1167149

research-article2023
EDRXXX10.3102/0013189X231167149Educational ResearcherMonth

Reviews/Essays

Beyond Making a Statement: An Intersectional

Framing of the Power and Possibilities of Positioning
Mildred Boveda1 and Subini Ancy Annamma2

In this essay, two women of Color researchers examine the intersections of race and disability and ask, “What is the power
and purpose of positioning and positionality statements?” Informed by Black feminist theory, and drawing from the DisCrit
tenets of intersectional oppressions, historicity, and whiteness and ability as property, the authors focus on researchers’
positioning in relation to how they engage and communicate knowledge about multiply marginalized people. Positionality
statements, they argue, must be more than a listing of identities or a claim on authority through the naming of professional
proximity to marginalized communities. Recognizing the increasing expectations for education scholars to articulate
positionality in their scholarship, the authors offer a three-pronged intersectional framework, with provocations about the
onto-epistemic, sociohistoric, and sociocultural elements of positioning. Education researchers interested in conveying how
intersectional oppressions effect knowledge production will find this framework useful for crafting positionality statements
that consider the multidimensional nature of power, oppression, and research in relation to their field, the literature, and
multiply marginalized participants.

Keywords: disability studies; equity; ethics; feminist theory; race; research methodology

A
s part of the communication of their research endeavors,
scholars are increasingly expected to write positionality
statements. For example, former editors of the Review of
Educational Research, intending to increase transparency about
the journal’s editorial review processes, recommended that
“authors of thematic reviews of empirical works interpreting
qualitative data . . . may need to offer a more detailed accounting
of researcher positionality and participant engagement” (Murphy
et al., 2020, p. 5). We have noticed several patterns in how schol-
ars write positionality statements as they become more prevalent
in education research. Often, statements are written as confes-
sionals (Pillow, 2003) or simply as disclosures of researcher iden-
tities (Secules et al., 2021). Other times, positionality statements
are used to justify authority through naming professional prox-
imity to marginalized groups (e.g., “I was a special education
teacher in an urban community, so I have experience with dis-
abled youth of Color”). These approaches to positionality state-
ments do not explicitly contend with the power dynamics that
accompany embodied privileges. For example, in the prior paren-
thetical statement, the researcher’s race and ability remain unin-
terrogated. These attempts at positionality statements serve as
inadequate models for scholars seeking to better understand why
researcher positionality matters to their participants, engagement
with data, and the communication of findings to their fields.
Our purpose in this essay is to argue that education scholars
must first understand the power and function of positioning to
effectively write these statements, especially in relation to mem-
bers of multiply marginalized communities (i.e., those at the
intersections of myriad oppressions). Doing so reveals position-
ality not merely as a function of reporting findings to colleagues,
but critical in the design and practice of ethical inquiry. We use
the structural analytical lenses afforded by Black feminism(s)
(e.g., Collins, 2000; Evans-Winters, 2019) and DisCrit
(Annamma et al., 2013) to extend Davies and Harré (1990),
who describe positioning as:
the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations
as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly
produced storylines. There can be interactive positioning in
which what one person says positions another. And there can be
reflexive positioning in which one positions oneself. (p. 37)
1
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
2
Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Educational Researcher, Vol. XX No. X, pp. 1­–9

DOI: 10.3102/0013189X231167149
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MONTH XXXX    1
As such, we conceptualize a framework of positioning as an
active verb where researchers reflect and address where their
locations lie in relationship to interlocking systems of oppres-
sion; fields of study; and, most importantly, research participants
over time. Researcher positioning is engaged and revisited
throughout the process of knowledge production. Positionality,
for us, is what researchers may articulate in a statement when
they reflect on what they negotiated—whether it be with partici-
pants, secondary data about multiply marginalized communi-
ties, or other sources of knowledge—throughout the inquiry
process. Articulating the distinction between positioning and
positionality is central to our purpose, as well as to our theoreti-
cal, methodological, and axiological commitments.
