Negotiating the insider–outsider dilemma in urban research: Experiences of a graduate student returning home for fieldwork
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract African doctoral students studying abroad and returning to their home countries for fieldwork face multiple and complex challenges. This paper reflexively addresses the question of positionality from the experiences of conducting research on urban governance and the spatial politics of street traders in Harare, Zimbabwe. The paper discusses dilemmas associated with navigating insider and outsider identities, showcasing how these categories continually shift while conducting research on street traders within a distinct socio‐cultural and political context. Moreover, the author's background as a former street trader, now pursuing a PhD at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, adds a layer of complexity to the situation, offering valuable insights into how these ‘multiple’ positionalities can either facilitate or hinder data collection. The paper underscores the nuanced experiences of the researcher in the field, shedding light on the potential challenges, pitfalls and opportunities inherent in grappling with one's positionality. By foregrounding these complexities, the paper contributes to our understanding of the positionalities of researchers in the social sciences and adds to the growing body of literature on methodologies for conducting urban studies, particularly with vulnerable populations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it