Paper Short Abstract:

Various types of parenthood (to unborn, dead, and living children of different ages) have different impacts on data collection in fieldwork, as the researcher’s positionality may change by methodology (online vs. in-person), cultural context, and own life stage.

Paper Abstract:

Original Title: Invisible motherhood vs. fieldwork on the playground – researcher positionalities in different places, life stages and methodologies

In the depths of covid, researchers were conducting online fieldwork, relying on digital ethnography and zoom interviews to gather their data in countries that had shut their borders to foreign scholars. It was also a time that bore the risk of intensifying the imbalance of information between researchers and the communities and individuals of interest. “My married friends now became mothers and I just don’t know about what to talk with them”, Xiangyu explained during our zoom-call, unaware that she was talking to a pregnant researcher whose toddler had been bribed to leave the house with dad so as not to disturb the interview.

Invisible motherhood – by being a mother to one dead child, one unborn child and one child in the care of their father – has shaped my fieldwork experiences online in 2021 and in person in Singapore in 2022, while I carried out in-person fieldwork in Tokyo and Singapore (and Germany) in 2023 with a baby. How someone perceives the researcher and, consequently, which information someone shares is highly context-dependent. Whether a researcher is joined by family or conducts fieldwork alone can heavily impact access to the field, opening some doors and keeping others shut. While this has received increasing intention in literature on accompanied fieldwork, this presentation offers a unique angle by comparing different types of motherhoods and their influence in data collection by different methodologies.