Getting in Touch with the Out of Reach: Fieldwork Strategies in Research on Women and Politics (South-West of Nigeria). Documents presented in the article

Researching women’s political representation in legislative policymaking provides an interesting lens to understand women’s struggle for political inclusion. Factors which could impede a systematic study of this subject include limited access to politicians who often become almost invisible once they get elected to public office on the one hand, and the poor record-keeping culture of legislative assemblies which could restrict the traceability of past events and transparency of the current decision-making process on the other hand. In this article, I analysed the study of three sub-national legislative assemblies in the South-West of Nigeria, namely: Ekiti State House of Assembly (EKSHA), Lagos State House of Assembly (LSHA) and Ogun State House of Assembly (OGSHA). I give an account of how both formal and informal entries helped facilitate the gathering of data to understand women’s struggle for power and their legislative policymaking activities in Nigeria. I begin by presenting my positionality as a male graduate student from a working-class background, researching gender/women issues and the implication of this intersection on the type of data I generate. Thereafter, I provide insights into how I navigated these assemblies to gain access to these lawmakers by articulating the kind of information I had hoped to get and what I eventually got. Then, I discuss women’s struggle for political inclusion, agency and their activities in legislative policymaking. I conclude by reflecting on the complementary roles of both formal and informal entries, and how they shaped and enhanced the data gathering process.