Article
Field Methods
2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–15
Local and Transnational © The Author(s) 2022
Identity, Positionality Article reuse guidelines:
and Knowledge sagepub.com/journals-permissionsDOI: 10.1177/1525822X211051574
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Production in Africa and
the African Diaspora
Kudus Oluwatoyin Adebayo1,2 and Emeka T. Njoku3
Abstract
How does shared identity between researcher and the researched influence
trust-building for data generation and knowledge production? We reflect on
this question based on two separate studies conducted by African-based
researchers in sociology and political science in Nigeria. We advanced two
interrelated positions. The first underscores the limits of national belonging
as shorthand for insiderness, while the second argues that when shared
national/group identity is tensioned other intersecting positions and rela-
tions take prominence. We also show that the researched challenge and
resist unequal power relations through interview refusal or by evading issues
that the researcher considers important, but the participant perceives as
intrusive. We shed light on the vagaries, overlaps, and similarities in the
dynamics of belonging and positionality in researching Africans in and
outside Africa as home-based researchers. Our contribution advances the
1Diaspora and Transnational Studies Unit, Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Ibadan,
Nigeria
2African Centre for Migration & Society, University of The Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South
Africa
3International Development Department, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United
Kingdom
Corresponding Author:
Emeka T. Njoku, International Development Department, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham, UK.
Email: emeka.njoku.thaddues@gmail.com and e.t.njoku@bham.ac.uk
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2 Field Methods 0(0)
understanding of field dynamics in the production of local and cross-border
knowledge on Africa/Africans.
Introduction
How should researchers engage with those researched, and what does it mean
for knowledge production and sharing of findings? Specifically, how do re-
searchers’ identity and multiple positionalities manifest in the researcher–
researched relationship, trust-building, and field access for data generation
and knowledge production? This article reflects on these questions based on two
separate studies conducted by Nigeria-based researchers as part of their doctoral
training in sociology and political science at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
After African researchers wrestled anthropology from the claws of the
colonial virtues with which the discipline was framed and associated in the
early years, the ethnographical method has been widely deployed to un-
derstand African peoples, cultures, and society (Munthali 2001). With this
shift, many questions have been raised to interrogate the notion of objectivity
in knowledge production (Ferdoush 2020; Hoogendoorn and Visser 2012;
Simandan 2019b; Todd 2021). They are centered around how field research
and data interpretation are largely influenced by researcher multiple sub-
jectivities (Henry 2003; Narayan 1993). In other words, researchers’ identity
and positionality can perform the dual purpose of advancing the research or
serve as a limitation (Bouka 2013). Identity, defined loosely to mean re-
searchers’ ethnic, race, class, religious affiliations or gender and sexual
orientation (Bouka 2013), determines the researchers’ positionality (Nagar
2002; Simandan 2019a, b). Henry and colleagues say the following:
Because identity is always grounded, the concept of positionality reflects the
situatedness of researchers’ identities and affiliations more accurately … in the
research context, positionality simply refers to the perspective, orientation and
situatedness of the researcher vis-á-vis the researched. (Henry et al. 2009: 468)
Simanda (2019b: 130) proposed four epistemic gaps in developing Donna
Haraway’s arguments on positionality and situatedness of knowledge claims,
arguing:
[O]ne’s knowledge is inevitably incomplete and situated because information
about the world always reaches one through a channel that is constituted by four
epistemic gaps: “possible worlds versus realised world,” “realised world versus
witnessed situation,” “witnessed situation versus remembered situation,” and
“remembered situation versus confessed situation.
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Adebayo and Njoku 3
Thus, the research process is predisposed to sociocultural positions and
emotional state that influence the designing of the research problem, the
methods used in assessing data, and how data is interpreted (Pratt 2009;
Proudfoot 2015; Todd 2021).
