ABSTRACT
White people generally do not spend much time thinking about whiteness or how their experience and identities are racialised. When I designed this project, I assumed that an interview that consisted entirely of questions around ‘race’ and whiteness would not yield much ‘material’ beyond the interesting question of silences and erasures. Instead, I opted to take a more indirect approach, which also had the advantage of opening up interview conversations to questions of the social imaginary and narrative. This chapter will give an overview of the approach taken to the fieldwork part of the research. It will: explain why a particular group of women – mothers – was chosen for the interviews; give a sense of the areas (Camberwell and Clapham) where they lived; explain how I made contact with the interviewees; convey a sense of the interview process and the subsequent analysis of the interviews.
