Working with collective identities has taught me that sameness, along with the ruthless logic of binary opposites, are their basic underpinnings. To address this concern, it is convenient to know from where I stand, which in English language relates to my positioning, the framework that is given to me, the way I see and feel things, in short, my perspective. This condition of visuality is in fact an epistemological constraint (Heidegger, 1999): a limited horizon, just like a pair of eye-glasses that produce naturalized views of the world (Mitchell, 2002).

I tried to overcome these logics, both in the understanding of my topic and in the research process itself, conducted in coherence with my positioning.

This paper intends to be a reflexive account on my research’s development by taking the argumentation ‘from where I stand’ to the point of questioning: ‘where do I stand?’ In relation with the topic of democracy of the special call, the issue here is not to take sides, giving way to binary logics, but to acknowledge how our (mis)perceptions and (mis)conceptions can shape our reality, and  how it can affect our contribution to strive for a just and equitative society. Furthermore, and countering the logics above-mentioned, I try to develop coherent research practices that explore rhizomatic strategies, through crossing and in-between fields.

Where do I stand, then? In research it is a legitimate, necessary and even productive question to ask systematically, that I take here as my research compass in order to fulfil the following objectives:

a) To acknowledge the view ‘from where I stand’ and how my everyday experiences influence my positioning in respect to my core values and my research (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985).

b) To define ‘where do I stand?’, as my positioning towards research, in epistemological, methodological, ontological and ethical terms (Hernández-Hernández, 2019).

c) To present several strategies that allow to value the process of becoming for the researcher, the research and the thesis.

d)  To identify 'what do I stand for' when pointing the logic of sameness and binary thinking as outdated and inadequate to the challenges of the present.

Dividing is an increasing phenomenon in our times, as we can witness by the number of walls that have been growing since the World War II, with an exponential growth since the 9/11 (Vallet & David, 2012). Dividing, as a categorizing strategy, helps to clarify and untangle concepts but we have to keep in mind, whether in social reality or in our research procedures, not to make the mistake of hierarchizing the elements that we have placed apart. For that we must make the subsequent effort of re-entangle, and sustain in tension, all the binaries that are formed before our eyes.

This exercise of reflexivity on the research process, as well as the process of becoming a researcher, relates to my topic of collective identities but also to “academic identities, including identities as researchers,[which] are forged, rehearsed and remade in local sites of practice” (Lee & Boud, 2003, p. 188). While connecting with the flowing aspects of my identity, defined by my perspective, I reckon the positioning that I am requested to perform (Guerin, 2013), to face the challenges of my social-political-academical environment.

With this reflexivity gesture I intend to demonstrate my attempt to democratise ways and forms of knowledge, nurturing the “need to be aware of the personal, social and cultural contexts in which we live and work and to understand how these impact on the ways we interpret our world” (Etherington, 2004a, p. 19).

This paper takes reflexivity as the main research method since it calls upon self-awareness and the process of interaction between what, or whom, or how, we are researching, as well as the frameworks of our values and, consequently, our orientations and interpretations (Etherington, 2004a; Etherington, 2004b). It consists on an exercise of transparency that “enables us to provide information on what is known as well as how it is known” (Etherington, 2004b). The first phase of my argumentation will present the positioning ‘from where I stand’, focusing on being a mother, the interest in ceramics, the love for dance and music, the journaling practice, the participation in different collectives - dance class, parents association and academic group of studies. Simultaneously, I will present the strategies, informed by a heuristic approach (Moustakas, 1990; Douglass & Moustakas, 1985), through which I came to understand, or visualize, ideas or concepts that I was working with. These strategies include images, metaphors, diagrams, and writing in the form of fiction or journaling. In a second moment, the question ‘where do I stand?’ will be addressed taking the apprenticeships of the previous phase. Misconceptions like the childish tendency to perceive solidity in what is fluid and ever changing, or the drive to categorize, if not polarize, ideas and concepts, to name a few, will feed my positioning and the core values that I try to impregnate in all aspects of my research. So I stand for bottom-up when not horizontal logics, and therefore democratic, non-hierarchical, and collaborative participation; as well as the rejection of sameness and binaries in its various forms. For this reason, and noting that ‘crossing’ is the watchword of my thesis, this must be reflected at all levels: reality, and with it identities, in permanent change (ontology); from which we can only know the narratives, the discourses, unable to capture essences (epistemology); the multiplicity and rhizomatic intertwining of research methods, as well as the crossing of the empirical field itself which is assumed by heterogeneity (methodology); and finally, the awareness that, as a researcher, I am a being in transit, who paradoxically must remain that way, alerted to the transformations that my perspectives (and all external contributions) can produce in my worldview and the research account itself (ethical).

It is evident that the concerns and the effort to democratize cultural concepts goes way beyond my reflections, indicating the need and urgency for cross perspectives with equal relations of power, as suggested by the question posed by Anna-Catharina Gebbers, curator of the exhibition ‘Nation, Narration, Narcosis’ (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2022) integrated in the curatorial project ‘Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories’: “How can the linear narratives associated with nation and state be supplemented by other forms of community, by plural narratives and by the simultaneity and equivalence of different ways of thinking?” (Goethe-Institut, 2021). The time of the grand narratives of sameness that opposed a fictionalized Other as long gone. Even though the walls keep being built, it is easy to read between the lines the call for another paradigm. Attempting to support it I share my process of research ‘in-between the lines’, that first requests to acknowledge the dividing lines that keep rising in our daily life and the involuntary easiness of binary thinking (Elbow, 1993) in our research projects. Secondly it calls for another ground, what in Klein (2019) words translates to “moving toward third space” (p.72), pointing “strategies for relational thinking” (p. 77-78) where intuition (hunches) and wisdom (reflexive knowledge over experience) are valued along with other strategies like journaling, or visualization through sketches and concept maps. This kind of thinking embraces “difference, uncertainty, ambiguity, and middle spaces” (p. 78) responding in line with the challenges of our times. Finally it has to be acknowledge that writing itself brings awareness, like reflexivity, and research also develops ‘in-between the lines’ of what we write, where life, fiction, artistry and all the belittled sources of knowledge can be voiced.

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