Handling data in decolonial research

The Messy Realities of Anticolonial Research: Reimagining Language Practices in Secondary Education in Nigeria

Mercy Martins, PhD researcher in Education at the University of Bath

My research explores how language practices in Nigerian secondary schools can be reimagined using anticolonial concepts of agency and resistance. The research design was indigenous, weaving qualitative, creative, and participatory methods that were flexible and aligned with the daily experiences of my collaborators. Structured in two phases, the first focused on the voices of marginalised students, while the second included teachers, parents, school management, and leadership.

After securing ethics approval, I conducted a small online pilot with local collaborators which informed my choice of a school with linguistic, ethnic, and religious parity. I prioritised depth in one all-male secondary school rather than breadth across two schools due to time constraints. Almost five months of fieldwork produced extensive data. To preserve Nigerian Pidgin and avoid rough translations, I transcribed and cleaned the data manually. Journalling and a participatory analysis session, where students directly engaged with the research questions, guided the analysis.

While I set aside some methods (such as Theatre of the Oppressed and parent interviews) for future work, I sought to include multiple perspectives, centre participant voices, and clearly distinguish between their ideas and mine. Ethical tensions included deciding what to share, avoiding reductive categorisation, and ensuring authenticity.

Storytelling, Embodiment, and the Ethics of Analysing Bedouin Ethnography

Wesam Wekhyan, PhD researcher in Social Policy at the University of Bath

My PhD research explores Bedouin identity, knowledge, and community praxis in central Jordan through a decolonial, feminist ethnographic approach. The dataset is multi-modal: focus groups, one-to-one interviews, oral histories, WhatsApp notes, photos, videos, fieldnotes, memos, and observations of ceremonies and everyday life (weddings, funerals, dinners, walkabouts). Much of this material was produced in a Bedouin dialect and a culture where history is preserved orally rather than textually, requiring translation across dialect, Arabic, and English, as well as from embodied, performative expression into written form. Virtual data (voice notes, chats, images) extended this storytelling into digital space.

Writing was not separate from analysis, but a continuation of storytelling: through memos, vignettes, and embodied descriptions I traced how narratives lived, moved, and transformed across settings and generation. Analysing such material meant making decisions about segmentation and representation without erasing relational meaning. Ethical and personal challenges were constant: anonymity in small communities, safeguarding oral/visual data sovereignty, and navigating my insider–outsider position and the embodied emotional labour of researching from within.

This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811