virtue.
The Reflexive Turn – How does the academy respond to personal involvement?
In contemporary ethnographic research, the researcher’s awareness of their interpretive position, and the affect arising from this reflexive awareness, have come to be treated as something every observer must consider during the research. Yet how does this reflexive turn seek to legitimise, and take responsibility for, the researcher’s personal involvement? Across previous discussions of affective reflexivity, we can observe a progressive chain: admitting positionality, integrating affect and vulnerability, and systematising affect as a methodology. Each step of this progression draws researchers deeper into the narrative of their own self-identity. This exposure of the researcher’s positionality makes ethnographic research appear increasingly “responsible.”
The discussion of reflexivity can be traced back to Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges.”[7] Her argument rejects the false objectivity of an all-seeing “god trick” perspective, arguing instead for an epistemology of location, positioning, and situating, in which rational knowledge arises under partial and non-universal conditions.[8] In other words, the objectivity she argues for rests on the observer’s situated, limited standpoint, and the only way to achieve it is to acknowledge the position one occupies – the most basic requirement of responsibility being to admit that position and make it visible to the reader. Within this epistemology, can the researcher’s affect, vulnerability, and subjectivity also be counted as components of location, to be integrated into the research rather than excluded as contamination? To answer this question, Behar further pushes situatedness from a cognitive gesture to a broader involvement of affect and vulnerability.
In her book, Behar proposes genuinely integrating vulnerability into ethnography, though this self-exposure must serve the argument. She draws on Geertz’s observation that field work lacks a genre for articulating the observer’s affective experience, and proposes vulnerable writing to fill this gap.[9] As she emphasises, such self-exposure “has to take us somewhere we could not otherwise get to,” and must “move us beyond that eclipse into inertia.”[10] Therefore, vulnerability prompts the researcher to think further, reflect further, and then take further responsibility for the study. However, since Behar offers little more than an ethos of vulnerable writing, once affect is integrated into research, how can one prevent it from remaining mere confession, and instead turn it into knowledge acceptable to the academy? Several scholars respond to this question with either practice or instruction. Here we take the methodological concept of Empirical Affect Montage,[11] coined by Stodulka, Dinkelaker, and Thajib, as an example of the systematisation of affective ethnography.
According to Stodulka et al., Empirical Affect Montage is “an extension of more traditional epistemologies” that “attempt to systematically juxtapose fieldworkers’ affective experience with accounts of the lifeworlds of those with and about whom they study.”[12] They suggest that researchers keep an emotional diary (following a clear template) to systematically record vulnerability and integrate it into the research, while still retaining the free-writing spirit and refusing to frame it as a prescriptive compulsion that follows concise rules.[13] Here rather than delving into Stodulka et al.’s concept to evaluate its normative function, we need to see how the academy seeks to realise, in practice, the reflexive function of vulnerable and affective writing. Through Stodulka et al.’s practice, we can see how scholars attempt to make reflexive methodology increasingly answerable for the outcome of anthropological ethnography. And through this progression of stages, we have witnessed their attempt to enrich situated objectivity, making its outcome a form of knowledge that they take to be answerable and critically positioned.
From Transparency to Accountability – What does reflexivity deliver?
