Reorienting Participation, Distance and Positionality: Ethnographic Encounters with Gender and Sexual Minority Migrants

Abstract

In this article, the author reflects on how complementing an interview-based methodological approach with participation may be conducive to creating nuanced knowledges about processes of identification, belonging and marginalization. The thoughts he elaborates on emerge from two experiences of fieldwork conducted with gender and sexual minority migrants in the UK and France. He dwells on the uses that social researchers make of some well-established methods when doing research fieldwork: participant observation, researcher’s distance, and positionality. In so doing, the author activates the queer signifier to help us think through how the words researchers use, and where they are situated, influence their sensibilities as investigators of the social.