Abstract

Fieldwork comprises of moments when researchers’ institutional, social, and political ascriptions shift, and their social identities and subjectivities conflict, collide, or conflate. These conditions often point to the needs for, or result from, oscillating identifications that compel both researchers and interlocutors to negotiate existing or emerging power relations. A sustained self-reflection of one’s changing and conflicting roles as field researcher can assist ethnographers in coping with different expectations and ascribed responsibilities, and contributes to nuanced analysis, interpretation, and representation of the studied phenomena.