Paper short abstract:

Are all ethnographic studies political? What is the value and the role of the ethnographer, and how does this role change when researching contentious debates? Having conducted research with communities of resistance, in this paper I aim to explore some of these questions in relation to my research.

Paper long abstract:

Being an ethnographer of activism, protest and resistance presents several challenges. The first and most important set of challenges are in relation to the communities being 'studied'. What does the ethnographer own the people they live and work with? And how do we give back to the communities/people we learn from? The second set of challenges is in relation to the academic community. What is the positionality of the researcher? Is the ethnographer "too close" to the community they work with and learn from? Does this closeness inhibit a rigorous academic debate? Is there a position of objectiveness or neutrality that the researcher can occupy which leads to more desired research outcomes? Having myself conducted research that dialectically deals with these questions I explore in this paper some of the ways we can think about these questions using critical theory and decolonizing methodologies as those discussed by Tuhiwai Smith. This paper explores the value of ethnographies and the role of the ethnographer in contentious political debates.