Although education researchers may find themselves in vul-
nerable positions during a research project (e.g., tenure-earning
faculty interviewing university presidents; Mason-Bish, 2019),
in this article we prioritize how positioning matters in scholar-
ship about multiply marginalized communities. Around the
world, researchers must participate in ethics trainings that revisit
the harm that researchers enacted on marginalized people, such
as the extraction of Henrietta Lacks’s cells, Nazi sterilization
experiments on Jewish and Roma captives, and the Willowbrook
hepatitis studies on disabled people (Spellecy & Busse, 2021).
U.S. federal regulations, moreover, require ethics boards to over-
see research involving “vulnerable populations” (e.g., children,
disabled people, incarcerated people, and those who are eco-
nomically disadvantaged). Beyond these training and compli-
ance requirements, we argue that education researchers must
continually stay vigilant about the ways certain communities are
more susceptible to harm—such as multiply marginalized peo-
ple who are rarely centered in education research, either as par-
ticipants or knowledge producers.
In this essay, we ask, “What is the power and purpose of posi-
tioning and positionality statements?” To answer, we focus on
researchers’ positioning in relation to how they engage, study,
and communicate research about multiply marginalized com-
munities. In exploring the importance of clarity about the pur-
pose, opportunities, and limitations of researcher positionality,
we ultimately offer a framework for researchers to engage in
positioning that decenters the authoritative figure of the
researcher and prioritizes the knowledge of multiply marginal-
ized communities.
Collaborative Conceptualization
of Positioning and Positionality
We are two scholars who self-identify as women of Color—one
disabled (Annamma) and one nondisabled (Boveda)—situated
in discursive spaces dominated by white, nondisabled people in
research, teaching, and advising (Arzubiaga et al., 2008; Boveda
& McCray, 2021). We each spend considerable time mentoring
graduate students and emerging researchers to examine the
intersections of racism, ableism, misogynoir, and other intersect-
ing oppressions. As such, we have thought deeply about the limi-
tations and possibilities of positionality statements in scholarship
about these intersections. Explicitly positioning our sociocul-
tural identities in the dissemination of our research has at times
provoked misunderstandings, mistrust, and even resentment
2    EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
from colleagues who interpret our intimate understandings with
marginalization as an obstacle to sound research. This includes
reductive interpretations of our research participants and our
findings’ relevancy to a broad educational research audience.
We understand that positionality statements may increase the
vulnerability of some scholars, particularly without established
consensus about the purpose of those statements throughout
education research communities. However, we argue that the
answer is not to refuse positionality statements, but instead to
engage a more robust, theoretically informed conceptualization
of what they mean. We thus came together to theorize about
how to responsibly support our colleagues’ and students’ under-
standings of purposefully engaging positionality.
First, we begin by examining what has been written since
Educational Researcher last featured an article on positionality 15
years ago—that is, Milner’s (2007) touchstone piece. In the fol-
lowing section, Discourse of Positionality, we inquired about the
social science literature, “What has been written about position-
ality statements when considering race and other sociocultural
identities?” Of this literature, we then highlight two articles that
focus on how to write positionality statements from the public
health field (Jacobson & Mustafa, 2019) and engineering educa-
tion research (Secules et al., 2021). Next, we use Black feminism
and disability critical race theory to create a theoretically based
conceptualization of positioning that considers intersecting
oppressions. Finally, we shift to how we conceptualize position-
ing during knowledge production and address how to reflect
that positioning process in positionality statements.
Discourse of Positionality
When examining scholarship explicitly focused on positionality
published after Milner (2007), scholars frequently claim the need
for positionality. Importantly, researchers contended with their
racialized, gendered, and otherwise minoritized sociocultural
identities (e.g., Ahmed et al., 2011; Caretta & Jokinen, 2017;
D’silva et al., 2016; Evans-Winters, 2011; Fremlova, 2018), the
professional tensions they encountered in the field (e.g., Fletcher,
2010; Mason-Bish, 2019), or how positionality aligns with
methodological approaches (e.g., Cousin, 2010; Holmes, 2020;
Jafar, 2018; Lin, 2015). In each of these articles, positionality
served to examine how researcher identities influence questions
asked, tensions navigated, and methods employed. We found
these instructive in conceptualizing a framework for examining
positioning.
Given our intentions to offer provocations for education
researchers as they (a) reflect on their positioning while engaging
inquiry and (b) articulate positionality statements, we highlight
two articles that offered practical guidance for thinking through
how to recognize and present one's positionality. Jacobson and
Mustafa (2019) created a positionality map in the form of a
graphic organizer, in which they listed the following sociocul-
tural identity categories as starting points for novice qualitative
researchers: class, citizenship, ability, age/generation, race, sexual
orientation, cis/trans, and gender. They described these as tier 1
groupings. The second tier asks researchers to “go beyond these
groupings by identifying how these positions impact their lives”
(p. 4). The third tier focuses on reflexivity and asks researchers to
name affective aspects tied to these social identities. The authors
encouraged researchers to use these maps during the research
design, data collection and analysis, and interpretation of find-
ings of a study. Jacobson and Mustafa (2019) offered the caveat
that the tool is intended for novices. Although they “separate”
sociocultural identities for workshopping purposes, they “pro-
pose that a next step in the process of positioning oneself is to
critically explore how these social identities are related to,
informed by, and overlap with one another” (p. 10), in consider-
ation of intersectionality conceived of as multiple identities.
Black feminists, on the other hand, consider intersectionality to
be about more than just multiplicative identities but also the
myriad of oppressions that accompany those identities (Collins,
2000; Crenshaw, 1991).
Secules and colleagues (2021), who are engineering educators
and researchers, categorize positionality practices in their field
into three types: acknowledging practice, establishing transpar-
ency, and contextualizing methodology.
The two most common forms of positionality statements,
Acknowledging Practice and Establishing Transparency of Self
Attributes, originate from the paradigmatic roots of high-
consensus disciplines such as science and mathematics (Biglan,
1973), where the researcher is acknowledged but nonintegral;
bias must be identified, accounted for, and bracketed or
suppressed. In contrast, Contextualizing Methodology statements
challenge this paradigm by positioning the researcher as an
integral component of the research process, highlighting the
importance of positionality within our work. (p. 22)
Considering these categorization types, our essay falls under
contextualizing methodology. Moreover, Secules et al. (2021)
intended to “highlight dimensions of positionality associated
with researchers from minoritized identity groups and/or work-
ing with minoritized participant populations” (p. 24). Although
Jacobson and Mustafa (2019) centered on novices, Secules et al.
(2021) intended to model more sophisticated ways of conceptu-
alizing researcher positionality. Naming six dimensions (select-
ing research questions, epistemology, ontology, methodology,
researcher-as-instrument, and communication), they presented
examples from researchers at various stages of their careers, with
an emphasis on equity in knowledge production. These guide-
lines and pedagogical tools help researchers consider positional-
ity with respect to identities.
In addition to acknowledging sociocultural identities or pro-
fessional backgrounds, scholars must also understand themselves
as members of institutions implicated in power differentials and
historical legacies of racism, ableism, sexism, and other intersect-
ing oppressions. Our contribution to the discourse on position-
ality uses Black feminism and DisCrit as important lenses to
articulate how education researchers can consider positioning
related to multiple oppressions that participants may face.
Extending and Expanding Positioning Through
Black Feminism and DisCrit
Davies and Harré (1990) use positioning to indicate the dynamic
interplay between individuals and selves. Black feminism and
DisCrit are rooted in understanding people who are multiply
positioned through interlocking systems of oppression. Our
understanding of positioning extends Davies and Harré through
Black feminism and DisCrit to require that researchers reflect on
interlocking systems and their shifting places within those struc-
tures. For example, a Black scholar at a predominantly white
university may find herself in collaborations where she is the
only multiply marginalized person. When working with incar-
cerated girls of Color, this same scholar must also reflect on her
privileged position as a doctoral-degree-holding researcher. We
thus revisit Milner’s (2007) conceptualization of positionality in
education research.
