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The paper reflects on ethical discomfort before research begins. Written by a Syrian researcher in the UK, it explores imagining the field from afar, fractured positionality, &the unease of asking Syrian women for accounts of suffering amid war. Should this research be done? By whom? On whose terms?

Paper long abstract

This paper emerges from a moment of ethical suspension: before research design, before ethics approval, and before any participant has been approached. Written from the position of a Syrian researcher living in the UK, it reflects on the ethical unease of contemplating research with women who remain in Syria, while witnessing renewed violence from afar. The paper is grounded in the discomfort of imagining the field rather than entering it, anticipating questions not yet asked, and harms that might be reanimated through research itself. Much of the research ethics literature positions ethics as a procedural concern that becomes relevant once a project is defined. This paper challenges that framing by foregrounding the pre-conceptual moment as a site of intense ethical labour, where the central question is not how to conduct research ethically, but whether one has the moral right to conduct it at all. At this stage, ethics is affective, embodied, and lived – felt through guilt, hesitation, grief, and the unease of occupying relative safety while imagining the asking for accounts of suffering from those who are not safe. Using a fragmented autoethnography, the paper explores positionality as fractured and unstable, resisting closure and certainty as a way of practising care. Rather than offering solutions or guidelines, the paper argues for the legitimacy of ethical discomfort and unresolvedness. It proposes ethics as a living, relational practice that begins long before institutional approval – and sometimes requires restraint, delay, or refusal as ethical outcomes in themselves.

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Based on a fieldwork with Duha reindeer herders, this paper examines how ethnographic learning emerges through integration and conflict. It argues that moments of relational discomfort function as learning opportunities, producing knowledge through entanglement rather than linear data collection.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines tensions inherent in long-term ethnographic fieldwork within Indigenous communities, drawing on a year of living and working with the Duha reindeer-herding community in northern Mongolia. It explores the limits of ethnographic knowledge and the conditions under which learning becomes possible in extended, immersive fieldwork settings.

I argue that learning emerges through the researcher’s gradual integration into community life, a process shaped by emotional, moral, and relational dynamics. Rather than facilitating smooth or linear data collection, such integration often generates moments of discomfort that disrupt research expectations and become productive learning opportunities. Knowledge is produced indirectly through uncertainty, conflict, and partial understanding, as the researcher becomes entangled in local networks of obligation, trust, and disagreement.

The paper shows that navigating these moments of discomfort is central to developing a holistic understanding of community life. Mistakes, misunderstandings, and conflicts are not peripheral to ethnographic practice but constitute key sites where relations are renegotiated and understanding deepened.

By foregrounding discomfort as methodologically generative, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on knowledge production and reflexivity, and proposes reconciliation as a methodological practice for sustaining long-term ethnographic engagement.

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This paper discusses the ethical dilemma of how, during my doctoral fieldwork studying everyday banter in post-industrial south Wales, I voiced discomfort with hegemonic banter while also listening to why research participants found these jokes funny and culturally important.

Paper long abstract

One of the core tenets of my ethnographic training underscored the importance of suspending one’s judgement in order to empathize with research participants. During my doctoral fieldwork studying everyday banter in Merthyr Tydfil – a Welsh, post-industrial town in south Wales – this “ethnographic mindset” was critical for familiarizing me with the particular sensibilities and functions of the local sense of humor, described as “affectionate abuse” by one local resident.

However, when I experienced certain instances of banter as crossing the “fine line” of banter into sexism, homophobia and racism, I began to question the ethnographic assumption that it is necessary to suppress one’s emotional responses in order to truly understand one’s research participants. I increasingly wondered how it might be possible to communicate my discomfort without moralizing judgement. Conscious of my positioning as a middle-class researcher with left-leaning values, I heeded Walkerdine’s (2017) warning about the dangers of outside researchers imposing a “progressive” agenda on working-class communities that reductively portrays them as culturally regressive or close-minded.

Drawing on Spencer’s (2011) work on ethnographic emotional reflexivity, in this paper I explore how I voiced criticism of local residents’ hegemonic banter while also listening carefully both to why those telling these jokes found them funny and to local residents who felt ambivalent about where they stood. I discuss the ethical dilemma of deciding to share with research participants that I felt offended by some of their jokes, and how these challenging conversations yielded generative avenues for deepened engagement.

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This paper reflects on the ethical, methodological, and emotional challenges of ethnographic research with far-right activists, showing how feminist approaches offer methodological innovation by shaping female researchers’ affective relations in the field and sustaining emotional resilience.

