Accompanying Migrant Children through their Everyday Lives. On the relation between research relationship and ethnographic field constitution
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Abstract
This article deals with methodological questions arising from the relationship between the establishment of (research) relationships and the emergence of an ethnographic field. Based on data from a long-term multi-site ethnography on belonging in a society shaped by migration, an ethnographic pathway is reconstructed that opened up while accompanying a child through the transnational everyday life. Situations along the way are described in which shifting loyalties and different authorities become visible in the social orders in which the ethnographer and the child interacted individually and with each other. I analyse how the ethnographic field is sometimes entangled in conflicting power dynamics through multi-referential social orders. Based on this reconstruction, I argue for granting analytically and socially adequate space to the processual, ethically complex situations in qualitative inequality research, thereby abandoning the construction if a ‘good research child’.
Keywords: Early childhood, kindergarten, multi-sited ethnography, migration, research relations, ethnographic pathways
Bibliography: Jaeger, Ursina: Migrationsandere Kinder durch den Alltag begleiten. Zum Verhältnis von Forschungsbeziehung und ethnografischer Feldkonstitution, ZQF – Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung, 2-2025, pp. 190-204.
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