I was delighted to be asked to write this foreword for Jennifer Leigh’s book. I have consistently been fascinated by the range and breadth of experience and literature that she weaves into her research, and this book is no exception! These days, it is very common for funders and other bodies to suggest that research should be interdisciplinary, however, how this should be achieved is much less clear. Furthermore, at a time when there is a push for these methods, the dearth of research methods literature to guide the way is a striking absence, surely diluting the potential impacts of interdisciplinary collaboration. As such, this book fills a much-needed gap in the literature.

Based upon her decades of experience as a scientist, therapist, and educator, Leigh’s research is consistently at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research, for example, involving hard science – in this case chemistry – with consideration of embodied practices. It is this cutting-edge exploration, described in a highly accessible way, that researchers can find within Borders of Qualitative Research. In doing so, Leigh identifies ways in which the subjectivities and embodied realities of scientists impact on their practice, challenging the dominance of positivist world views and opening up a range of ontological perspectives. In doing so, the potential for harm to (under-supported) researchers is front and centre, raising important questions about the support provided to novice researchers, which are relevant to new and seasoned researcher alike.

Although these types of philosophical debates and considerations of how to change the academy for the better are challenging, Leigh takes readers on a gentle journey, sharing her own experiences to illustrate key points. First, she considers subjective research practices, including the use of qualitative methods, including those which rely on creative methods and embodied practices. Later she establishes current disciplinary boundaries, from art, science and ethics, before finally showing interdisciplinarity through a series of case studies. I am sure that by the end of reading this book any reader will be considering their practice through a different lens, which can help to identify ways in which creativity and embodiment can add to hard science research, while simultaneously reducing the potential for harm.

According to the internet (so it must be true): ‘the scientific method is the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation. The basic process involves making an observation, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, conducting an experiment and finally analyzing the results’ (Science Buddies n.d.). The scientific method is familiar to most of us, as it is the way children are taught to ‘do’ science throughout a school education. What is notable in the scientific method and the way that it is most commonly taught in schools is the absence of reflection, self-awareness, or the importance and impact of the relationship between the scientist and the world around them. Science is acknowledged as being ‘hard’, possibly because it is abstract (Millar 1991). As a result, science is seen as something worthy, and success in science something to celebrate (Frank 2012). This may be one reason why some social scientists aspire to be taken seriously as ‘scientists’ and hold fast to a scientific ideal (Flyvbjerg 2006).

One of the key tenets of the scientific method is scientific objectivity:

Julian and Jan Sprenger continued:

George Orwell (1946) always encouraged writers to reveal why they write and why a particular subject interested them: ‘I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in.’ To help assess my motives, and the age I live in, I provide in this Preface an account of what has led me to write this book.

My interest in alienation emerges from two places filled with different sorts of smoke. The first place was the Aberdeen Trades Council and Social Club, the hub of organized labour in Aberdeen until its closure in the 2000s. It possessed a multiplicity of rooms in a grand granite 19th-century building in which various trade unions, community campaigns and political groups held meetings. For some reason most of the meetings I attended were in the badly ventilated at best, windowless at worst, rooms in the basement. It was the 1980s and 1990s, prior to the smoking ban, and a thick acrid fug of cigarette smoke rolled around every meeting. My eyes would be stinging by the end of a speaker’s closing remarks. But I learned a lot there. Some of what I learned was to do with the formal part of a meeting and the topics under discussion, such as how to end Apartheid, the General Strike of 1926, gay rights and what this new form of conservative politics called ‘neoliberalism’ would mean for Britain and working-class people. It was a good grounding in Socialism 101, and a valuable education in theory, politics and history. It was there that I first encountered the thick and lush forest of Marxist theory in which it was so easy to become lost, wandering down the pathways of the forces of production and real subsumption, or ensnared by the thorny bushes of base and superstructure. I remember a young me fumbling through a presentation on alienation in one of those rooms, trying to make sense of concepts such as species-being to both myself and whoever happened to have turned up that night.