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This paper offers a reflection on ethical, methodological and emotional challenges I encountered, as a Polish female, migrant researcher, interviewing Polish men involved in far-right politics in the UK. This ethnographic experience exposes the complicated intersections of affinity, antipathy, and empathy, as well as ethnographers’ need of constant engagement in emotional management in a gendered context where female researchers, like myself, may expect high level of sexual attention.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and dozens of interviews I offer a unique study case of a research relation with leading Polish activists in fascist and neo-Nazi networks in the UK to explore three central questions: (1) How can researchers cultivate empathy and navigate professional regard for far-right activists without compromising their ethical stance? (2) What ethical and methodological implications arise when a woman researcher utilizes flirtation as a strategy in the field? (3) How do third-wave feminist understandings of agency shape the emotional experience and practices of ethnographic fieldwork in male-dominated far-right milieus?

The findings build on ethnographies of the far-right scholars such as Agnieszka Pasieka, Kathleen Blee or Hilary Pilkington and expand it over the feminist perspectives of Heidi Kaspar & Sara Landolt and a third wave of feminism. In doing so, the paper demonstrates a methodological innovation by illustrating how these approaches shape women researchers’ affective relationships to themselves and their research sites and help them to sustain emotional resilience.

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This paper examines gendered discomfort as an ethical and methodological condition of ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on autoethnography in Vaishnava institutions in North-East India, it asks how sustained discomfort shapes access, knowledge production, and epistemic inequality in the field.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on discomfort as an ethical and methodological condition of ethnographic fieldwork, drawing on autoethnographic engagement with Vaishnava religious institutions in the North-East India. Conducting fieldwork as a female researcher in a predominantly masculine religious landscape generates sustained forms of unease shaped by gendered hierarchies of access and authority. In such spaces, where female presence is marginal, I reflect on my experiences of discomfort not as obstacles to be resolved, but how discomfort becomes an ongoing condition shaping the rhythms of fieldwork for a female researcher. Discomfort emerges when one fails to access certain ritual spaces and information owing to their gender, through patronising assumptions about a woman’s inability to understand religion, and in the vigilance required to navigate living arrangements and field sites where her presence is subject to constant surveillance and scrutiny. Experiences such as incessant phone calls/messages framed as “logistical coordination” from potential interlocuters or expectations of her availability from the community are often normalised as part of doing fieldwork, even as they demand continuous emotional and ethical negotiation. Under institutional pressures to complete fieldwork within fixed timelines, such unease is frequently managed through practices of self-silencing, self-censorship, and denial. These conditions raise a broader methodological question: whether gendered discomfort produces epistemic inequality in the field. When access, trust, and continuity are unevenly distributed, ethnographic depth itself risks becoming stratified. By staying with discomfort rather than resolving it, the paper argues for its generative potential in prompting reflexive, ethical, and more accountable anthropological knowledge.

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Fieldwork is an ongoing activity even after site visits are over, especially in contexts of catastrophe. I address how fieldwork of this kind affects our knowledge practices, enactments of the world, and our entire lived experience. I base this on 12years of research on the Colombian armed conflict.

Paper long abstract

Inspired by from feminist and decolonial scholars, in this talk I propose to attend to fieldwork as an ongoing activity that continues to occur long after we finish our encounters with interlocutors, site visits, document reading and so on. Especially so when doing ethnographic work in contexts of catastrophe, death, and violence. The experience of discomforting and even painful fieldwork shapes the entire research practice from how we relate to our material to how we write about it. This is so beacuse challenging fieldwork experiences tangibly affect our bodies and emotions in ways that must be acknowledged, as it is from our flesh that we produce the knowledge that we share.

Hence, making ourselves vulnerable and acknowledging such vulnerability alongside other flesh-related effects of doing ethnography in catastrophic contexts is an opportunity to explore how our enfleshments produce very specific kinds of knowledge. More than that, addressing such discomfort and pain enables us to account for how our entire being and lived experience become entangled with the research topics we engage with and helps us enact the world in particular ways.

I base these considerations on more than twelve years of working ethnographically on matters of the Colombian armed conflict, ranging from forensic victim identification to the search for forcibly disappeared persons. I present a reflexive, auto-ethnographic piece on my experience of my path to recover from vicarious trauma and its relationship with the world I want to contribute to enact.

