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This blog post is based on the following article written by the authors: Segers, Iris B., Tamta Gelashvili and Audrey Gagnon. 2023. ‘Intersectionality and care ethics in researching the far right.’ Feminist Media Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2280884
Close-up research on the far right comes with inherent challenges related to power, justice, and ethics. It involves what scholars refer to as researching “distasteful populations”, that is, populations whose ideas or way of life are generally not shared by researchers. Indeed, far-right actors, or members and sympathizers of far-right parties, groups, and social movement organizations endorse nativist views that are often rejected by social scientists, leading to the latter developing “under-rapport” when researching the former. Moreover, the far right can pose indirect (through exposure to hostile content) or direct (through interpersonal interactions) harm to researchers.
These challenges and risks that researchers face when engaging with the far right are often gendered and intersect with other axes of inequality, like race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality, adding complexity to research. In other words, they can be viewed through the lens of intersectionality, a term originally coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, and which today is used across research fields and civil society to refer to the combined impact of various structures of inequality on the legal, social, and political treatment of individuals. Applied to researchers focusing on the far right, an intersectional lens highlights the ways in which risk of harm is unequally distributed, through scholars’ combined positions along various axes of inequality such as gender identity, sexuality, and race-ethnicity.
We approach these challenges from an ethics of care perspective, prioritizing relationships and context. This approach involves negotiating interactions during fieldwork, so that researchers reflect on the potential harm they may experience. It also implies considering the self as inherently relational, that is, shaped by and also shaping relations with others, rather than “a rational, autonomous agent, or a self-interested individual”. We reflect on how researchers can navigate ethical dilemmas related to the inherent relationality of research, contextual and situated decision-making, and the role of emotions in research.
Towards a ‘negotiated relationality’
Fieldwork guidelines on reflexivity often suggest that researchers minimize their own power and give voice to the research population. However, they regularly fail to acknowledge that researchers are not necessarily in a more powerful position, making the ethical imperative of minimizing one’s own power irrelevant. In far-right settings, minimizing one’s own power can, for example, leave women and researchers of color vulnerable to harassment or unwanted sexual advances.
Seeing research as relational means that we do not perceive researchers as necessarily powerful, and can reflect on the (in)direct harm they may experience. Indeed, some field interactions might require a negotiation of relationality, circumventing or expanding guidelines on reflexivity to afford more agency to the researcher. For instance, researchers may have to carefully consider how, and under which conditions, they can safely engage with research participants. Rather than discouraging researchers from engaging with distasteful populations, research institutions should provide the opportunity, space, and resources for researchers to negotiate their relationship with their research populations. For example, while ethics requirements primarily concern the responsibility of researchers to protect their research subjects, in the case of potentially dangerous fieldwork, they should also take into account the protection of researchers.
Contextual and situated decision-making
Research guidelines generally suggest that researchers should aim for situated and contextual decision-making in fieldwork to establish a trust-based relationship with their subjects. When researching distasteful populations such as the far right, this is all the more important. In such cases, building trust can be challenging in terms of not only ethics, but also safety. An ethics of care approach acknowledges that gaining access to far-right milieus is difficult and comes with intersectional risks. As a result, care for the researchers themselves is important to prioritize their safety. This care and risk-management should be balanced with broader reflections on ethics and justice outside of the researcher-participant relationship, especially when participants’ views contradict human rights and liberal democratic principles. Such a combination of more abstracted and norm-based (i.e. deontological) considerations on the one hand, and situated and contextual ethical considerations on the other hand, could help the researcher manage risk without legitimizing or spreading far-right ideologies and activities.
The role of emotions
Research on distasteful populations can generate a range of emotions, including ones that can affect researchers’ wellbeing, such as fear and anxiety. Thus, in addition to caring for the researchers’ safety, an ethics of care approach highlights the value of emotions in ethical considerations, and argues that emotional responses can be mobilized to inform moral decisions.
This does not mean that emotion in itself can, or should, be used as a guide for moral conduct; but that an in-depth reflection on emotions can contribute to ethical research. We thus argue that, in an ethical approach to researching distasteful populations, researchers’ emotional safety should be emphasized in a way that allows for engagement with emotions, instead of a detached research process. Researchers of the far right should use their emotions to set boundaries for what and who they are willing to study, but also to reflect on the ways in which emotions can impact research. For example, Kathleen Blee emphasizes the role of fear in her research involving interviews with racist activists in the United States. She argues that researchers need to be aware of the emotional dynamics inherent to researching distasteful populations, probe their own emotions, and pay attention to how they might influence the research process.
Concluding remarks
Insights from an ethics of care can guide researchers and institutions in navigating complex ethical dilemmas inherent to research on far-right actors, and “distasteful populations” more generally. Specifically, ethics considerations should involve holistic and reflexive approaches where researchers have space to consider the relational nature of research, the complexities of situational decision-making, and the importance of emotions. This perspective is also developed in the ethical guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers, who argue that a process approach to research, which sees ethics as embedded in method, can contribute to improve research design and lead to better, more ethical research. In line with this approach, we encourage institutions to support researchers in developing a reflexive approach to research ethics, based on an understanding of relationality, context, and emotions as crucial components of the research process.
