ABSTRACT
The researcher’s identity in fieldwork has always invited analysis and debate. In this chapter I have reflected on my experience of fieldwork with children to problematize how the researcher’s gendered identity interacts with generational location, producing not a single identity, but identities, which influence fieldwork. I have done this by engaging with the contributions of the anthropologist Jean Briggs’, who foregrounded the significance of a relationally produced generational location much before it was discussed in Childhood Studies. By discussing how the figure of the woman as a researcher is imagined in the broader anthropological tradition and the more eclectic Childhood Studies, this chapter foregrounds how the researcher’s identity is problematized in discipline-specific ways, often problematizing the implications of ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘adult’, ‘child’ in limited ways. It argues that a cross-disciplinary exercise would produce a more complex analysis of the researcher’s location as also the subject locations of others.