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For one of my interlocutors, being a gay Muslim was a “joke.” And there I was, sitting across from him, wearing my insult: gay-Muslim. How can autoethnography, while offering comfort to others, become a source of discomfort for the anthropologist—and an analytical opportunity?

Paper long abstract

This paper examines autoethnographic discomfort both as an obstacle and as a method. I reflect on my position as a gay Muslim Syrian conducting research among queer Syrians in Berlin, where religion is often dismissed as incompatible with queerness. Across contexts, my identity is repeatedly fragmented: in Syria, I am read only as Muslim and my queerness is erased; in Berlin, I am seen only as gay and my faith is ridiculed. But I am both.

Remembering the fieldwork, I found myself confronted with the question: Should I leave Islam to be gay—and not a joke to laugh at? I was listening as an outsider, trying to observe and understand. Yet as an insider, there I was: a gay Muslim man, not a “joke.” Listening later to the recording, I could hear the agitation in my own voice. These moments illustrate how autoethnography, while often framed as comforting or empowering—especially for interlocutors—can itself be deeply unsettling for the researcher. Discomfort does not stay in the field—it travels home, into the body, memory, and writing.

This unease, however, becomes analytically productive. It exposes the limits of queer frameworks, the conditionality of belonging, and the moral hierarchies shaping migrant queer spaces. By linking autoethnographic vignettes with interlocutors’ narratives, I treat discomfort not as a personal injury but as a site for ethical and methodological reflection on self-protection, positionality, and fieldwork practice. Confronting discomfort, rather than silencing it, becomes a way for anthropology to flourish.

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Drawing on fieldwork with far-right voters in Brazil, this paper examines some of the ethical and methodological challenges of engaging with ‘uncomfortable’ others. It examines tensions with anthropological ‘orthodoxy’ and advances an anthropology attentive to urgent sociopolitical concerns.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on long-term fieldwork with far-right voters in Brazil to examine the theoretical and methodological challenges anthropologists encounter when engaging with ‘uncomfortable’ others. While the study of alterity is foundational to anthropological theory and practice, relations with alterity are often informed by ideas of mutual constitution that are unsettled by certain ‘others’. Focusing on far-right subjectivities, the paper interrogates the relative scarcity of ethnographic studies of the far right, arguing that it falls outside prevailing anthropological orthodoxy and thus constitutes a form of ambiguous alterity that raises both ethical and methodological dilemmas. The discussion illuminates some of the tensions and difficulties involved in navigating discomfort in the field, while suggesting that discomfort itself can be a productive starting point for expanding the field of phenomena and questions anthropologists engage with. In doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on discomfort in anthropological research and advances an anthropology of the full spectrum (Goodale 2021), one attuned to some of the most urgent sociopolitical concerns of our time.

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Reflecting on doing fieldwork in a controversial, high demand global Pentecostal megachurch, this paper grapples with the methodological and ethical dimensions of navigating power, vulnerability and harms in spiritual and faith communities.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, from the emotional safety of temporal distance, I reflect on doctoral fieldwork I completed 7 years ago. It took place in the Australian headquarters of a controversial Pentecostal megachurch – one with immense power and global reach. Known to actively recruit the marginalised and vulnerable, it is a place of violent spiritual warfare and makes high demands of its congregants. Scholars and journalists alike have condemned the church’s “repugnant” mechanisms of manipulation and exploitation. During two years of fieldwork, I experienced deep personal discomfort and paranoia. As a, then, international student, under the funding umbrella of a large grant, I did not choose my field site. Moreover, I could not afford (financially nor visa wise) to rethink my project. And so, I got on with it. I suppressed the everyday dread and disquiet of fieldwork and withheld moral judgements, as a coping mechanism as much as an ethnographic approach. Here I grapple with the ethical implications of navigating (spiritual) harms in ambiguous circumstances as a precarious doctoral candidate, my contemporary responsibilities to former interlocutors and now survivors of the church, and telling a fuller ethnographic story. I argue for more nuanced scholarly considerations of the dynamic and complex ways power and vulnerability can manifest in ethnographic encounters, especially in spaces of faith. This paper highlights the methodological and ethical dimensions of doing unsettling fieldwork, and it contributes a novel perspective on the growing body of scholarly literature concerning harm in spiritual and faith communities.

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Discomfort is common for social scientists navigating prison settings. Questioning the legitimacy of research in a “total institution”, among detained people and under administrative supervision, makes discomfort a generative site of reflexivity, especially for female researchers in male prisons.

