ABSTRACT
Doing research: questions and methods As my disciplinary base is in political science I defined my research endeavour as a political ethnography following the definition of Edward Schatz (2009) who contrasts political ethnography to ‘holistic approaches’ which aim to describe cultures or societies in their totality: ‘Our analytics are . . . partial, we study politics – the exercise of power in its varying manifestations’ (ibid.: 305-306). With this definition in mind, political is not a quality of certain practices – as it seems difficult to imagine any social practice completely devoid of power and power relations – but a question of perspective and (research) interests. This focus on power relations leads Timothy Pachirat (2009) to consider the dual role the political plays in political ethnography: ‘In addition to extending our knowledge of politics and power, the ethnographic process itself is political insofar as fieldwork inevitably locates the ethnographer within networks of power’ (ibid.: 144). For my own research this translated, first, to a focus on political practices that (de)construct ethnicised differences linked to dominance and discrimination and, second, to an approach that treated research and reflexivity as inseparable. Third, the situating of my research in the field of feminist studies added yet another layer to its political dimension, as feminist research has always been defined as political in the sense of following critical and transformative goals. Reading feminist and postcolonial theory also added to the necessity of self-reflection and self-situating – not so much in terms of a list of demographic characteristics including gender, class, ethnicity, citizenship, religion or status with regard to (dis)ability, but in terms of one’s location in relations of power (see Butler 1991: 210 on the impossibility of defining a situated subject by means of listing adjectives). When I embarked on the adventure called empirical research I had a number of questions in mind, which in their shortest form might be reduced to the following: How do white feminist activists (de)construct powerful ethnicised difference in explicit as well as implicit forms? And how is the white feminist constructed and transformed in these practices? Of course, these questions were already the product of a process that had started with an uneasiness experienced by the white feminist activist me: Why do I find it so hard to put my good antiracist intentions into political praxis? Getting from there to questions I could write into a research proposal took quite some time and needed a lot of help, but once I had established what I wanted my research to be about, the difficult task became putting these wishes into practice. I worked with a combination of different materials and methods in order to accommodate different aims. Of course, the linear account I provide here does not do justice to the circular (and often messy) process of actual research with its loops, side-tracks and dead ends characteristic of any interpretative endeavour.