Milner’s (2007) original exploration into “dangers seen,
unseen, and unforeseen,” powerfully anchored by a critical race
theoretical framing, identified how researchers’ understanding of
racism, society, and knowledge production influences their
engagement with positionality. DisCrit grew from the roots of
Black feminism (Collins, 2000) and drew from critical race the-
ory (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and
disability studies (Baynton, 2001; Bell, 2006) to engage the
mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism (Erevelles,
2014) more robustly. Given the generative commitments of Black
feminism(s) and DisCrit, we do not seek to diminish prior ana-
lytical tools for understanding racial oppression. Instead, we seek
to extend and expand the foundational work that came before
ours. As such, Milner’s assertion that researchers “should be
actively engaged, thoughtful, and forthright regarding tensions
that can surface when conducting research where issues of race
and culture are concerned” (p. 388) is one we take seriously.
Building from Milner’s argument for positionality, we aim to
conceptualize a framework for positioning that robustly recog-
nizes intersecting oppressions including racism, ableism, and
sexism. In other words, we engage other dimensions of social
oppression entangled with racism. Ours is not a comprehensive
list of oppressions, and the purpose of our intersectional analysis
is not to account for all of them (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Rather,
we intend this as an example of how to consider multiple mar-
ginalizations when engaging researcher positioning.
To examine our guiding question—“What is the power and
purpose of positioning and positionality statements?”—we
revisit three tenets of this multitheory framework driving our
conceptualization of positioning and positionality: intersectional
oppressions, historicity, and whiteness and ability as property.
Intersectional oppressions. Black feminism is the intellectual
foundation of DisCrit as it steers us to conceptually center those
who experience multiple oppressions (Annamma, 2021;
Annamma et al., 2018). Anna Julia Cooper (1852) wrote, “[W]
oman’s strongest vindication for speaking is that the world needs
to hear her voice (p. 122, italics in original). She goes on, “When
race, color, sex, condition, are realized to be the accidents, not
the substance of life. . . . Her wrongs are thus indissolubly linked
with all undefended woe, all helpless suffering, and the plenitude
of her ‘rights’ will mean the final triumph” (p. 125). Cooper and
other Black feminist thinkers laid the foundation for what the
Combahee River Collective (1977) argued over 100 years later:
“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else
would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the
destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Our goal here is not
MONTH XXXX    3
to articulate that only Black women’s voices matter in Black
feminism, what Patricia Hill Collins (2000) critiques as “exclu-
sionary definitions of Black feminism . . . (which) are inadequate
because they are inherently separatist” (p. 36). Audre Lorde
(1984), for example, emphasized the role Black feminism has in
building coalition across different marginalized people. Instead,
we acknowledge how addressing interlocking oppressions pro-
vides a robust analysis of systems of power and people’s interac-
tions within those systems. Our intersectional analysis does not
hyper-focus on multiple identities but instead recognizes how
multiple oppressions land in our lives (Crenshaw, 1991).
Through this foundational recognition of multiple oppres-
sions, DisCrit “focuses on ways that the forces of racism and
ableism circulate interdependently, often in neutralized and
invisible ways, to uphold notions of normalcy” (Annamma et al.,
2013, p. 11). Consequently, DisCrit specifically highlights how
notions of behavior, productivity, and intelligence are all medi-
ated by perceptions of race (Lewis, 2021) and illustrate how rac-
ism is mutually constitutive with ableism (Artiles, 2013). Both
Black feminism and DisCrit recognize racism as endemic, while
holding that other oppressions interact with racism to influence
and inform life from the macrosociopolitical to the microinter-
actional. Conversations held by congressional representatives,
scholars, and activists about the criminalization of Black dis-
abled girls (Pressley et al., 2020), for example, require examina-
tions of interpersonal dynamics between a predominantly white
teacher workforce and their students.
The power of conceptualizing positioning through Black
feminism and DisCrit is that they reveal how a myriad of oppres-
sions also limit knowledge production. Education researchers
have ignored or refused narratives offered by multiply marginal-
ized people, like disabled people of Color who have been found
shameful and deficient (Erevelles, 2019). Conversely, the power
of positioning can be generative when understanding how
researchers and participants engage in relationships, given these
interlocking oppressions. Returning to the example of the Black
scholar working with Black incarcerated youth, making explicit
her shared and divergent experiences with the youth may enrich
the depth of their co-constructed understandings.
