Objective/Context:

In this article, I propose a personal reflection on how it is possible to undertake collaborative, feminist-based ethnography regarding the transnationalized care regime. This reflection is based on multi-sited ethnography I have carried out since 2007 with care workers, domestic and transnational migrants, displaced and exiled individuals who self-identify as cis and transgender women, lesbian and heterosexual women, and trans men.

Methodology:

I will undertake a reflection on the political, corporal, sensorial, and emotional implications of a collaborative research and action agenda, both for me as a researcher and for those individuals who have worked with me to construct a collective narrative regarding their working, employment, and living conditions as migrants, displaced people, and the exiled. Multi-sited ethnography and collaborative research imply particularities in terms of the boy, care, and the emotions in physical and symbolic displacement and the political relationships with these individuals, who are subjects with agency with respect to advocacy within the context of transnational care schemes. However, such research must avoiding ignoring the vast power disparities in the relationships that ethnography and research involve.

Conclusions:

To conclude, I will demonstrate how undertaking multi-sited feminist, transdisciplinary ethnographic research is always a paradoxical, incomplete, and partial exercise under constant negotiation. For this type of exercise, the postulates of feminist epistemology are useful, provided they are grounded in the local historical and political context.

Originality:

I hope, with this initial reflection, to contribute to a limited discussion on multi-sited ethnography based in feminism and care.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )