Outside home. Notes on reflexivity

Abstract

There is a wide spectrum of ways in managing subjectivity intrinsic in research. This paper goes through and “lives” (Gregorio Gil, 2014) some research experiences: one on prostitution of minors and another on trafficking in human beings. These two experiences reveal how some of the characteristics of my subjectivity – among which that of being a “young female foreigner and outsider” in academia and in fieldwork – and of my own researches, have impacted that reflexivity practice alongside access to related fields, types of relationships and shared information. The paper proffers the idea in which a “reflexive process” on subjectivity can involve and/or hopefully involve the entire experience of the researcher, going beyond the borders of a single research. In the process, unexpected elements of subjectivity can come into play; in other cases the meaning attributed to them can change in time or can have a role different from what had been expected. Some elements, objects of epistemological analyses, as imposed by a reflexive approach, can become objects of attention also on the phenomenological level.

Keywords

• subjectivity; reflexivity; outsider; qualitative research; prostitution
• sex work; trafficking in human beings