Positionality in Research: Ethical Inquiry and Methodological Rigour

We are very pleased invite you to a workshop on:

'Positionality in Research: Skills for Ethical Inquiry and Methodological Rigour'

20th May - 9:30-12:00

Fusion Building - FG06

The workshop explores positionality as a central element in critical research praxis. The workshop examines how the intersectional identities of researchers and their socio-cultural, geopolitical, and epistemological standpoints actively shape research methodologies, knowledge construction, and interpretive lenses.

Drawing on key frameworks of Intersectionality, Postcolonialism, decolonial thought, and transnational collaboration, participants will engage in reflexive exercises and interactive activities designed to support the articulation of rigorous positionality statements. The session foregrounds power, critical ethics, and representation as essential dimensions of research design. By embracing situated knowledge, researchers can cultivate reflexivity and accountability while disrupting extractive or hierarchical knowledge systems.

Introduced by Dr. Christa van Raalte, Director of the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP), the workshop is led by Dr. Samantha Iwowo with a featured contribution by Professor Winston Mano:

Dr Samantha Iwowo, filmmaker and critical media theorist, will share insights from her practice-based research. She will reflect on how writing the Zimbabwean political drama Mugabe (2022) as a Nigerian screenwriter shaped her approach to narrative framing and representation, and how her cultural rootedness as a Niger-Deltan informed her work on Oloibiri(2015), a film that confronts the realities of oil exploitation in Nigeria’s Niger-Delta. These case studies illustrate how positionality actively shapes storytelling strategies, influences audience reception, and demands sustained ethical engagement. Dr Iwowo will also draw from her UKRI-HEIF project, Developing a Media Decolonial Imaginary, and the AHRC-funded Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections, where she serves as Co-Investigator. Both projects, among their core concerns, examine how knowledge systems from formerly colonised contexts are activated, negotiated, or contested within contemporary research and transnational collaborations.

Professor Winston Mano will introduce his theory of Afrokology as a decolonial epistemological framework that recentres African ways of knowing. Afrokology challenges Eurocentric epistemologies and offers alternative methodological foundations rooted in African lived realities, philosophies, and cultural logics (Mano, 2021). His contribution invites researchers to rethink positionality through indigenous, pluriversal perspectives. By foregrounding African ontologies, Afrokology resists the universalising tendencies of Western-centric research models and affirms the legitimacy of localised, experiential knowledge systems. It emphasises relationality, community-based validation, and culturally grounded ethics as central to scholarly inquiry. In doing so, Afrokology not only deconstructs existing power asymmetries in knowledge production but also proposes an affirmative vision for research that is contextually resonant, epistemically inclusive, and politically liberatory.

Together, the session will help participants identify and address bias, navigate power asymmetries, and ethically engage with research communities. The workshop is especially relevant to scholars working across transnational, interdisciplinary, and underrepresented knowledge landscapes who seek to move beyond claims to objectivity and toward epistemic justice.

Refreshments will be available in the room from 9.00am.