What’s mess got to do with it? A conceptual framework for researching borders and gendered violence

This is a guest post by Samantha O’Donnell, Dr Briony Anderson, and Dr Kajsa Lundberg. This post is based on an article with Qualitative Inquiry that is forthcoming. Samantha is a PhD Candidate and Research Fellow with the Centre for the Elimination of Violence Against Women at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines gendered violence, bordering, and state violence. Dr Briony Anderson is a Career Development Fellow (Criminology) at Durham University, specialising in privacy abuse, gendered-harms, and technology-facilitated violence and abuse. Dr Kajsa Lundberg is a Research Fellow at RMIT University’s Centre for Urban Research and the TREMS Hub, working in the intersection of urban design, environmental harm, and sustainable policy solutions. This post is part of a thematic series in occasion of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gendered Violence. 

Researching the intersections of gendered violence and bordering is a complex and, at times, messy undertaking. As we reflect on 16 days of activism against gendered violence, we are inspired to highlight ‘mess’ as a conceptual tool for researchers working towards the shared goal of disrupting and challenging experiences of gendered violence. Mess can attune us to new modes of connection and solidarity between researchers, activists, and communities. Engaging with the mess of all research, particularly that which is politically motivated, rather than shying away from such complexity, ultimately enables researchers to bring their activism into their research. This engagement, thus, allows for more connected and engaged knowledge production.

Clearly, research on the intersections between gendered violence and bordering is inherently political, relational, and community-engaged. Researchers often seek coalitions with communities, activists, and organisations, which blurs the researcher’s role within these modes. Much of this research, however, is still taking place within academic institutions, where neoliberal and empiricist demands challenge political and relational approaches. In these spaces, we are encouraged to present our findings in neat and objective ways. But these ideals are not always compatible with an overarching commitment to social change, community, and care. Even when these commitments are embedded in the research design, the mess is often tidied away in the neat presentation of findings. 

In this blog post, we consider how a messy methodological approach may be of use to researchers whose work examines gendered violence and bordering. We present findings from our journal article in Qualitative Inquiry, where we develop mess as an excavating tool. We particularly focus on interviews with women with a precarious migration status where we discussed their experiences of harm at the intersection of immigration law and family violence. In exploring these interviews as a lively encounter, we show how embracing mess provided important insights. In particular, we argue, this framework has generative potential for challenging ideas of research as a neat and objective process. The methods that we engage, like interviews, are not easily separated from who we are as researchers, our political commitments, and the places and time of our research. Mess is, therefore, a useful methodological framework for challenging ideals of objectivity and attuning to the ways in which research is an inherently political endeavour.

Challenging researcher separability

Research is a multidirectional conversation between ourselves, participants, environments, objects, and other intangible elements that we are situated in relation to. As qualitative researchers, we are not objective observers: we both shape the research and are also shaped by it. In this sense, and to borrow a long-cited feminist phrase, the personal is inherently political. Embracing the mess encourages an exploration of the nuanced ways in which our lives are not separable from the research that we do. 

A pertinent example of this embeddedness is considering how space and place shape our research. For example, we are researchers in the Australian context and settlers on stolen land. Our research is never separable from this settler-colonial context, nor the academic institutions and disciplines that uphold and maintain this colonial system and from within which all three of us work. As we explore in our article, unpacking our complicity within the systems that we set out to critique is indeed messy. Yet sitting with this discomfort and untidiness is central to a feminist research praxis committed to social change. 

These conversations are integral to feminist paradigms, including work on borders and gendered violence. For example, Saba Vasefi and Sara Dehm explore gendered violence as an essential function of a ‘settler-colonial border regime’. Furthermore, and as Maria Giannacopoulos details, border studies work within settler-colonial contexts ‘cannot claim the status of “critical” unless’ this work ‘substantively’ contends with the ways in which racialised migration logics ‘dispossess Indigenous people and target refugees and migrants’. We argue that a messy methodological approach holds generative potential in bringing these contentions to the fore. 

To return to the example of an interview, the moments, spaces, and places of research are central to the realities co-created in that moment. Mess as an excavating tool allows us to consider these elements as an essential ingredient of the research and challenge framings that view qualitative research as an objective conversation between the ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’. For us, understanding an interview as a moment that is shaped by all of these elements encourages greater attention to reflexivity. Indeed, our complicity in systems that we seek to challenge, like the migration system, is highlighted, a system that we continue to profit from through the exclusionary access it affords us as white women of European heritage. Attention to mess has challenged us to centre rather than sideline these conversations about our relationships as researchers to the political questions that our work considers. 

Insights into gendered violence and bordering

In our article, we also examine how exploring the liveliness of research brings new insights and creative reflections that expand the research findings. Deep attention to objects, matter, emotions, people, and spaces, yes all the elements that play a role in shaping the research, enables us to more easily recognise how the stories and lives of our participants, and indeed ourselves, are shaped by ‘social, historical, and other material forces’. 

Returning to the example of the interviews, these were not neatly packaged but sensorial and lively. In many of these interviews, the participants brought their young babies with them. This points to the material forces that shaped the participants' experiences. They were mothers with young children whose precarity limited their access to childcare subsidies. Rather than an intrusion or roadblock to the research, this sensorial and affective experience exhumed the pervasive grip of immigration law, as a force that broke through the interview’s seemingly private walls. 

A messy movement

During and beyond the 16 days of activism against gendered violence, we encourage consideration of the messiness accompanying research in this space. Instead of foreclosing this mess, we hope to start a messy movement that challenges notions of objectivity and impartiality. As researchers, we cannot operate in isolation from each other and the world within which we are situated, nor should we want to. In centring political and personal modes of working and researching, we aim to open up new axes and places where commitments to social change can take place. 

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