ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss how my experience of doing multi-sited fieldwork in a host country (Japan) and in my home country (Turkey) with transnational migrant families was challenging to my researcher positionality. I examined how my fieldwork became an ever-shifting process, continuously transforming the data collection and ethical considerations and giving rise to a researcher’s positionality. Positionality also gives clues as to how researchers locate themselves within the structures of power dynamics in actual fieldwork and how these influence the entire data collection process (Sultana, 2007). Because researchers do not have either a fixed or predetermined identity (Lal, 1996), during fieldwork, I ended up defining my existence among my participants as a science fictional shapeshifter character in these cycles of adaptations. By regarding myself as a shapeshifter, I was able to go beyond the fixed definitions of a researcher as an ‘insider’ and/or ‘outsider’ and understand the challenges of knowledge production, between myself and the participants. This enabled me to have deeper and insightful considerations of the ethical issues at stake. My adaptations to the different contexts of the fieldwork carried me beyond the fixed understandings of social categories.
