“In the end, people are people”: positionality statements in the archival enterprise

Abstract Although positionality statements have gained considerable visibility in archival studies scholarship and professional discourse, little empirical evidence exists concerning the ways in which archival professionals themselves use positionality statements. Drawing on an international survey of 62 archivists, this exploratory case study examines archivists’ attitudes toward positionality, their experiences creating positionality statements, their perceptions of positionality statements’ usefulness and drawbacks, and their views on such statements’ application, namely in archival description, reparative description, and peer review. Findings show that most respondents value reflection on positionality and perceive payoffs for personal ethics, professional practice, and scholarly communication. Conversely, participants expressed ambivalence toward positionality statements as a practice. While many respondents identified potential advantages such as showing the researcher’s location, countering bias, enhancing understanding, illuminating the ostensible insider/outsider relationship, encouraging reflexivity, increasing transparency, augmenting trustworthiness, and promoting critical thinking, most also put forth concerns. These included inauthenticity, violating privacy, infusing bias, ineffectiveness, extra labor, irrelevancy, reductiveness, chilling effects on scholarly communication, intellectually suspect, not universally accepted, and a lack of best practices. Many stressed the potentially adverse ramifications of these on members of marginalized communities. Complementary quantitative analysis suggested that caring about positionality strongly correlated with perceiving positionality statements as useful, even though belief in their drawbacks persisted, irrespective of stance. Most participants opposed using positionality statements in colophons and annotations; they remained divided on PS’ role in reparative description. In peer review, finally, respondents mostly opposed requiring PS. This research complicates prevailing claims about positionality statements by foregrounding archivists’ lived experiences.