In another vein, the positionality of the researcher poses challenges in data
access, as it can influence the disposition of the research participants toward
the researcher. For instance, if the positionality of a researcher is at variance
with the research participant, it could determine the quantity and quality of
data that would be made available. The concept of “elite interviewing” best
demonstrates this point. Simply, elite interviewing reflects a setting in which
the researcher’s background is not elevated or is relatively weak. According to
Glas (2021), Morris (2009), and Batteson and Ball (1995), interviewing
various types of elites, such as those in positions of authority and those who
are educated, is often affected by positionality and power relations, which may
impede data access. These elites can influence encounters through “intent and
disinterest” (Glas 2021: 440) while their power and positionality can easily
sway the directions of the research. Such participants can also exude influence
by attempting to proselytize the researcher to accept a particular perspective
(Marie 2005), thereby making knowledge socially produced and located in
power networks (Simanda 2019b). Implicit in all of these is the agelong
insider–outsider debate in ethnographical encounters.
The discourse on the insider/outsider binary focuses on conflicting epis-
temological standpoints and methodological approaches about the researcher
and the researched (Naples 1996). The assumption is that researchers’ af-
filiations to a group privilege them to extract in-depth knowledge about that
group. On the flipside, Fonow and Cook (1991) argue that outsiders can be
viewed as neutral between two contending groups (Abu-Lughod 1988; Hill-
Collins 1990). This view is based on the belief that people are more likely to
share information with a stranger than with friends and acquaintances. How-
ever, the binary construction of insider/outsider has been refuted largely because
of how it views insiderness as “fixed social location” and neglects the “in-
teractive processes through which ‘insiderness’ and ‘outsiderness’ are con-
structed” (Naples 1996). Indeed, what decades of “insiders looking-in-research”
showed is that insiderness is not automatically ascribed as the status of a re-
searcher can turn the familiar into the unfamiliar and vice versa (Adeniyi-
Ogunyankin 2019; Chege 2015; Mandiyanike 2009; Oriola and Haggerty
2012). Further, intersectional categories that define local and global societies
complicate presumably straightforward identities (Yacob-Haliso 2019).
However, few studies have focused on African scholars’ positionality.
“Even in studies that focus on African societies, African scholars’ posi-
tionality is marginalized” (Mwambari 2019: 3). The loudest response to this
clear gap in scholarship has emerged from African academic “homecomers”
(Adeniyi-Ogunyankin 2019; Chege 2015; Mandiyanike 2009; Oriola and
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Haggerty 2012). Academic homecomers “are individuals who left home to
pursue graduate education in the West, with an eye to returning to their
country of origin to conduct research or start an academic career” (Oriola and
Haggerty 2012: 2). Still, the intervention of academic homecomers has not
accounted for the varied contexts and dimensionalities of border-crossing as
they shape the positionality of African researchers. In this regard, we ask the
following: What happens with or to identity and positionalities when home-
basedAfrican researchers do research in their home countries or cross borders to
do research among their national diasporas? The present article reflects on this
question, using our experiences as doctoral researchers in a Nigerian university.
We draw on two unrelated but methodologically overlapping studies, one
focusing on counter-terrorism in northeastern Nigeria and the other on Nigerian
diaspora in China. Despite the dissimilarity in their thematic and geographic
focus, the studies are similar because of their focus on understanding the
experiences of Nigerians, as well as on the account of how the researchers
encountered and interfaced with the vagaries of national belongingness in the
fieldwork process. We analyze how our identity and multiple positionalities
manifest in the field to influence or shape researcher–researched relationship,
trust, and access of Nigeria-based researchers to data for knowledge production.
We will advance two interrelated arguments. First, national belonging
alone does not determine the relationship between a researcher and research
participants. Our joint experiences suggest that, in working with Nigerians as
home-based researchers in Nigeria and the diaspora, nationality is often re-
calibrated into other politicized oppositional categories that operate dy-
namically to hinder or facilitate the fieldwork. While similar to Nigerian
academic homecomers in this regard (see Oriola and Haggerty 2012), we
advanced this argument with a reflection on the dimension that African
positionalities take when identity is transnationalized. We show that, because
of the border crossing of participants and home-based researcher, the com-
bined contexts of the economy of migration and “illegality”/precarity of
diasporization tension researcher–researched relationship, with national be-
longing itself becoming the basis of suspicion.
