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Paper Short Abstract

While conducting fieldwork with anti-migrant activists certainly entails moral and methodological challenges, in this paper I argue that participant observation can reveal how ostensibly "far right" actors may themselves be ambivalently engaged in uncertain moral endeavours

Paper Abstract

At the Western Heights Viewing Point in Dover, England, a host of interested parties gathers to watch the Channel for the arrival of small boat migrants. These range from humanitarian and legal monitoring volunteers to self-proclaimed "migrant hunters" activists. This paper explores the moral and methodological pitfalls of conducting fieldwork with far-right actors. Faced with objectionable practices and beliefs, it asks to what extent participant observation with such actors is a morally conscionable, safe, or even legal fieldwork practice.

During fieldwork, I was advised by interlocutors whose moral outlooks aligned with mine simply not to engage with certain people that were perceived as "far right". While moral and political dealignments certainly limited the depth of my engagement with some activists, however, I argue here that some of those who at first glance appear to be “dislikable others” are themselves engaged in uncertain endeavors, guided by unresolved processes of moral grappling. Rather than presuming that such figures embody coherent forms of moral decrepitude, and on this basis refusing to engage with them, it is instead as flawed, uncertain subjects still in-the-making that they must be understood. For all the ethical, moral, and methodological difficulties it inevitably produces, I argue that participant observation is only method by which such uncertain endeavours can be fully grasped.