In the previous section, we witnessed how vulnerability-as-reflexivity is systematised as legitimate academic material, making the ethnographic research seem more transparent – researchers expose their positionality, the affect arising within it, and how these collectively shape the research’s presuppositions, direction, and outcome. To some extent, it enacts what Haraway proposes as objectivity – acknowledging the unequal, constructed nature of knowledge and taking risks in a world where “we” are permanently mortal.[14] Publicly presenting the process and outcome of research, actively revealing researchers’ own limitations, and believing that one can be held accountable seem sufficiently “responsible”. But we must ask: once the academy has completed its peer review and judged the research “good” or “bad” – once this double-layered reflective process, both internal and external, is done – is everything now settled? Returning to the predicament of feminist research that Behar mentions again: researchers worry about whether their representations respect or betray – indeed objectify – their subjects. Yet beyond this self-reflexivity, if such objectification does occur, what effect does it have on those subjects? Furthermore, how can researchers respond to that effect? In a word, when we use vulnerability-as-reflexivity to become increasingly responsible, to whom are we responsible? Ethnography differs from other knowledge production: its “material” is human subjects who may be affected by how they are represented. Therefore, its accountability cannot be owed to the academy alone; those who are written into the text, and whose image the text determines, should be an indispensable party in this accountability relationship. I argue that the systematised reflexivity described above provides accountability to the wrong forum – all reflexive practices take place on the side of the researcher and the academy, while the researched never appears.
The progressive chain laid out in Section 1 already marks a shift towards accountability – reflexivity was never merely transparent. Haraway proposed situated knowledge because she advocated that knowledge must be able to be called to account in order to realise responsibility.[15] Based on this reflexive tradition, van Es et al. distinguish between “transparency” and “accountability” drawing on Bovens’ framework, arguing that “transparency is a passive openness, accountability is an active relationship, in which one’s conduct may be scrutinised and judged by specific fora and under particular circumstances.”[16] In other words, “responsible knowledge claims not only make transparent how they have been constructed, they also provide a justification and account as to why such claims were constructed in the way they have.”[17] This distinction between levels of reflexivity is essential for reconsidering vulnerability-as-reflexivity: through it, we can not only evaluate the reflexiveness of a vulnerable text, but also, more importantly, expose the accountability blindspot within that reflexiveness. The literature discussed in Section 1 shares a common feature: its reflexivity is either the researcher’s autobiography or a debate within the academy, proceeding from the same academic starting point of continually extending and enriching the research. Their success lies in this commitment to academic rigour, while the blindspot is also exposed in that commitment.
Affective scholarship indeed constructs the kind of accountability Bovens describes – affect is processed into legitimate knowledge that can be questioned and defended. As Bovens notes, accountability, in a narrow sense, is “the obligation to explain and justify conduct,” which “implies a relationship between an actor, the accountor, and a forum, the account-holder or accountee.”[18] What’s more, the actor-forum structure is not a rigid individual-to-institutional relationship but rather a relational structure of holding and being held to account.[19] Such as Behar’s critique of Michaelson and Johnson’s critique of Rosaldo in Chapter 6,[20] or in the critical interactions among the texts examined here. Bovens’ account of accountability is flexibly realised within the academy, which continually applies this ethos to take responsibility for its published research. Nevertheless, I argue that this actor-forum relationship should not only remain within the academy but should also extend to one in which ethnographic research figures as the actor and the researched as the forum. Only then can responsibility complete the research – completeness here meaning not a further supplement to its content, but in the ethical sense, that the research is truly answerable for what and whom it studies. Behar does address the relationship between researcher and researched: in Chapter 3, she places her subject – Marta – at the centre of the text and explores the issues of research ethics and politics of representation that arise from juxtaposing academic observation with private friendship. However, this chapter reads more as an exposure of this dynamic rather than an analysis of it. As she reflects in Chapter 1:
I wrote ‘My Mexican Friend Marta’ out of anguish, because I feared I’d not lived up to my part of the friendship, because I’d not done enough to stop Marta from punishing herself, forcing herself to become modern, by having a hysterectomy at twenty-six.[21]
Notably, her anguish is framed around “Have I lived up to my part of the friendship?” – that is, around her own moral standards. The entire reflexive act unfolds within her and her text, while Marta remains an object to be reflected upon and represented – with no position from which to respond to the question, or reject Behar’s representation. In other words, only Behar decides in what image Marta enters the text. Even in such a sincere and self-aware reflexivity, its forum remains the researcher’s conscience and the reader as judge, rather than the researched as a party who can question it.