The second argument builds on the first by advancing that, when in-
siderness by shared national (or group) identity is disrupted in the field, other
intersecting positions and relations take prominence. In pinpointing their
significance in our fieldworks, we contend that positionalities force us to
rethink the location and importance of power. Our experiences revealed that
power in the researcher–researched relationship takes different forms and is
multiply located, such that research participants too exercise strategic agency
to determine the processes of the field. We show that the researched do
challenge and resist the unequal power relations. In both our fieldworks,
power tends to be diffused and situated.
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Adebayo and Njoku 5
The Studies
The article is based on two doctoral studies conducted in the Departments of
Sociology and Political Science at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Both
studies involved extensive fieldwork in which ethnography played an im-
portant part. The fieldwork for the first study was conducted in 2015. It
examined the interface between civil society organization (CSO) and security
governance in Nigeria, specifically the post 9/11 international and state-level
counter-terrorism laws, policies, and practices (Njoku 2020, 2021). Due to
the humanitarian crisis caused by terrorism, many CSOs became involved in
diverse capacity building, technical assistance, and advocacy efforts in the
Northeast. Although operating in the Northeast, many CSOs returned to their
headquarters in Abuja and/or Lagos, Plateau, Oyo, and Ogun states.
Likewise, critical state actors from within the civil service and the Nigerian
military were in Abuja. Data were obtained through a mixed-methods
approach. A total of 234 individuals were involved in the study, includ-
ing CSOs and government officials like security agencies in selected states.
Telephone interviews were also conducted with CSOs and security agents
who were still skeptical about the researcher’s motives despite assurances.
Two research assistants who were familiar with the Northeast were recruited
to distribute and collect survey forms, but all in-depth interviews were
conducted by the lead researcher.
The fieldwork for the second study was conducted in 2017. The study was
framed within the discourse of contemporary Africa–China relations and the
resulting flows of Nigerians to Guangzhou city. Owing to the commercial and
trading outlook of Guangzhou, more Nigerians have traveled to the city than
elsewhere in China, with a growing number residing there permanently with
their families, including those married to Chinese women (Adebayo and
Omololu 2020; Bodomo 2010). Unlike the first study, a purely ethnographic/
qualitative approach was adopted with observations taking place in settings
like markets to shops, worship spaces, homes, bars, restaurants, and other
public spaces. Nigerian migrants and community leaders, a consular official,
and Chinese people were interviewed as part of the research—69 participants
in all. The study was conducted in two phases, each lasting one month in
Guangzhou. In Phase I, the day-to-day activities of Nigerians were observed
on the ground, with informal conversations and interviews taking place in-
between. The three weeks spent as a roommate and sampa1 to an informant
made it possible to be part of the daily life of Nigerians on Guangyuan Xi Lu.
Phase II focused on monitoring transformations, following-up on informa-
tional gaps, approaching hard-to-reach groups, and exploring the functioning
of the Nigerian community. Bilingual research assistants, two Chinese and a
Nigerian student, were recruited to conduct some interviews. In reporting our
experiences, we will refer to the first study as the Counter-terrorism Study and
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use first-person pronouns or Emeka when referring to the author. The second
research will be tagged the Diaspora Study, with Kudus and first-person
pronouns used as necessary.
