Browsing by Author "Settler, Henrietta Monica"
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- Item‘Hair economies’: power and ethics in an ethnographic study of female African hairdressers in Cape Town(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Settler, Henrietta Monica; Professor Van der Waal, Kees; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology & Social Anthropology.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this empirical study, which focused on power and ethics, I explored the relationship between the researcher and the research participant in the context of migrant African women in Cape Town. The study, located in hair styling salons, had dual aims; one ethnographic and the other methodological. In the ethnographic context of the hair salons, I sought to analyse how female migrants from African countries chose specific economic activities that express their cultural or gendered identities. Methodologically, this study was aimed at identifying and analysing how the power between the researcher and the research participants impacted on a study of migrant women’s experiences, with specific consideration of the social and economic contexts within which research participants navigate and assert their own agency. Participant observation was used as the primary data collection method, a method that I used in conjunction with semi-structured interviews. For a period of 12 weeks, between May 2013 and August 2013 I entered and engaged the social world of migrants and hair salons in Mowbray, Cape Town. From the onset securing access to the research field and participants proved to be a challenge since initial possibilities of access to a primary identified site was denied. Through a process of negotiation and securing access, I, as researcher had to confront issues of privilege in relation to migrants, even though my race and gender provided me with a degree of intersectionality in relation to African migrant women. Further, I found that not only does migrant women`s ownership and labour in hair salons disrupt imagined ideas about their mobility, but also that they asserted their agency by presenting me, the researcher, with a protracted set of rules of engagement. This resolved, to a degree, their vulnerability and my power as a researcher. By default, I managed to find a salon owner willing to grant access. The aim of the study was to interview the owner of the hair salon as well as the four hairstylists but only two stylists agreed to being interviewed. Findings from this research show the complexities of power relations between the researcher and the research participants. African migrant women in scholarship are imagined in a gendered context and almost always in relation to their partners as the primary decision-maker around migration. This study shows how African migrant women facilitate their own agency in the context of migration and how the hair styling industry provides them with a range of economic possibilities. The study further shows, notwithstanding their vulnerability as migrants, how African women in this research project exercised their agency as women by refusal, selfsilencing, determining the level and measure of participation and the content of discussions.