Respectful Rationalities: Engaging with Opposing Views
by Carol Ballantine and Kath Browne
Dr. Carol Ballantine is a feminist sociologist interested in gender, race and violence. She received her PhD (2020) from the School of Global Women’s Studies in the University of Galway, focusing on narratives of violence in the lives of African women living in Ireland. She has a background in the international development sector, and has worked for NGOs and UN agencies, as an advisor on gender and refugee issues. Dr. Ballantine is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on Beyond Opposition in the UCD School of Geography. As the postdoctoral researcher responsible for Ireland, Carol oversees the design and implementation of interviews and group activities/ workshops exploring difference and living with difference as this relates to gender, sexuality and abortion.
Kath Browne is a Geography Professor at University College Dublin (UCD). Her research interests lie in Social and Cultural Geographies, and particular people's spatial experiences of sexualities and genders. Her work has focused on the impact of legislative changes to sexual and gender equalities in the 21st Century. Prof. Browne's recent research includes the exploration of the transformations of everyday spaces for those who are opposed to or concerned about socio-legal changes in sexualities, gender and abortion. Beyond Opposition, a European Research Council funded project, then used these findings to explore ways of moving beyond social polarisation related to gender, sexuality and abortion in Ireland, Great Britain and Canada and consider the possibilities of living together where we don’t agree. She is also a partner in the project RESIST, which focuses on gender politics in several European countries. She has authored over 100 publications, including (with Catherine Nash) Respectful Relationalities: Researching with Those Who Contest or Have Concerns about Changes in Sexual and Gender Legislation and Cultures.1
Drs. Browne and Ballantine share with us below a description of their ground-breaking work in understanding and finding ways to engage with and among opposing viewpoints on some of the most polarizing issues of our time.
LGBTQ+ and abortion are issues that are made to be contentious, divisive and polarising. For those of us who want to see a more equal, less gender-segregated world, we need to centre those who are oppressed and marginalised by inequities, including around sexualities and genders. We also want to think about all of society, including those who do not share our perspective. We believe that it is necessary to acknowledge that oppositions to sexual and gendered equalities run deep; they are often fundamental to people’s identities. Because of this, we have come to recognise that, even with extensive activism, education and political support, there may never be an end point where everybody agrees (with us). Conducting research with people who disagree with gender and sexual equalities legislation can be important, and is very challenging. It can require an ethos that respectfully engages.
This post explores how the Beyond Opposition project interviewed people who oppose or have concerns about legal and social changes around sexualities, genders and abortions. We look at the respectful relationalities as a way of dealing with the challenges and risks of this work.
Why We Need to Hear These Voices
Beyond Opposition is a research project that is investigating social polarisations related to gender, sexuality and abortion. We interviewed 161 people who are opposed to or concerned about changes in laws and societies in Canada, Ireland and the UK related to gender, sexuality and/ or abortion. We did this because, recently, for some and in some places, there has been significant progress towards inclusion and equalities related to gender and sexualities. For instance, Ireland — where we are writing this post—is known as the first country in the world to pass same sex marriage by popular referendum. But 38% of voters in Ireland’s 2015 referendum on marriage equality voted ‘No’ and, outside of a few professional media commentators, these ‘No’ voters are rarely heard from. We know little about their lives or their experiences.
Thinking about disagreement and opposition allows a consideration of the lives and experiences of people who find themselves outside the new (fragile) social consensus in these “worlds that we have (supposedly) won.”2 We challenge approaches that discount those who oppose us; that presume they are all “far right” or religious conservatives; or that assume that eventually they will disappear. We are also unconvinced by the merit of deploying the power of the state against people who disagree with us - too easily, those same powers can be turned against us.
In order to make the Beyond Opposition research possible, we developed an approach, which we call respectful relationalities. This approach allowed us to ask new, challenging questions about changing norms, and here we consider its many complexities.
Why Would They Speak to Us?
The individual background of each of the researchers on the project positioned each of us squarely in the category of queer and/ or feminist academics: this proved both central and problematic for setting up and carrying out interviews. Central, because we came to this research as a result of our lived knowledge of what it was like to be excluded because of our sexual and gender identities and positions. And problematic, because, given our backgrounds, there was no reason why our interview participants would trust us, people who might have actively worked against their views and values. In order to address this challenge, we developed the respectful relationalities research ethos (Browne and Nash,2023). This approach integrated our queer and feminist knowledge and values with the new challenge of conducting research with people with whom we expect to disagree, perhaps fundamentally.
Throughout the project we have reflected carefully on the ethics of our approach.3 We recognise that there are risks in “platforming” and “giving voice” to perspectives that oppose or undermine our long term vision of a world without gender. Yet we believe that understanding the experience of holding these positions is of urgent importance, not only to consider divisions and polarisation, but also to understand how those who find themselves outside of what is ‘normal’ in places like Ireland are treated.