Scaled up to other research contexts – such as this immigration project – this unequal dynamic reinforces the modernist/colonialist hegemony of knowledge. As Pillow argues, the prevailing uses of reflexivity all rely on a modernist, knowable subject, so that both the researched and the researchers are written toward the familiar and ultimately rest in a comfortable closure.[22] Therefore, she coins the term “uncomfortable reflexivity” to hold open complexity and unfamiliarity.[23] Her attempts help us understand modernity and coloniality: precisely because uncomfortable reflexivity refuses to deliver a familiar self as its conclusion, we gain the chance to see the biases embedded in our positionality, and thereby to push reflexivity further. As she says, uncomfortable reflexivity is “not about better methods, or about whether we can represent people better”, but “whether we can be accountable to people’s struggles for self-representation and self-determination, including our own selves.”[24] This touches upon Haraway’s claim that critical positioning is what produces objectivity.[25] Nonetheless, recognising the enemy – the hegemony of knowledge – does not automatically resolve the researcher’s accountability, just as van Es et al. argue that transparency does not equate to accountability, though it is necessary for it.[26] Pillow’s argument remains within the academy, rather than extending this reflexive responsibility to the researched – where reflexivity’s deconstructive function might truly be exerted. “Uncomfortable”, as an assessment criterion, is ultimately judged by other researchers and the academy, and the researched cannot participate in that judgment. As long as accountability lacks a forum that the researched can occupy, then however sophisticated the reflexivity, it cannot reach accountability at the social and ethical level.
Accountability and Immigration – What does accountability need, and why is it foreclosed to immigrants?
In the previous analysis, we identified the problem of to whom accountability is owed; but what conditions must a forum that incorporates the researched satisfy, and can the objects of ethnographic research – especially in immigration research – actually meet them? This paper argues that extending the notion of vulnerability – from the researcher’s own vulnerability to that of the researched, and of the research relationship as a whole – is a necessary condition for such a forum. However, whether it can genuinely function as accountability, and whether it is realistically achievable at all remains an open question – especially for groups that already lack a voice.
A forum with the power to impose consequences does already exist. In Canada, First Nations have advocated the principles of ownership, control, access and possession (OCAP) in order to provide “a way out of the muddle of contemporary Aboriginal research and the ethical dilemmas that characterise it.”[27] As Schnarch describes, “OCAP is about legitimacy and accountability for First Nations’ authorities and institutions.”[28] The accountability here is not merely confessional, rather, it involves the power to make decisions (dissenting from publishing), leverage of resources (controlling funding), and the capacity to impose consequences (the researched community can refuse engagement or withdraw consent).[29] The core of OCAP is not “a better reflexivity” but rather institutional power, which is held by the researched group that can shape the content produced. In Bovens’ terms, this is a complete structure that can pose questions, pass judgment, and expose the actor to consequences.[30]
However, OCAP can only provide an outlook for enacting the forum, it cannot be simply transplanted into ethnographic research in general. The power OCAP and First Nations gain does not derive from reflexive virtue; it derives from the prior, collective standing that indigenous nations hold through treaties, constitutions, and sovereignty – a standing that makes withdrawal a consequence that can actually be imposed. Ordinary ethnographic subjects, in comparison, have no such foundation. Once the principle descends to subjects who lack that standing, the power disappears: acknowledgement and participation are merely granted by the researcher, rather than held by the researched. In immigration research, this lack of standing becomes even more extreme – visibility itself is a risk for immigrants, especially undocumented ones. This is an accountability paradox: to be accountable to the researched, the OCAP logic requires the researched to become visible so that they can question and refuse; yet for immigrants, becoming visible itself is dangerous, or from a researcher’s perspective, it means irresponsibly exposing them. For the immigrants, then, the door to accountability is not merely hard to open but structurally closed.
