Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Iranian refugees in Germany and based on the theoretical works of critical migration and feminist scholars, this paper aims to accentuate ‘accent’ and incorporate it into ethnographic practice to recognize alternative forms of knowledge production.

Paper Abstract:

The experience of migration leaves marks on the body both literally and figuratively. These marks take multiple forms and (re)produce bodies of ‘deterritorialized’ people as ‘unwanted’, ‘excluded’, ‘not integrated’ or ‘partially/temporarily included’. Whether it is physical/psychological trauma or the conspicuousness of physical characteristics such as ‘accent’, they are both recognizable and categorizable within hierarchical systems of power relations. Besides, the very presence of migrant bodies represents the borderland as a liminal state of (not) here and (not) there. Hence, the practice of ethnography about ‘deterritorialized’ people by ‘deterritorialized’ researchers can result in a stylistic genre with both formal and thematic characteristics that, to quote Hamid Naficy (2001), can be an aesthetic response to the lived experiences of researchers. Being ‘accented in field’ creates new dynamics, challenges, but also opens up possibilities for new ethnographic understandings of migration and bordering processes. It allows the ‘unwritten politics’ of people’s everyday lives to infiltrate the ethnographic practice/understanding/text and thus create new poetics and politics of ethnography. Following Shahram Khosravi’s (2024) account of ‘accent’ as an epistemological and methodological refusal and a form of positioning against colonial processes of knowledge production, this paper aims to accentuate ‘accent’ and incorporate it into ethnographic practice in order to recognize alternative forms of knowledge production. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Iranian refugees in Germany and based on the theoretical works of critical migration and feminist scholars, this paper proposes the term ‘accented ethnography’ to characterize the fieldwork dynamics in ethnographic practice and its resulting ethnographic representation.