Identity, Positionality, and Field Research in Nigeria
The fieldwork for the Counter-terrorism study took place in 2015, as Boko
Haram attacks in Nigeria expanded beyond the Northeast and the nations’
capital, Abuja. During the early phase, Emeka was worried that his ethnic
identity and positionality, coupled with the difficulty of assessing data on
security-related issues in Nigeria, would limit his access to data. For instance,
while the research sites and participants were mostly based in the North,
Emeka is a single man, an ethnic Igbo Christian from southeastern Nigeria—
although born and raised in the southwest of the country. He was raised within
the deep-seated ethnic animosity that exists between the southeasterners and
the northerners, a consequence of the vestiges of the Biafra/Nigerian Civil
War. Although his father, a Biafran soldier, never discussed the war, he heard
stories of atrocities and genocides against the Igbo from his mother and
relatives. Thus, the researcher is conscious of his identity and how it positions
him vis-à-vis some of his research participants. Besides, the expanding se-
curitization architecture of the Nigerian state made counter-terrorism data a
specially guarded commodity (Njoku 2020).
In the field, Emeka strategically deployed his identity and positionalities to
minimize risk and advance his research. First, he sought the services of an
experienced research assistant—who was familiar with the terrain in the
northeast—to manage surveys. Second, he enlisted the assistance of co-
ethnics in the defence sector: A professor of political science and a senior
military officer with links to key players in counter-terrorism planning and
implementation in Nigeria. Also, to access Muslim CSOs, he approached a
Muslim lecturer at his home university.
In qualitative research, deploying one’s identities, relationships, and
gatekeepers to assess essential information is vital in the field (Ferdoush 2020;
Hoogendoorn and Visser 2012). As Katherine Irwin noted, “outsiders angling
for insider knowledge, professionals dependent on personal relationships for
data, and members of research settings as well as the academy, field re-
searchers ride the lines between and across multiple boundaries, and the
journey, as many have attested, can be emotionally and existentially un-
comfortable” (Irwin 2006: 160). Nevertheless, Emeka’s reliance on his po-
sitionality paid off, as he was able to interview important actors, many of
whom are Hausa–Fulani officers.
Moreover, Emeka’s singleness and ethnicity shaped field interactions in
other ways. First, because of his status as an unmarried Igbo man without
immediate family commitment, which should normally constrain him from
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Adebayo and Njoku 7
taking risks, his northern research participants did not completely trust him
with critical information. His interlocutors were almost too curious about
where he was from and why he was still single. Second, his ethnicity posed
specific challenges when interviewing some senior officers from the North.
Having initially agreed to participate, some officers reminded him that he was
lucky to have access to them, with additional emphasis on the impact of the
recommendation by the Igbo professor and the senior Igbo army officer.
Reflecting on this experience, Emeka wondered whether these initial ques-
tions and reservations of the officers were strategic and if they had influenced
the quality of information given. He also wondered if the context of his access
to the participants had prevented them from sharing their critical views on the
government’s counter-terrorism programs that they are part of. The above
reflects the views that the researcher is not always in the position of power in
the research process, as respondents have control over the information they
provide (Henry 2003).
There were other more specific instances where respondents’ power was
aptly demonstrated. For instance, despite the recommendations and guar-
antees of anonymity, Emeka was not so lucky during interviews with northern
officers in another location. They were not wholly receptive, and reluctantly
granted the interview. They prevented him from recording interview sessions
with a voice recorder, and note taking was also resisted. An officer seized and
redacted Emeka’s written note. This is a clear case of the powers of re-
spondents to sway information to achieve a particularly “political and
practical” end and thus influence research outcome (Chege 2015; Shinozaki
2012). It also demonstrates how elites evade probing or attempt to dominate
the interactions, either to profit from the interviews and therefore portray
themselves in a favorable light, or to derail an interview because it contradicts
their perspectives (Batteson and Ball 1995; Glas 2021; Morris 2009).
