Researcher identity and childhood memories in a study of vulnerable children in Swaziland

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which construes scientific research as objective and value-free, this article foregrounds my social identity as a female, who grew up (and was schooled) in a deep rural, impoverished context of Swaziland, and my subjective childhood memories in shaping a qualitative-narrative study of six vulnerable children in a rural primary school in Swaziland. The article denotes the significance of productive remembering as a critical basis for knowledge acquisition and production. It contributes to ongoing avant-garde theorising about the centrality of researcher's reflexivity and positionality in the scientific processes of knowledge acquisition and production. I show how subjective remembering was at the heart of the conceptual, theoretical and methodological decisions undertaken in this study, and how, almost 30 years later, the vulnerable children's schooling experiences still mirrored my own childhood memories about schooling in this context. Therefore, highlighting the pervasive nature and, indeed, cross-generational extent of the vulnerable children's unfavourable schooling experiences. Just like my childhood memories and identities, the vulnerable children's schooling experiences were entangled in complex, enduring and discursively regulated power-laden social relationships. Hence, the article recommends foregrounding and addressing vulnerable children's identities and their power positioning within social relationships in their contexts as a basis upon which strategies for improving the quality of vulnerable children's rural schooling experiences should be founded.