Dr John Jok
John Jok is an early-career education researcher who has officially completed a PhD in Education at Deakin University, Australia. His research examines family-school partnerships, refugee and migrant education, parental engagement, educational equity, and culturally responsive research methodologies. Drawing on qualitative and participatory approaches, his work explores the educational experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse communities, with a particular focus on South Sudanese Australian families. His methodological interests include researcher positionality, reflexivity, multilingual research, and ethical qualitative inquiry. John is committed to producing research that informs educational policy, strengthens family-school partnerships, and promotes equitable educational opportunities for refugee and migrant communities.
Session
Researcher positionality is often conceptualised through insider-outsider distinctions, where insider researchers are assumed to possess privileged access, trust, and cultural understanding within the communities they study. However, these classifications can overlook the fluid, contextual, and relational processes through which researchers and participants position one another throughout the research encounter. Drawing on methodological reflections from a qualitative doctoral study examining family-school partnerships among South Sudanese Australian families, this paper explores how researcher positionality was continuously shaped and reshaped through relationships with participants, community networks, and institutional contexts.
As a South Sudanese Australian researcher, I found that shared cultural background, language, and community connections facilitated access, recruitment, and initial trust-building with participants. However, these markers of insider status did not produce a fixed insider position. Instead, my positionality shifted across different research interactions as participants also interpreted my identity through other social and institutional locations, including my affiliation with a university, my status as a doctoral researcher, my professional background, and my access to educational and social capital. These intersecting positions influenced expectations, disclosures, relationships of trust, and the power dynamics embedded within the production of knowledge.
Through reflexive analysis of recruitment, interviewing, translation, and interpretation processes, this paper examines how researcher positionality emerged relationally rather than as a predetermined identity category. It argues that understanding positionality requires attention to the ongoing interplay between trust, power, and relationships within the research context. By moving beyond fixed insider-outsider positions, the paper contributes to methodological discussions on reflexivity, ethics, and knowledge production in qualitative research with culturally and linguistically diverse communities. It highlights the importance of recognising positionality as an evolving relational process shaped by the multiple identities, relationships, and contexts that researchers and participants bring into the research interaction.