Grounded Theory and the Decolonizing Agenda: Possibilities and Limitations

Grounded Theory (GT), a pioneer of qualitative research strategies, has gained its place in academia as a systematic inductive approach to research. The founders of GT such as Glaser, Strauss, and Corbin, as well as Charmaz and Clarke who developed GT further after the constructivist and post-structuralism turn explored and developed the approach in several directions and across various research fields from medical care to social anthropology.

Evolving as an alternative approach, GT embodies fundamental processes and procedures, which allows its users to pulse, reflect, position and consciously adopt measures to deconstruct and disempower orthodox and taken for granted nuances of research relationships, processes and interactions.

As voices get louder for the decolonization of knowledge production and qualitative research in particular, it is important to assess how much of an alternative is GT as it moves into mainstream research. Taking also into account the advancement of current understandings of epistemic injustice.

In this paper, we draw on experience doing research in rural and urban settings in East and North-East Africa to explore inherent characteristics and processes of the methodology, such as optimal ignorance, flexibility, inductive data gatherings, and coding. Providing concrete examples of doing, we demonstrate the possibilities and limitations for reversing power relations, co-creating knowledge and producing de-colonial research processes and knowledge beyond global south - north asymmetries.