In countries such as the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, the high proportion of Indigenous peoples and ethnic and racial minorities incarcerated or in the criminal justice system has raised questions and much debate about the link between criminal justice, race and class (Mauer and King, 2007). The figures from two of these countries, by way of illustration, are stark. For example, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) 2019 Uniform Crime Report, 26.6 per cent of all arrests and 36.4 per cent of arrests for violent crime in the United States were Black or African American, despite comprising only 14 per cent of the population (FBI, 2019; Tamir et al, 2021). ‘Of adults arrested for murder, 51.3 per cent were Black or African American [and] 45.7 per cent were White’ (FBI, 2019). In terms of juvenile violent crime, African Americans comprised nearly 49 per cent of all juveniles arrested in 2020 (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2020). Piquero and Brame (2008: 1–2) reveal that ‘the non-White arrest rate for robbery was 132.8 per 100,000, whereas the comparable rate for Whites was 23.0 per 100,000’ and also that ‘the non-White to White robbery ratio was 5.773, indicating that for every one White who was arrested for robbery, almost six non-Whites were arrested’ for the same crime. In fact, Piquero and Brame conclude that the arrest rates for non-Whites were higher than White arrest rates for all crimes. Of note, however, is the disparity between the rates of drug arrests and the rates of drug offending among minorities. Mitchell and Caudy (2015, cited in Drakulich and Rodriguez-Whitney, 2018: 19) find that ‘at ages 17, 22, and 27 African-Americans’ chances of drug arrest are approximately 13, 83, and 235% greater than whites, respectively’, despite the fact that ‘African-American and Hispanics reported statistically lower rates of drug offending [compared to Whites] on nearly every measure of drug offending’. Drakulich and Rodriguez-Whitney (2018) further note that African-American youth are twice as likely to report having had some contact with the police, highlighting the racialized imbalances between contact with the justice authorities and actual offending, and also the relatively early start to experiencing these racialized encounters.

It is vitally important that a qualitative researcher is self-aware, reflective, and reflexive; particularly one using creative and embodied methods (Leigh and Brown 2021a). Reflection and reflexivity can be used interchangeably, and though they are linked, they are not the same (Leigh and Bailey 2013). Being reflective is the process of looking and examining what is there, how we reacted, or what has happened – the literal act of looking into a mirror – ideally performed without judgement, enhancement, or filters. Reflection is a necessary element of being reflexive, and being consciously self-aware enhances the ability to be reflective. Being reflexive can be understood as the process of reflecting on those reflections, taking into account the context, positionality, and using that insight to act rather than react, and choose what happens next.

I am not a lone voice calling for reflection and reflexivity in researchers. Ian Stronach and colleagues described how reflexivity, and different models of reflexivity are intrinsic to creative methodology in educational, scientific, and artistic research (Stronach et al 2007). Mike Poltorak saw embodied reflexivity as crucial in visual anthropology research and education (Poltorak 2019). Susan Hall stated it is essential in action research (Hall 1996a). Sarah Pink (2007, 2009) and Venus Evans-Winters (2019) saw it as essential to ethnographic research, and Aimee Grant (2018) for documentary analysis. Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke developed a widely adopted approach to qualitative analysis ‘Reflexive Thematic Analysis’ which demands reflexivity to ensure quality1 (Braun et al 2012, 2019; Braun and Clarke 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021a, 2021b; Clarke and Braun 2019). Amanda Moffat and colleagues believed that reflexivity is key for a researcher’s self-care (Moffat et al 2016). It might seem obvious to say that reflexivity is essential throughout a qualitative research process from design, to data generation, and analysis (Leigh and Brown 2021a). However, Ben Newton and colleagues found that far too often reflexivity is still lacking in qualitative research (Newton et al 2011). The ways in which researchers are supposed to develop reflexivity are ‘hardly discussed’ (Pink 2009: 50). This may be because reflection and reflexivity are seen as hard to teach (Leigh and Bailey 2013), and researchers are lacking the skills they need to reflect effectively.

The vast majority of qualitative research involves others; as participants, cocreators, or audience. Leaving aside audiences for now, when a qualitative researcher is working with participants or co-creators and wants to elicit data or engage, they have to form a relationship with them. The same is true for educators when they educate others, and for artists who work with or for community groups. However, it is therapists who receive training on how to form, build, and contain relationships with a specific intent. This lesson draws on psychotherapy to understand the constituents of a therapeutic encounter or relationship, so researchers, educators, and artists might better understand the encounters they have and the relationships they form with their participants, students, or co-creators.

The purpose of psychotherapy

Psychotherapeutic approaches are intended to allow others (clients) to share and explore their stories with trained therapists so that they can process their experiences and heal. As such, psychotherapists undergo specific training to support their work and development as a therapist. While these trainings vary in length and content depending on the specific nature of the psychotherapeutic approach, they would all cover similar general principles in order to adhere to the guidelines and codes set by the professional bodies in their country (examples of these are the Standards of Conduct, Performance and Ethics set out by the UK Health and Care Professions Council; Codes of Ethics and Conduct from the British Psychological Society; Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct from the American Psychological Association; the Association of Family Therapy Code of Ethics and Practice; and similar codes set by various bodies including the UK Council for Psychotherapy and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy). These codes all include practical ways of engaging and building a relationship with a client, establishing trust, boundaries, and creating an environment in which the client is happy to share personal and often emotional stories and the therapist is working to strict professional ethics to safeguard their own safety and that of their client. The purpose of therapeutic training is to build and facilitate the natural skills of the therapist (Budd et al 2020).

