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The Agonistic Approach

Reframing Resistance in Qualitative Research

The Danish National Center of Social Research, Copenhagen, Denmark

The agonistic approach—aimed at embracing opposing perspectives as part of a qualitative research process and acknowledging that process as fundamentally political—sheds light on both the construction of and the resistance to research identities. This approach involves reflexively embedding interview situations into the ethnographic context as a tool for analyzing how this context conditions and limits positions for research participants, thereby setting the stage for potential agonisms between the researcher and field participants. The author—an ethnic Danish researcher—uses the agonistic approach to examine the identity construction problems and resistance dynamics in interviews with ethnic minority boys at a crime-preventive recreation centre. Applying an agonistic analysis to apparently "uninformative" interview data not only creates insight into local discursive resources, practices, cultural understandings, and power relations but also transforms what initially appears to constitute methodological problems—in terms of "data gaps" from participant resistance—into important, substantial empirical material.

Key Words: political agonisms • research identities • resistance dynamics

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