Paper long abstract

Carceral settings are highly demanding fields, marked by ethical and methodological challenges. Social scientists have long emphasised the emotional endeavours of conducting ethnographic research in prison, which require constant self-questioning, as well as reflection on the legitimacy of navigating an environment deeply shaped by power dynamics.

Discomfort is a widespread experience among researchers who navigate the complexity of the “total institution”. It comes from the environment itself, hostile to the outsider’s gaze; from interacting with a “captive population”, such as detained people; from dealing with limitations imposed by carceral administrations, which affect methodology and methods adopted. These constraints restrict the possibility of seeing, talking, and listening freely, allowing the researcher to conduct only “partial ethnographies”.

Moreover, prisons are gendered institutions, largely inhabited and governed by men. Being a female researcher entails an additional layer of discomfort, as the researcher’s self is exposed to ongoing scrutiny and negotiation in the field.

Drawing on three ethnographic experiences conducted in several Italian and Spanish prisons between 2022 and 2025, this paper examines how ethnographic discomfort, under institutional constraints and surveillance, shapes the researcher's positionality and the forms of knowledge produced in prison ethnography. It highlights the potential of reflexivity to enhance both the researcher's understanding of their role and the mechanisms of knowledge production in restrictive settings. Despite many limitations, collaborative knowledge remains a possible and desirable goal: from this perspective, discomfort becomes a keystone for unveiling the complexity of prison ethnography.

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The paper reflects on ethical, emotional, and methodological challenges of conducting ethnography in conflict-affected Cabo Delgado, showing how discomfort—witnessing structural violence and negotiating positionality—can be reflexively transformed into analytical and ethical insight.

Paper long abstract

The conflict in Cabo Delgado, Northern Mozambique, emerges from the intersection of historical political violence, land dispossession, extensive extractive practices, and shifting social dynamics. Conducting ethnographic research in this context presents profound ethical, emotional, and methodological challenges. Humanitarian interventions often reproduce colonial logics through non-participatory and discriminatory practices, creating dilemmas around complicity, representation, and engagement with vulnerable populations.

In this paper, I reflect on my experiences conducting political ethnography among internally displaced persons and urban residents in conflict- torn Cabo Delgado. I examine the moments of discomfort elicited by witnessing structural violence, negotiating access, and confronting the limits of my positionality, values, and assumptions. I discuss strategies I employed to navigate these tensions, including integrating local voices into research design, critically negotiating ethical engagement, and maintaining reflexive awareness of power asymmetries.

I argue that discomfort— whether arising from emotional unease, ethical dilemmas, or methodological uncertainty— can be generative. By engaging reflexively with these experiences, researchers can enhance both the analytical depth of their work and the ethical quality of their interventions. Drawing on fieldwork, literature, and methodological reflection, this paper illustrates how ethnographic engagement in ethically complex, conflict-affected contexts can transform experiences of discomfort into opportunities for critical insight into conflict–city dynamics, urbanization, and the governance of aid and displacement.

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This contribution explores ‘disobedient’ queer and trans researcher bodies as sources of knowledge and meaning making in fieldwork, focusing on skin, sound, and feet in nightlife dancing as un/comfortable sites through which the researcher critically negotiates fieldwork relations and geographies.

Paper long abstract

As queer people, we are often told that our bodies do not belong. The queer body may appear in a way that is unexpected or discordant with the surrounding bodies. It does the ‘wrong’ things or does them in the ‘wrong’ way. Similarly, as researchers we are often told that our bodies do not belong in the research process. While there is work being done in many fields to dismantle this presumption, there remain few resources available for queer researchers to understand and work through what this intersection—queer and researcher—means in the field. Field research is disobedient. You prepare, plan, theorize what will happen and what you will do, but nothing goes precisely as planned. Equally, my queer researcher body is disobedient. This paper situates the researcher’s body as a site of knowledge and aims provide new insights into this question by providing reflections on various ways that a researcher’s body can be ‘disobedient’ during fieldwork and looks at nightclub dancing as a means through which these ‘deviant’ states of being can be filtered and coped with. I argue that going out to dance at clubs and other nightlife venues can act as sites through which the researcher both critically negotiates fieldwork relations and geographies and also provides an avenue for working through and expressing discontents and challenges in the research process. As this contribution derives itself from the body, I focus on skin, sound, and feet as sites of discomfort and dis/emplacement.