ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how emotive and sensory reactions connect the researcher to participants and it offers an alternative way of operationalizing 'insiderness' in the context of migration research. It explores how insider research defined and enacted in multi-ethnic and multi-religious contexts. The chapter discusses interplay between the categorization of differences in the logics of administering nation-states, and the resulting methodological nationalism in social sciences. It demonstrates how Sunni-Turkish mobilized, negated and challenged in relation to ideas around a constructed common nationality, a common or distinct ethnicity and distinct religious backgrounds. The chapter explores how this is related to broader contestations between nationalized and ethnicized identities in Turkey and Germany. It scrutinizes the nature of suffering and the position a researcher takes within the triadic relationship between the victim, the perpetrator and the witness. The chapter argues that the emotive and sensitive proximity of the researcher to research participants generates bodily effects, which vitalize or alienate the researcher within research process.