Jackie’s story

Jackie began to cry out of anger. She showed me a picture. It was supposedly the staff room for her and her colleagues to take a break during the day or shelter when it was raining. The room was little more than a small toilet with a microwave on a nearby shelf. The toilet was broken and circled by brown stains on the floor around it. She hated her job. It reduced her to tears most days and she told me about the sense of dread she experienced before she went to sleep and, in the morning, when she awoke about what the day would bring.

Jackie and her co-workers were under pressure to meet ever tighter and more demanding targets. They were traffic wardens working for a private contractor and the targets they needed to meet were handing out as many parking tickets as possible. Boosting the number of tickets meant providing zero leeway for drivers. A second over the allotted parking time and a ticket was issued, even if the driver was approaching and the car park was far from full. Irate rows with drivers were common, adding to the friction of the day. Users of the car park and the traffic wardens became locked into a conflictual relationship, each seeing the other as some form of enemy.

It wasn’t the fractious tension with drivers and the shabby working conditions she hated. It was how her job had changed over time. A private contractor had taken over the council’s traffic warden operation. When she was employed by the council, she had enjoyed her work. She was not based in a car park but covered the streets in a neighbourhood. There was no pressure to rack up numbers of parking fines issued. She could use her discretion to allow people a few more minutes to move on, or turn a blind eye if she felt that they were having a bad day. Most of her day, in fact, was spent walking around the neighbourhood. She became a known and trusted face to the locals, someone who could be asked to keep an eye on a house if the owners were on holiday, or would say hello and chat to older people if they were on their own.

Mike’s story

“It’s a great job but terrible work,” said Mike. He worked for an online delivery service.

Mike loved his bike, loved cycling. If he wasn’t out cycling, then he was repairing and tweaking his bike ensuring a smooth high performance ride every time he went out onto the city streets or beyond its boundaries and along country tracks. He knew that he needed work. He had to eat and his bike cost money to run. Working for an online platform delivery company was therefore a logical choice. It would allow him to earn money while cycling around the city. A perfect match.

At first it was fun. He soon found that there was a sort of workplace. Other cyclists, all early 20-something men like him, hung out at a central location in the city seated around a statue to some old king or other, waiting for the app to ping to provide them with the info for the next pickup and delivery. The camaraderie between them was energizing. They shared maintenance tips and tails of near mishaps and crashes. One guy had spilled off his bike while on a pizza delivery. Took a corner too fast and too tight in order to meet the designated time, skidded and then found himself painfully lying on the pavement. He contacted the delivery company through the app. Their concern was immediate: was the pizza okay? That brought a laugh, but the graze on his knee still hadn’t quite healed.

As the weeks went by, the job wasn’t what Mike hoped it to be. It was either frenetically hectic and full on or nothing at all. There was a lot of waiting. Too much waiting. Not all days were busy, sometimes Saturdays could be unexpectedly quiet. Sure, he could chat and banter with the other delivery cyclists. But it meant he wasn’t on his bike. That was frustrating. Especially in the summer when it was dry, with long light nights, a time when he’d otherwise be out cycling.

Then again, when it was busy that could be frustrating too. Some nights it was constant, no time to stop or catch your breath. To help offset the pain in his knees he experienced at peak times, Mike loaded up as much as he could on painkillers and anti-inflammatory medication. The pain in his knees aside he felt fine.

I am an interdisciplinary researcher. My passion is utilising embodied and creative qualitative research to capture transient evocative moments and authentic stories of people’s lives (Leigh and Brown 2021a). I am particularly interested in exploring and sharing the subjective experiences of those who are marginalised, and highlighting these testimonials in order to effect change. The life I lived beyond academia as a scientist, therapist, teacher, and artist taught me lessons about intention and impact imperative for all qualitative researchers; particularly those using creative and embodied methods. It showed me how art, education, therapy, and qualitative research share borders and lie adjacent to science. A naive or unwary researcher, artist, or educator can easily get lost, or even harm themselves and their participants if they find themselves in unfamiliar therapeutic territory. Researchers, artists, therapists, and educators are trained to navigate in different lands.