Ignoring historicity. Rose M. Brewer (1989) described Black
feminism’s commitment to historicity as the “concern with the
interplay between biography and the social-historical juncture”
(p. 67). Hirsch & Stewart (2005) elaborate,
historicity in this sense is the manner in which persons operating
under the constraints of social ideologies make sense of the past,
while anticipating the future. Historicity is a dynamic social
situation open to ethnographic investigation. (p. 262)
We find the distinction between history as an objective truth
and historicity as articulated in Black feminism and DisCrit
especially relevant to conversations about positionality.
Black women and other multiply marginalized scholars of
Color have been largely erased as producers of knowledge, even as
they participated in knowledge-building throughout history
more generally and education research specifically (Evans-
Winters, 2019; Smith et al., 2021). It is thus critical we use “the
4    EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
moment-to-moment updatable technology . . . interwoven with
other forms of new media and creative and community-building
educational events, to create an experiential archive” of Black
feminist thinking and practice (Gumbs, 2011, p. 19). For exam-
ple, Boveda and McCray (2021) noted how Black women’s con-
tribution to special education, disabilities studies in education,
and inclusive education are seldom explicitly acknowledged in
the literature. The authors call for disrupting traditional notions
of academic mentoring that limit Black women “to individualis-
tic, whiteness-centered” ways of knowing, which “may produce
internalized mistrust of embodied epistemologies and hinder the
growth and development of new knowledges” (p. 509). Education
researchers have ignored historicity that has replicated how
knowledge production attempts to exclude Black women from
the formal archives, positioning them as not enough. Yet, as The
Cite Black Women Collective and others remind us, Black
women have always produced knowledge and written themselves
into the archives in innovative ways (e.g., Smith et al., 2021).
Black women are one of many groups left out of education
research. Disabled people have also been imagined as incapable
of producing knowledge, and studies of disability are often anti-
Black (Bell, 2011). Education researchers too often treat parents,
families, educators, and other caregivers in their lives as more
knowledgeable than disabled people themselves (Wong, 2020).
When included, education research addressing disability often
centers on white disabled children, erasing the complex lives of
disabled youth of Color (Banks, 2015). Leaving multiply
marginalized people out of research—both as producers and
participants—erases their voices, denies their humanity, and
makes them vulnerable to violence as a result. Disabled people of
Color have positioned themselves, and deserve positioning, that
situates them as legitimate researchers, research participants, and
knowledge builders.
Drawing on the commitment to historicity, DisCrit examines
the “legal and historical aspects of dis/ability and race and how
both have been used separately and together to deny the rights of
some citizens” (p. 11). Chris Bell (2011) calls this recovery and
detection work—work to uncover hidden, invisibilized, and
erased histories. Documenting positioning serves to archive past
and current practices of resistance to build a better future; this,
in turn, is a commitment to historicity. Consequently, for
researchers who are women of Color and those embodying mul-
tiple marginalized identities, historicity is not only about writing
ourselves into the narrative as marginalized scholars. Historicity
is also of consequence for facing how our affiliations with presti-
gious institutions and scholarly communities necessitate an
understanding and articulation of the academy’s historical and
current relationship to the specific multiply marginalized com-
munities we learn alongside. Said differently, the purpose of
linking researcher positioning and historicity is to recognize the
necessity of documenting multiply marginalized people’s experi-
ences and the inequitable outcomes they face—thereby connect-
ing them with interlocking systems of power across time.
Whiteness and ability as property.  The recognition of whiteness
and ability as property is the third theoretical principle guiding
our framing of the purpose and power of positioning (i.e.,
researchers’ continuous reflection and negotiation with power
throughout the inquiry and knowledge production processes).