Conclusion – The forum that cannot be built
As Pillow, drawing on Trinh, observes, the sharing of power is “‘given’ to the research subject, ‘not taken.’”[31] The same logic applies to reflexive accountability. The criteria governing this accountability – determining “to whom to be accountable”, “how to be accountable”, and “what constitutes fulfilment of accountability” – remain unilaterally designed and implemented by researchers, no matter how well-intentioned they are. Granting the researched the power of review is equivalent to asking them to expend cognitive and emotional labour on revising the researchers’ output – or worse, to placing them in a potentially dangerous position. This constitutes a form of implicit exploitation of those who are already positioned at a structural disadvantage. As discussed previously, reflexivity – no matter how systematised or uncomfortable it is – only delivers transparency, or accountability to the academy, whereas the forum that genuinely incorporates the researched demands a prior standing, like that underpinning OCAP, which the researched is unlikely to possess. Therefore, the Malta Immigration Documentary project can only amount to an honest reckoning with inequality. The uncomfortable reflexivity that may emerge in the fieldwork must resist the temptation of comfortable closure and sit with this irreducible tension.
Afterwords – Dancing with our legs fettered
Writing vulnerably is like dancing on a rope with fettered legs – the performance must be well-completed, but the responsibility we bear binds our movement, and once the gesture crosses the line, the dancer falls into the bottomless chasm. One of my favourite quotes from The Vulnerable Observer is: “when you write vulnerably, others respond vulnerably.”[32] Only when we as researchers genuinely share the right to be vulnerable will a wider vision be shown to us.
The rope is also vulnerable – this is something we need to recognise.
Then this fettered dance is finished, together with the rope.
[1] Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 14.
[2] Wanda Pillow, “Confession, Catharsis, or Cure? Rethinking the Uses of Reflexivity as Methodological Power in Qualitative Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16, no. 2 (2003): 175–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839032000060635.
[3] Karin van Es, Mirko Tobias Schäfer, and Maranke Wieringa, “Tool Criticism and the Computational Turn: A ‘Methodological Moment’ in Media and Communication Studies,” Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 69, no. 1 (2021): 46–64, https://doi.org/10.5771/1615-634X-2021-1-46.
[4] Mark Bovens, “Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework,” European Law Journal 13, no. 4 (2007): 447–68.
[5] Behar, The Vulnerable Observer, 28.
[6] Pillow, “Confession, Catharsis, or Cure?”, 178.
[7] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
[8] Ibid., 589.
[9] Behar, The Vulnerable Observer, 9.
[10] Ibid., 14.
[11] Thomas Stodulka, Samia Dinkelaker, and Ferdiansyah Thajib, “Fieldwork, Ethnography and the Empirical Affect Montage,” in Analyzing Affective Societies: Methods and Methodologies, ed. Antje Kahl (London: Routledge, 2019), 281–95, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429424366.
[12] Ibid., 287.
[13] Ibid., 289.
[14] Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 595-96.
[15] Ibid., 583.
[16] van Es et al., “Tool Criticism and the Computational Turn,” 56.
[17] Ibid., 56.
[18] Bovens, “Analysing and Assessing Accountability,” 450 .
[19] Ibid., 450.
[20] Behar, The Vulnerable Observer, 161-77.
[21] Ibid., 23.
[22] Pillow, “Confession, Catharsis, or Cure?”, 180.
[23] Ibid., 188.
[24] Ibid., 193.
[25] Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 586.
[26] van Es et al., “Tool Criticism and the Computational Turn,” 56.
[27] Brian Schnarch, “Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession (OCAP) or Self-Determination Applied to Research: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary First Nations Research and Some Options for First Nations Communities,” International Journal of Indigenous Health 1, no. 1 (2004): 80-95.
[28] Schnarch, “Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession (OCAP),” 85.
[29] Ibid., 86-91.
[30] Bovens, “Analysing and Assessing Accountability,” 450.
[31] Pillow, “Confession, Catharsis, or Cure?”, 185.
[32] Behar, The Vulnerable Observer, 16.
Lavio Rens 
Leave a comment