Crossing Borders, Making Meaning: Transnational Reflexivity as a Methodological Practice in Qualitative Inquiry

This article introduces transnational reflexivity as a methodological practice in qualitative inquiry, repositioning reflexivity not as an individualized act of self-awareness but as a dialogical, relational, and power-sensitive practice of meaning-making grounded in transnational experience. While reflexivity is widely recognized as a cornerstone of qualitative research, the positionalities of transnational researchers remain under-theorized, often framed through individualized and static approaches that fail to capture the complexities of research across borders. Drawing on our experiences as Asian early-career ethnographers conducting research within and across U.S. educational contexts, we examine how transnational reflexivity shapes interpretation, positionality, and knowledge production in our work. Through collaborative dialogue and co-analysis of ethnographic materials, we illustrate how transnational positionalities generate interpretive friction that, under specific relational and ethical conditions, opens new forms of understanding unavailable to either researcher alone. We further offer a heuristic of guiding questions that qualitative researchers working transnationally can adapt to examine their own analytic positions and the power conditions shaping whose knowledge gets recognized. We argue that attending to transnationalism reframes reflexivity as a collective and dialogical practice that challenges traditional methodological boundaries, resists deficit framings of transnational scholars and participants, and expands the epistemological horizons of qualitative inquiry across borders. By conceptualizing transnational reflexivity as a heuristic methodological framework, this article calls for qualitative researchers to approach reflexivity as an evolving dialogical practice through which knowledge can be co-constructed in more relational, plural, and globally attuned ways that embrace the possibilities of working across epistemic borders.