Politicized and Depoliticized Ethnicities, Power Relations and Temporality: Insights to Outsider Research from Comparative and Transnational Fieldwork

The insider and outsider positions in migration studies have conventionally been approached in terms of ethnic or national belonging. Recently scholars have problematized the essentialist approaches to these roles by arguing for the inclusion of multiple intersecting social locations that are at play in the constitution of researcher positionality. Less attention has been paid, however, on how different ethnicities are constructed and how they can become politicized and depoliticized at particular moments during the research process. This paper discusses the fieldwork experiences of two “apparent outsiders” to the studied diaspora community. We show how a researcher’s assumed ethnicity can at times become politicized and depoliticized, and constructed in relation to other social categories. Drawing from our experiences in multi-sited and comparative ethnographic fieldwork on the Kurdish diaspora, we also show how our assumed ethnicities as “Turkish” and “Finnish” shifted within the actual empirical field, being relevant in one moment and less so in another. We argue that rather than taking insider and outsider positions as a starting-point to understand researcher positionality, scholars need to look at particular moments of insiderness and outsiderness to grasp how the researcher’s assumed ethnicity becomes politicized and depoliticized during ethnographic fieldwork.