The performative power expressed by the officers forced Emeka to rethink
and provoked a reflection about what kind of information he can/should
publish while ensuring his safety. He was particularly conscious of the power
dynamics between him and the senior military officers. Unlike the researcher–
researched power relations that are commonly portrayed in the reflexive
ethnographic literature, there was an unusual physicality to the power as-
sociated with the military that posed a danger to Emeka. There was a real
existential fear owing to the entrenched culture of repressive civil–military
relations in Nigeria. Henry (2003:238) had observed that, at times, respon-
dents engaged in “symbolic violence, trying to dominate the anthropological
encounter,” and, in this way, research participants cannot be seen as only
objects, but as active subjects, who have the power “to shape and control the
ethnographer and the ethnographic encounter.”
Nevertheless, Emeka’s education would mediate and aid his access to
data from civil society operators, many of whom had a higher level of
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educational achievement. Some of them had completed their Masters degree
overseas. Hence, they were receptive to a doctoral student from the University
of Ibadan, whose research examines the impact of counter-terrorism policy on
CSOs. Even though some of them were northerners, the researcher did not
experience animosity, suspicion, or reluctance. Importantly, the nature of the
research, which takes a critical approach in examining counter-terrorism
polices as it affects the operations of civil society actors, may have also
contributed to influencing their disposition toward him. This encounter ad-
vances existing arguments that shared positionality encourages research
participants to be comfortable with researchers and facilitates easy access to
vital information (Henry 2003).
Insiderness and Positionality of a Home-based
Researcher in a Nigerian Diaspora Community
The significance of boundary-crossing for African home-based researchers
who travel abroad to generate knowledge on their national diaspora has not
received the same level of reflection as academic homecomers. What does it
mean to be an ethnic Yoruba–Nigerian studying Nigerian diasporic experience
in China? How did Yoruba identity shape the context of trust, suspicion, and
access in the diaspora community dominated by non-Yoruba Nigerians? The
Diaspora Study, in which fieldwork was conducted in 2017, reflects on the
context of Nigerianness and fieldwork in China.
At the time that Kudus reached Guangzhou in early 2017, Biafra agitation
had reached its climax and was taking a violent dimension in Nigeria. Nigerian
diaspora communities, mostly the ethnic Igbo diaspora, were actively in-
volved in criticizing and protesting against the Nigerian state. While in the
presence of Nigerian migrants, Nigerianness conferred on Kudus an insider
status and opened the field for him, from live-in invitations to access to the
space of diaspora interaction (shops, churches, business settings, and home).
However, that identity privilege was often temporized and made partial by his
Yoruba ethnicity, as the majority of his interlocutors were Igbo. In the in-
terpellation process, some of them reconstructed his identity and chose to
relate with him using the lens they had self-designed. Some interlocutors
viewed him with critical eyes and called him a government spy who received
money from the Nigerian state to monitor them and report back.
Later, in the social space where Kudus spent most of his time, he became
familiar with a prominent member of a group that converged along a popular
road in the city. With more interactions, he became Ọmọ Odùduwà—that is,
descendant of Odùduwà—to this predominantly Igbo–Nigerian community.
Odùduwà is a culturally significant appellation used for Yoruba people of
Nigeria. These interlocutors preferred his Yorubaness to his Nigerianness
owing to the oppressiveness that the latter had become associated. During one
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Adebayo and Njoku 9
of his evening discussions with them, a member of the group advised Kudus to
join their struggle. To convert him, they showed the researcher a video of
supposed ethnic Yoruba protestors who were demanding for an independent
Yoruba Nation.
The Yoruba protest was purportedly taking place in early 2017, the same
time when Nigeria was steep in pro-Biafra agitations at home and abroad. To
his interlocutors, the video was proof that both Yoruba (i.e., me) and Igbo (i.e.,
them) people are in the same struggle. The oppressor, they argued, is the
Nigerian state that they perceive as being controlled by the Hausa/Fulani
people. However, in pointing to researcher–researched affinities, his inter-
locutors were constructing the researcher as both different from and the same
as them. Here, Kudus’s encounter in Guangzhou resonates with the experience
of a Canada-based Nigerian doctoral student who conducted research in the
volatile Niger delta (Oriola and Haggerty 2012), but whose Yorubaness
projected him as a beneficiary of the majoritarian politics that had contributed
to the abjection of the mainly minority ethnicities in the region, thereby
signposting him as part of the oppressor class.
