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Paper short abstract

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.

Paper long abstract

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.