Creating a Space for Listening
In the interviews we conducted for Beyond Opposition, we wanted to create a space where trust was possible, even across mutual suspicion. For instance, it became clear very early on in the project that some of the potential participants looked up the project webpage and researcher profiles to find out more about us. They learned about our different individual and professional commitments to bringing about social change. This sometimes meant that we, the researchers, were seen as opposed to them, the possible interviewees. Building trust in this fragile context required us to develop our approach deliberately as a research team. In a carefully-worded outline on the project website, we laid out our ethical approach of respectful relationalities as clearly as we could. It said:
We will not seek to change the opinions of those who are involved in the research, indeed these views, values or beliefs are not the focus of the study. Instead we are interested in everyday experiences; in other words, what happens when people are going about their lives and find that they are confronted with people or situations that challenge their values.
With this statement, we were promising an interview space where we would listen with curiosity to hear what they had to say. Beyond Opposition operates in the academic discipline of human and cultural geographies, and it investigates how people’s views about gender and sexualities affect how they experience space. This meant that the process of interviews did not criticise or even explore people’s views in detail. Instead the interviews looked to understand experiences of everyday spaces, like work, home, schools, shopping. Queer geographers understand deeply how experiences in space and place can be troubling as well as central to our experience of our identities, as well as our relations with others.4 Focusing on spaces and daily life placed the individual participants and their lives at the centre of the interview, in a way that focusing on polarised issues and often-abstracted topics might not, creating a respectful space for our inquiry rather than a combative one
We also said: “We are academics who believe in respecting people’s lives and experiences and reporting them as they tell us.” (Beyond Opposition)
This commitment is standard in qualitative research practice. By emphasising it in our ethos statement, we were acknowledging the worries and perhaps suspicions that potential research participants brought to the interviews. With this promise, we were also making a long term commitment, not only that our conduct within the interview encounter would be respectful, but also that when we came to write about the interviews - as we are doing now - we would not use participants’s words to “set them up”. We were not trying to ‘trip them up’ or ‘name and shame them’— which was a huge fear for many. This is a challenge for researchers like us, accustomed to using findings to bring about what we see as legal and policy improvements for marginalised people. It is necessary to make listening possible.
Feedback and Change
A key approach to building trust was listening carefully to the feedback we received from participants and potential participants about the research project, and acting on that feedback. The most important example came quite early in our data collection. For the purposes of recruitment, we initially grouped individuals and organisations under a single category, describing our desired/ intended participants as those who were: ‘opposed to sexual and gender rights and equalities’. We received extensive feedback criticising this category. Our target audience told us that they were not necessarily ‘opposed’ to these issues; often they considered themselves ‘concerned about’ them, or as holding ‘misgivings’. Others had concerns about very specific aspects of our topic — for instance gender affirming care for children, or workplace Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies — but were otherwise supportive. Finally, some responses objected to our use of the term ‘rights and equalities’. Some potential recruits emphasised their support for rights and equalities, especially a particular cohort who described themselves as pro-choice feminists, in favour of LGB equalities, but opposed to what they saw as the unjust inclusion of trans rights in this framework. Leaving aside our analysis of the issues, we understood that the category we had created was not working for our intended research sample.
As a result of this feedback, in Spring 2021, we revised our project language, and changed the description of our participants to those who are ‘concerned about or opposed to legislative, political or social changes in relation to sexualities and sex/gender in the 21st century’. The category is broader and less definitive, and provides space for multiple different perspectives on changing gender and sexual norms, not just pro or anti. It also allowed for positions that were concerned but not necessarily opposed, those who held their views lightly. It did not escape us, that in pushing against our rigid and binary categorisation, potential participants in Beyond Opposition were queering our understanding of their positions, although it is unlikely that the participants would describe it in this way!
Engaging with Difference, Differently
Beyond Opposition seeks a way of engaging with difference differently, knowing that difference is inevitable even when it causes harm. We explored the day-to-day experiences of those who feminist and queer researchers often avoid, or confidently stereotype. This project is risky and ethically challenging, and we have benefited from generous research funding to allow us to approach it with great care. Our ethos of respectful relationalities is both a useful approach for conducting research in this arena, and also fraught with considerations of complicity and complexity.
Browne, Kath, and Catherine Nash, 'Respectful Relationalities: Researching with Those Who Contest or Have Concerns about Changes in Sexual and Gender Legislation and Cultures', in Kate Boyer, LaToya E. Eaves, and Jennifer Fluri (eds), Activist Feminist Geographies (Bristol, 2023; online edn, Policy Press Scholarship Online, 18 Jan. 2024), https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781529225099.003.0009, accessed 14 Sept. 2024.
For example, see Weeks, J. (2007). The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203956809.
Ballantine, C. and Browne, K. (2024). “Listening with quiet curiosity: Feminist and queer reflections on interviews with the ‘wrong’ people.” Women’s Studies International Forum 107 November – December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2024.102982. See also Young, K., & Browne, K. (2024). Facebook recruitment: understanding research relations Prior to data collection. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2023.2278253.
Brown, G., & Browne, K. (Eds.). (2016). The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315613000
Note that guest posts express the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the publishers and founders of A World Without Gender, which is expressly intended as a place where readers can encounter and explore different viewpoints on the topic.