In other situations, Yorubaness mattered indeed, in a positive way, by
enabling access to information necessary for having a deeper understanding of
intra-Nigerian diasporic life in China. For instance, when probing about the
challenges of Nigerians in Guangzhou, a Yoruba participant would say
somethings like “awon boys yen” or “those boys” when talking about the
“illegalities” that some young Nigerians perpetrate to hurt the image of
Nigeria. But those boys really meant “those Igbo boys,” not young Nigerians
in general. Some Hausa Nigerians in Guangzhou shared this perception.
Kudus sensed that clarifying this point mattered to non-Igbo Nigerians; they
felt the need to let him know and understand this as a matter of “fact.” They
wanted him to get the point that there is no uniformity and essence to Ni-
gerianess in China.
The above suggests that when we stand outside of it, the field and those we
intend to study remain co-constructors who insist on drawing us in regardless
of researcher’s depoliticized-self, with clear implication for what occurs in the
field (also see Oriola and Haggerty 2012: 5). The culture in “shared culture”
manifests as many notions in concrete social relations and regardless of one’s
nationality, researchers often find themselves in “non-shared cultural spaces”
(Savvides et al. 2014: 414). Also, in the field, boundaries are “created in a
situational manner” (Shinozaki 2012). Kudus was in an unfamiliar territory
not only because of geography but also because most of his participants were
Igbo. What was uncertain, though, is whether his ethnic Yoruba interlocutors
would talk about Igbo–Nigerians in the same way if Kudus were Igbo or
Hausa and not a Yoruba.
Meanwhile, with some participants, namely, the more educated, Kudus’s
education and the degree he was pursuing contributed to the positive reception
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he got in the field. For instance, he was able to secure meetings with some of
the most successful Nigerians in the city, mostly men, with offices in high-rise
buildings far from the hustle and bustle of the markets in Guangyuan Xi Lu.
However, this same positionality tensioned his interactions with another group
of Nigerians, the “triple illegals” class—that is, those who China’s immi-
gration law categorized as having illegal entry, illegal stay, and illegal working
status (Huang 2019; Lan 2017). Unlike the more educated group occupying
high-rise apartment and office buildings, those falling in the triple illegal
category could not comprehend how a Nigerian research student departs
Nigeria, travels for thousands and thousands of miles, only to interview fellow
Nigerians about their lives. Even more, unaware of the researcher’s (im)
mobility struggles while planning for the fieldwork in China, the undocu-
mented and immobilized participants believed that Kudus’s mobilized con-
dition made him less like them (Adebayo 2020). He was perceived as a freely
moving body, or, if you like, a cosmopolitan “super citizen”with a freedom of
mobility that was unavailable to them. Consequently, he was asked questions
like the following: How are you here just to do an interview? Are you going
back to Nigeria? To them, a young Nigerian does not “travel out” just to talk to
people. His mobility power increased the suspicious eyes with which some
Nigerians viewed him. It did not also help that Kudus was in the field when the
Biafra agitation was high and global.
As a migrant researcher, therefore, the positionality of Kudus as privileged
draws directly from the reality of the widespread interest and fantasy of
Nigerians with the pursuit of greener pastures. A lot of young Nigerians’want
to migrate, and they would patronize visa gods to realize that dream (Obadare
and Adebanwi 2010). So, they would ask Kudus, how is it that you, a young
Nigerian man, came to China to just do interviews and go back to Nigeria?
