— What Am I Doing Here? Power, Positionality, and Contradictions in Ethnographic Research
Ethnographic researchers can find themselves confronted with a deceptively simple question: What am I doing here? In the field, researchers regularly encounter moments of uncertainty, ethical tension, and contradiction, particularly when working from feminist and intersectional perspectives that foreground questions of power, positionality, and responsibility. This workshop explores how these contradictions of ethnographic research practice. The session will begin with a short impulse talk that reflects on ethical and methodological tensions in feminist ethnography. Drawing on my own research on feminist of color archives in Germany, the talk will share reflections from fieldwork and archival engagement to raise questions about responsibility, power, and desire in the research process. How do researchers navigate relationships of trust and accountability? What kinds of attachments and investments shape our engagement with archives, communities, and histories? And how can we critically reflect on our own positionalities within these encounters? Following the input, participants will be invited to discuss examples, questions, and uncertainties from their own research experiences. The workshop aims to create a space for collective reflection on the ethical and methodological contradictions of fieldwork, and on how researchers might engage with them reflexively and responsibly within their own projects.