Cheryl Harris (1993) conceptualized whiteness as property to
better understand how power is reproduced: “In particular,
whiteness and property share a common premise—a conceptual
nucleus—of a right to exclude” (p. 1713). Before and during
enslavement in the United States, white identity was used as fur-
ther justification for stripping Indigenous people of property
rights to the land they tended for generations. This interaction
between whiteness and property evolved when Black people
were owned as property. Black women experienced a specific
kind of dehumanization during this time. “The cruel tension
between property and humanity was also reflected in the law's
legitimation of the use of Black women's bodies as a means of
increasing property” (Harris, 1993, p. 1719). It was in the
moments of genocide and enslavement that white identity
became more firmly entrenched with owning property. Hence,
the right to include meant the right to strip others of access to
the property and to secure all the accompanying powers that
came with being a property owner. Consequently, when under-
standing positionality, we must recognize how the property
rights of whiteness—which provides an opportunity to exclude
others from the research process—allowed researchers to pretend
race did not matter and “own” and feel entitled to knowledge
about multiply marginalized people.
Securing whiteness as property also allows for a claim to
white innocence and the erasure of historicity. Gotanda (2004)
describes this
“innocence” in the sense that the Aha! Moment has, through the
use of a “new” beginning, cut off the moral, social, economic and
political ties to the past. The “innocence” is the innocence of a
new beginning. There are many other aspects to the notion of
innocence that can be drawn from my simple idea of a new
beginning. For example, one could attempt to build inquiries
into such issues as responsibility, guilt, or compensation from the
idea of innocence. (p. 673)
Specifically, when engaging in positioning, some scholars claim
this new beginning by “suddenly” recognizing race and racism.
Yet the generations of knowledge production that depended on
whiteness as property are not easily swept away with a positional-
ity statement. If left uninterrogated, scholars simply build on top
of whiteness-centered knowledge, feigning innocence as if the
very foundations of our educational institutions are not contin-
gent on exclusion (Orozco, 2019).
Leonardo and Broderick (2011) wrote, “like race, ability is a
relational system”; they complement each other in discursive and
material ways to exclude “those deemed to be uneducable and
disposable” (p. 2208). Leonardo and Broderick delineated how
deficit thinking and knowledge production stem from whiteness
and ability as property. Ultimately, DisCrit roots itself in this
understanding that notions of ability cannot be removed from
notions of whiteness, as they depend on each other to thrive.
This is what we mean when we say racism and ableism are mutu-
ally constitutive.
When reflecting on the ways positioning is made legible or
ignored, DisCrit reminds us of how whiteness has been situated
as the norm and used to justify the exclusion of Black women,
disabled youth of Color, and other multiply marginalized
humans from receiving credit for generating knowledge. This
exclusion functions through a racist and ableist rationale that
positions certain people as being less than in thinking, behavior,
and production (Lewis, 2021). Therefore, when scholars make
explicit how they are positioning themselves within these struc-
tural dynamics, as well as in relation to the multiply marginal-
ized communities presented in their scholarship, they expose
whiteness and ability as property. This inclusion is essential as it
situates scholars as those who may work against the grain of
power reproduction in education research.
These three tenets, intersectional oppressions, historicity, and
whiteness and ability as property—garnered through Black femi-
nism and DisCrit—have helped us conceptualize what has lim-
ited the ways we generate knowledge. That is, by engaging
positioning as a statement to be made as a list of identities or a
confessional, researchers fail to utilize one or all of these three
tenets. Concurrently, these tenets also provide us with an under-
standing of what possibilities there are in contending with posi-
tioning in education research. We do this by engaging three
elements of researcher positioning informed by these tenets that
can inform research, both during the process of inquiry as well as
writing the positionality statements afterward.
A Framework of Positioning Through
Black Feminism and DisCrit
Our goal in this section is to infuse the theoretical tenets outlined
previously within the elements of positioning to create a frame-
work for engaging researcher positioning throughout the knowledge
production process and when writing positionality statements. We
argue that positionality, as it has been taken up, often recenters the
powerful or uses researcher proximity to marginalized communi-
ties as a rationale for why we are an authority. When positionality
is engaged as static (a statement), we miss theoretically informed
ways to consider researcher relationships with their field, the litera-
ture, and participants. We argue that the power and purpose of
positioning should be to remove the researcher from the center of
the work and centralize multiply marginalized communities.
Consequently, positioning requires reflection throughout the
research process, not just in researcher statements.
