Caught Between the State and the Subject: Studying Identity and Belonging within State-Based Classifications

Public research funding often requires researchers to frame their work in relation to the state-based classification schemes (e.g. ethnic and racial statistical categories) that guide government interests. Surveys and interviews built around these classifications set durable, a priori boundary markers between groups, and respondents must articulate an identity within those confines. They also elicit responses that capture only one component of identity: a consciously articulated sense of one’s location within the available classification system that cannot capture the implicit, situational, and interactive component of identity. What strategies are available to researchers wishing to avoid the pitfalls of the ‘groupness’ that state-based classification schemes imply?

This paper explores one methodological solution to this dilemma, using the example of research conducted with an NGO in London, which was commissioned by the government to study the financial inclusion of aging ‘Black and minority ethnics’ (BMEs). Our method draws on analytical techniques developed by German sociologists for operationalizing Mannheim’s notion of ‘documentary meaning’. Instead of asking subjects who they ‘were’ or ‘were not’ in relation to the official category that they were recruited to represent, we implicitly explored what it ‘meant’ to be an aging BME by observing how subjects engaged in political communication at a deliberative assembly on matters central to being a member of a political community. At the core of this technique is an intersectional impulse wherein identity markers are seen as emergent through practices, relationships, and interactions and thereby deeply enmeshed with other identity markers: in this case, generation, citizenship and class. The deliberative context also created a critical distance between participants and researchers that enabled the former to challenge directly the empirical and analytical validity of state-based practices of classification, such as statistics.