ABSTRACT
In this chapter I provide a reflective account of my doctoral research on the electoral rise and fall of the British National Party (BNP) – a party with its ideological and organizational origins in neo-Nazism and neo-fascism. In doing so, I will offer an account of the dialectical interplay of theory, method and data. Moreover, I will throw light on the way in which my research design evolved during the course of this study, thus demonstrating the ways in which it, and the decisions taken once in ‘the field’, were shaped by my personal biography and sociological training, as well as a range of other institutional, political, cultural and ethical factors. In doing so, I will draw attention to the significance of whiteness and class, including my own positionality as a white working class researcher, when negotiating the contours of the local ‘communicative community’ (Hewitt, 2005) through three overlapping periods of data collection on my journey towards a political ethnographic study of the BNP in the outer-East London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. I then conclude with a discussion which addresses a criticism that I (and others) have faced while presenting work in this area: namely, that there is no place for ethnographic academic research involving the far right. Drawing on Back’s (2007) concept of ‘active listening’, I will suggest that there is an important role for anti-racist, anti-fascist activist-scholarship in a field largely dominated by white people, and often susceptible to the pitfalls of ‘white logic’ and ‘white methods’ (see Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008).