I am a researcher. However, before I became a researcher I was a scientist, and I accepted that there was an objective and absolute truth, and purity in the scientific method. Before I became a researcher, I was a therapist. I worked therapeutically with a humanistic and person-centred ethos using movement, words, and creative outputs such as drawing or mark-making in the service of others to help them process difficult experiences. My work facilitated others to learn from and take what they needed from their own lives and their relationships with the world and others around them, and to let go of what they no longer needed. Before I became a researcher, I was a teacher. I trained to teach children aged 11–19 in science, and worked with children aged four and older with and without special educational needs across the curriculum in the UK. Before I became a researcher, I was an artist, using movement and fibre to capture ephemeral moments of creativity in a spinning web for others to notice and play with.

So why am I writing this book? What am I saying that is unique, or, more importantly, do I feel needs to be said yet has not been shared so far within existing literature?

This book is a qualitative study of a monoethnic Malay Muslim gang, Omega, which has its roots in the Singapore prisons. It remains one of the most important secret societies in postcolonial Singapore, albeit a racially exclusive one, having gained much control over the illicit drug trade in the country and in the Southeast Asian region since the 1990s, though the scale of its activities seems to have diminished over the last decade. This study aims to examine the genesis of the gang and its processes of gang membership and initiation, structure, organization and activities, as well as behavioural traits of its members. While the Omega gang outwardly operates with strong ethnoreligious overtones through the incorporation of Islamic doctrines to create a form of ‘Muslim brotherhood’ in the criminal underworld, its existence is also very much about how Malays as a racial minority in Singapore have responded to latent marginalization and hangovers of colonial racialization by organizing themselves into gangs in order to seek material success. Akin to many racial minority groups elsewhere (such as African Americans in the United States, African Caribbeans in Britain and the Indigenous populations of Australasia), Malays are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system and often caught in the vicious cycle of arrest–incarceration–re-arrest (Travis et al, 2001). While much has been written about racial disparities in crime in Western countries such as Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, much less is known about this phenomenon and of the complex and often contested relationship between race and crime in Singapore, an affluent multiracial and multicultural society. This book attempts to address some of the gaps in the current literature and to contribute to a better understanding of this significant but rather obscure dimension of Singapore society.

In theoretical terms, a functionalist-structuralist perspective takes the position that racial disparity in crime in general and the disproportionate involvement of visible minorities in gangs in particular are a result of the structural marginalization of racial minorities. By treating the Omega gang as a microcosm of the larger socioeconomic and political dynamics of a settler society, the functionalist-structuralist view contextualizes the historical and structural consequences of colonization, industrialization, modernization and socioeconomic disempowerment which have converged to produce an ethnic Malay underclass.

Research, particularly research with the self or with people, presents many challenges and constraints. However, often the only mention of these and potential implications is within a formal university ethics approvals process. The requirements of these varies between institutions. Ethical processes are, for the most part, based around medical or clinical research. They are primarily designed to protect institutions from risk (Dingwall 2016), and do not take into account the same safeguarding elements as professional ethics (Hayes 2009). A real-world approach that shifts ethics from ‘do no harm’ towards a social justice perspective is advocated by Helen Kara (2018). She encourages reflexivity even in quantitative researchers to recognise and acknowledge positionality and bias, and a move from the view that science equals objectivity. Kara argued that researchers need a broader view of ethics, and should think of axiology instead as a ‘wider term than ethics’ (Kara 2018: 14). Axiology is a branch of philosophy that incorporates religion, aesthetics, ethics, and how these play a role in the construction of knowledge. Axiology implies the researcher adheres to values such as respect, reciprocity, and relational accountability (Wilson 2008). This in turn means they should be aware of how the research methods they choose can help or hinder the building of respectful relationships, and privilege some stories over others. Conventional Euro-Western research is non-egalitarian, with the researcher holding the power and making all decisions about what and who are researched, the methods used, and how data are analysed and disseminated. Research is done to or on a topic and participants are research subjects. The research is owned by the researcher, and they have control of it. Creative or arts-based, participatory, and embodied research can all challenge assumptions about participants in research and ethics processes with regard to ownership of co-created content, anonymity, and autonomy. Participants may not want anonymity, and might ask for their names or faces to be associated with their stories. They may want to choose which of their stories are shared, how they are presented, and who they are shared with. Research in these paradigms is with people not on them. Data are generated, co-constructed, or co-created, which means a consideration of ethics and axiology needs to continue beyond research design and data gathering, including reflexivity through analysis and dissemination (Kara 2018).