Milner (2007) included a list of seven bulleted questions
related to the researchers’ understanding of themselves, race, and
culture, and five bulleted questions related to researchers “rela-
tion to others.” Although not explicitly an article about position-
ality, Boveda and Bhattacharya (2019) offer several “points of
consideration” in question format for researchers to consider
how onto-epistemology matters when purporting to engage in
ethical de/colonial inquiry. We follow their approach and offer
questions as provocations. These questions are categorized under
three elements of positioning: (1) the onto-epistemic that recog-
nizes how embodied experiences shape understandings of inter-
sectional oppressions, (2) the sociohistorical that engages
historicity, and (3) the sociocultural that concedes whiteness and
ability as property. We then provide questions that animate each
of those reflections to engage throughout the research process,
from design to publication. For didactic and pedagogical rea-
sons, we separate these assumptions and ideas, but in practice,
these elements are entangled.
MONTH XXXX    5
The onto-epistemic.  In its simplest form, the onto-epistemic con-
siders both what we know about the world and how we find
knowledge within that world. “Onto-epistemology refers to the
inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology when engag-
ing in knowledge production, with scientific practices, and with
the world itself and its inhabitants—” (Hyde, 2021, p. 381).
Given the black Feminist and DisCrit theoretical tenets we draw
from, the onto-epistemic element of positioning recognizes how
knowledge production is impacted by historic and current inter-
sectional oppressions. Consequently, we encourage researchers
who center the interlocking oppressions multiply marginalized
people face to ask the following:
What theoretical framing and intellectual foundations will you
draw from?
What do these theories suggest about ways of knowing?
What does that framing say about how power relations are
reproduced?
What do these theories require of you regarding positioning?
How does this theoretical framing account for being in a
relationship with others and with those with less power than you?
What do these theories say about who is qualified to produce
knowledge?
How do your theories explicitly address racism, ableism,
cisheteropatriarchy, and other oppressions?
If your theories do not address or center these oppressions, how
will you consider them?
These questions about the onto-epistemic element of position-
ing allow recognition of ideas about the sources of interlocking
oppressions, highlighting education scholars’ roles in reproduc-
ing power inequities in knowledge production. The power of the
onto-epistemic in positioning, then, is that it requires us as
researchers to explicitly grapple with, throughout the inquiry
process, what our assumptions about reality, truth, and knowl-
edge mean for research.
The sociohistorical. Within an intersectional framework, the
sociohistorical responds to calls to attend to the interplay
between biographical and social-historical junctures (Brewer,
1989). Thus, the sociohistorical element of positioning refuses
to ignore historicity by attending to our professional situated-
ness; power dynamics regarding that situatedness within the
academy; and collaborations between coauthors, research teams,
and participant-researchers, which all impact knowledge pro-
duction. Sociohistorical questions that infuse our understanding
of positioning include:
•• Addressing professional situatedness:
What is the genealogy of your field(s)?
What epistemic assumptions are explicit or implicit in the field(s)?
6    EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
To what extent does the institution you are affiliated with hold
power within your field? How has your field and institution been
in a relationship with multiply marginalized people? Specifically,
what harm has the institution caused and what repair has been
done?
What are you doing to recognize the genealogy, assumptions,
and harm within your research?
•• Addressing power dynamics:
What are the relationships and hierarchies within the disciplines
and subdisciplines?
How are these theories and ideas received in your academic
community? How is this reception problematic or productive?
How will you recognize and disrupt these power dynamics with
your work?
•• Addressing relationships between collaborators:
What are the relationships between members of a research team?
What are the varying statuses and notoriety of members of an
authorial team?
Which collaborators are: tenure and nontenure earning? Scholar/
practitioner? Student/superior? Advisees?
How do these statuses impact collaborations?
•• Addressing the interrelatedness of sociohistorical elements of
positioning:
How are professional situatedness, power dynamics, and
collaborations between researchers and coauthors impacted by
multiple oppressions?
How do approaches toward collaborations disrupt or reproduce
sociohistorical hegemony?
What are the social implications of dialoguing about harmful
institutional histories?
The sociohistorical element of positioning is animated through a
lens of historicity, where we as researchers recognize our complic-
ity through belonging to institutions, fields, and partnerships
that have reproduced power and harmed multiply marginalized
communities and write ourselves and our communities into the
archive of knowledge production. If one occurs without the
other, our reflections on positioning will remain superficial.
