Researcher’s disaffiliation for the development of knowledge: How to position yourself as a researcher and actor in an ethno-religious school?
When the researcher invests in his research, he maintains a cognitive and affective relationship with his object of study. In this article, we would like to address this relationship, and to present how the question of the involvement of the researcher is an issue of research and how the analysis of the processes at work can become an object of reflection, which also allows an understanding of the research subject. Our immersion in a religious primary school in Quebec (as part of a doctoral research on the role of religion and school in the construction of youth identity) places us at the heart of a reflexive process on the position of the researcher to himself, to research subjects, and to data collection tools. In this study, we find ourselves at the heart of a continuous conversational process affecting conversations with subjects, data interpretations, and with our own values. This conversational process actually leads to some sort of religious disaffiliation, and to live and reflect on the intersubjective aspects of our research.