Race, emotionalized bodies and migration research: doing fieldwork in the West as a Black African Male

ABSTRACT

The optimism that accompanies the voyage into social science-related fieldwork is sometimes confronted by the ‘unanticipated’ of the field, which surges out of a perceived (in)congruence between the researcher and the settings of the site of fieldwork. Using theoretical framings from Pierre Bourdieu, I show how my habitus as a ‘Black African Male’ was perceived in a field of research that is both racialized and gendered, accounting for the several surprising and awkward moments that marked my fieldwork in Denmark and New Zealand. I begin by showing how the origins of migration studies effected the racialized composition of this field of scholarship, as well as its subsequent gendered turn. I then present my sites of fieldwork and the several encounters of the ‘unanticipated’ that engendered fieldwork reflexivity, especially as regards the unequal power relations existing in various sites of research engagements. I suggest a few fieldwork navigation strategies for researchers with comparable identities and lastly recommend that fieldwork’s awkward moments engendered by stereotypes of race and gender be made productive by way of ‘creative confrontations’.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration research fieldwork
• Denmark
• New Zealand
• habitus
• epistemological shock

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to Nick Lewis, David Mayeda, Birgitte Johansen, Chinyere Abah, Hilary Okoli and Anthonia Uzoigwe for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Name has been changed

2 A colloquial phrase meaning – to improve something

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship.