Contribution short abstract:

The paper addresses questions of complicity, participation and responsibility in ethnographic research on the (white) far right: how is the researcher implicated in the perpetuation of nationalist and white supremacist projects based on systematic oppression and racism?

Contribution long abstract:

This paper focuses on emotional challenges and questions of positionality in ethnographic research on the far right. Inspired by the literature on critical whiteness, this paper is interested in the unspoken or absent presences in this field: racial privilege, whiteness and white supremacy. I want to reflect on my own experiences in the field of far-right politics, with the ethnographic research I have been doing in Eastern Germany since 2018, with different agents and organisations of the near and far right. In this paper, I will provide a close reading of my ethnographic material of interactions between me and my far-right informants, who presented themselves as polite, considerate and nice – which I found unwanted, unsolicited and generally irritating due to my own expectations that I brought into the field. Analytically, I focus on 1) how whiteness remains absent but manifests itself in the form of discomfort, 2) what this discomfort does and how whiteness and white privilege operate, and 3) how the researcher functions as an ‘implicated subject’ (Rothberg 2019) in the study of the (white) far right and the study of racism, racist activism and white supremacy. This paper thus aims to address questions of complicity, participation and responsibility: how is the researcher – how am I – implicated in the perpetuation of nationalist and white supremacist projects based on systematic oppression and racism?