The sociocultural.  Informed by how Black feminism(s) and Dis-
Crit frame markers of difference, structural inequalities, and the
need to center the experiences of multiply marginalized people,
positioning must include the sociocultural element. Whiteness
and ability have been the foundation of knowledge production,
including the right to exclude others who do not fit within these
narrow boundaries. Socially and culturally, multiply marginal-
ized people have been left out of educational research, both as
participants and formally recognized knowledge generators.
Consequently, we must refuse the white innocence that erases
historicity and ignores intersectional oppressions. Instead, edu-
cation researchers must ask:
What are the sociocultural identities you share with your
participants and research team members?
What are the interlocking systems of oppression that your
participants and research team members may face that you do
not? (These will be different for different participants and research
team members—e.g., participants: teachers and students; research
team: postdoctoral fellow, graduate research assistant)
To what extent is the literature informing your research team,
design, and analysis centering multiply marginalized people?
How does the source of your knowledge production resist
essentialism about your participants and research team members
and represent in-group variance?
Each of these questions seeks to resist whiteness and ability as
gatekeepers to knowledge production. Even the most critical
scholars, those deeply rooted in examining and uprooting power
dynamics, can replicate those same power dynamics in relation-
ships with participants and research team members. Using the
sociocultural elements of positioning, then, must explicitly ques-
tion how researchers attend to power differentials with the peo-
ple with whom they partner.
We argue that reflecting on our positioning in the academy is
about more than listing our identities as if they are stagnant and
uninformed by shifting power, people, and places. It is more
than claiming authority by centering our experiences. Instead,
positioning must be understood as an ongoing act that takes
time, care, and repeated effort to return to these questions.
Conclusion
At the outset of the paper, we noted that we imagine a distinc-
tion between positioning and positionality statements, which we
return to now. Engaging a framework for positioning imbued
with Black feminism and DisCrit is a careful and conscientious
act that occurs throughout the research process. It is a cyclic
endeavor, not linear, ever-expanding and evolving as research
teams, participants, and coauthors change over time.
The positionality statement is the outcome produced through
enacting, with due diligence, reflections on the elements of the
framework. The goal of the framework offered is not to answer
every question posed in a positionality statement, nor is it a pre-
scriptive checklist. However, if a positionality statement is going
to be more than an enumeration of identities or a claim on
authority, researchers who center multiply marginalized people
can use this positioning framework as a guide throughout their
inquiry. By doing so, researchers can generate positionality state-
ments that consider the multidimensional nature of power,
oppression, and knowledge production in relation to the field,
the literature, and multiply marginalized participants.
As editors increasingly encourage positionality statements and
education researchers strive to include them in their scholarship,
we must have more robust conceptions of their function beyond
rhetorical moves that center researchers. We built on Davies and
Harré’s (1990), Milner’s (2007), and other scholars’ efforts to
offer robust understandings of positioning because we are heart-
ened by the possibilities of how they make space for reflective
researchers who understand the roles that identity and race play
in knowledge production. We sought to expand on this work
through a Black feminist and DisCrit lens to offer insights for
those who substantially address intersecting oppressions. We offer
this framework for positioning, and the elements within, as prov-
ocations. As such, we hope our collaborative conceptualization of
the power and purpose of positioning can provide a pedagogic
and praxis-oriented guide to a range of scholars enacting various
research methods. When positioning is situated as a necessary
part of the inquiry, positionality statements communicated by
scholars who are in the initial stages of learning research practices,
as well as those written by veteran researchers who support emerg-
ing scholars, will ultimately become more robust and insightful.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Educational Researcher editorial team
and reviewers for their poignant feedback on this essay.
ORCID iDs
Mildred Boveda https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2377-5960
Subini Ancy Annamma https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8744-6456
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Manuscript received August 16, 2021
Authors
Revision received May 30, 2022; December 13, 2022
MILDRED BOVEDA, Ed.D., is associate professor at the College of Accepted March 14, 2023
Education, The Pennsylvania State University, 140 CEDAR Building,

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