Paper Short Abstract:

The paper explores the researcher’s family positionality in the field, as a meaningful issue that moulds both methodological choices, calling from innovative and creative solutions, both the knowledge production process, enhancing its relational and collective nature.

Paper Abstract:

This paper investigates my positionality as a mother of a 2-year-old child and a precarious early-career researcher on fieldwork. The research I am working on focuses on the intersection of ageing and migration, investigating the experience of economic migrants who moved from the South of Europe to the North and retirement migrants who made the inverse journey. Since the beginning of the fieldwork, being the mother of a young child deeply influenced my choices, needs and gaze. First, I will problematise the process of balancing research and family needs, exploring how it calls for creative methodological solutions and reveals the continuous request by university institutions for boundary-making between family and work. However, fieldwork undoes dualism and boundaries and problematises the researcher figure designed by the institution. The “family positionality”, still too invisible in anthropological production, will be investigated as a realm where class, gender, and age intersect with different effects. Finally, exploring the researcher’s family positionality will enhance a reflection on knowledge production as an embodied and relational process. Being a mother in the field raised unexpected resonances with people I met in it, and deeply moulded my gaze, my interest and my awareness of my existential experience. It highlighted the centrality of transnational family care as a lived interest I shared with people in the field and the others I brought in the field decentred my gaze, including new perspectives in the knowledge production process.