Conclusion
From the experiences described in this article, we affirm that during fieldwork,
a researcher’s identity can be redefined. This redefinition can influence data
accessibility and knowledge production. Moreover, to be redefined can lead to
a deliberate utilization of relational positionalities to advance the research
goal. In the security sector, where access to information is often buried in the
narrative of national security exceptions, exploiting relational positionalities
becomes particularly vital. Also, where power resides, and whether unequal
power relations place the researched in an exploitative position, is also im-
portant. As Collet (2008) asserts, the potentialities that abusive and ex-
ploitative relations may occur in the field make power dynamics critical as it
could be a main source of tension. Our encounters in the two studies indicate
that power in researcher–researched relations manifests differently in different
research situations. In the Counter-terrorism Study, power manifested itself in
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Adebayo and Njoku 11
physical and symbolic forms, while somewhat of a mobility power was more
manifest in the Diaspora Study. In Emeka’s interactions with military officers,
the latter wielded their powers to limit the quality/quantity of information
accessible to the researcher. For the Diaspora Study, mobility power, which
was located in the researcher, placed the researcher and the researched in an
unequal relationship such that the former became someone to be suspected.
Both our experiences revealed that identity as a categorizing frame is
powerful in opening the field to researchers, whether in their home countries
or when studying co-nationals or other citizens abroad. However, the in-
tersectionality of ethnicity, religion, and status can transform seemingly
shared identity as the researcher moves around spaces of subcommunities
locally and transnationally. In our case, our identity as a social bonding
mechanism was questioned or resisted. Such resistance poses difficulties in
the research process. Our experience, therefore, is that the notion of in-group
arising from the account of nationality or other constructed notions, assumes a
homogeneity that is fraught and flawed. As with Matejskova (2014) and to
some extent Ferdoush (2020), we agree that ethnonationality as a primary
signifier of insiderness is reflective of epistemological nationalism because
often, the field is concretely laid with the dynamism of positionalities. In
essence, the interpellation of the researcher by the researched is crucial to
becoming an insider. More importantly, how the researched defines a re-
searcher, as different from how a researcher self-identifies, is consequential.
Having said that, we acknowledge that, identity, as it shapes the field and data
access, cannot be invoked in a causative manner. This is because, in field
situations, other dynamics can give important openings to the researcher,
especially when a shared identity as a common ground is absent in researcher–
researched relations (Fujii 2009, as cited in Glas 2018).
Acknowledgments
The authors appreciate Nic Cheeseman and anonymous reviewers for their guidance
and helpful comments. They also appreciate their supervisors at the University of
Ibadan: Olajide O. Akanji (Political Science) and Femi O. Omololu (Sociology).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: Emeka Thaddues Njoku’s research was
made possible by support from the Social Science Research Council’s Next Generation
Social Sciences in Africa Fellowship, with funds provided by the Carnegie Corporation
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12 Field Methods 0(0)
of New York. The Carnegie Fund for Conference Attendance, Institute of International
Education, Makarere Institute for Social Research, the African Research Development
Group of the American Political Science Association, and Postgraduate College,
University of Ibadan supported the presentation of the research at conferences in
Sweden, Uganda, and the United States. Kudus Oluwatoyin Adebayo received funding
through the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA). CARTA
is jointly led by the African Population and Health Research Center and the University
of the Witwatersrand and is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Grant
No: B 8606.R02), Sida (Grant No: 54100113), the DELTAS Africa Initiative (Grant
No: 107768/Z/15/Z), and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. The DELTAS
Africa Initiative is an independent funding arm of the African Academy of Sciences’
Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa and is supported by the New
Partnership for Africa’s Development Planning and Coordinating Agency, with
funding from the Wellcome Trust (U.K.) and the U.K. government. Kudus was also a
Fellow of the African Humanities Program Dissertation Fellowships of the American
Council for Learned Societies/Carnegie Corporation of New York, a Laureate of the
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, and Scholar of the
Postgraduate College, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
ORCID iD
Emeka T. Njoku  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1473-1571
Note
1. Sampa refers to boys/young men in markets with unstable employment who can
take up the readily available task for new entrants willing to earn a living to merely
survive in Guangzhou.
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