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Paper short abstract

When subjected to strict border regimes, precarious lives often resist fictionalisation. This paper explores object-oriented ethnography as a method for writing about migration at the Polish–Belarusian border beyond the limits of anonymisation.

Paper long abstract

In a world shaped by polarisation understood not as fixed oppositions but as dynamic processes of (re)producing divisions, anthropological writing becomes entangled in fields of power, visibility, and surveillance. In contexts where migration is politically instrumentalised and digitally tracked, conventional strategies of anonymisation are no longer sufficient to protect interlocutors while preserving the depth of ethnographic knowledge. This paper explores the ethical and methodological challenges of writing about people migrating across the Polish–Belarusian border, asking how anthropologists can speak about precarious lives without reinforcing polarising narratives, whitesaviourism or exposing interlocutors to harm.

Drawing on long-term engagement with humanitarian practices under border regimes, I argue that fictionalisation should be understood not merely as a stylistic device but as a situated response to polarising conditions of knowledge production. Rather than replacing ethnographic description, fictionalisation emerges as a fragile and often incomplete practice.

I propose object-oriented ethnography as a way of writing about people on the move through objects that are carried, lost, stolen, or left behind. This approach emerges from autoethnographic engagement with border realities, where the researcher’s own entanglement in regimes of visibility, risk, and responsibility reveals the limits of fictionalisation and necessity of indirect forms of narration. Objects mediate border experiences and often become the only possible narrators of migratory trajectories, enabling ethnographic knowledge to be articulated beyond the reach of conventional anonymisation.

By combining object-oriented ethnography, selective fictionalisation, and autoethnographic reflection, this paper proposes a framework for writing that navigates between visibility and concealment in polarised and surveilled worlds.