Accompanied Invasions

Paper proposal for the planned handbook “Accompanied Fieldwork in Anthropology”, edited by Julia Koch-Tshirangwana, Judit Tavakoli & Sophia Thubauville, cp. GAA Working Group „Family in the Field” & Handbook Project “Accompanied Fieldwork in Anthropology”

While in recent publications on ethnographic research and positionality, the researcher’s engendered body (Hanson & Richards 2019; Klofl 2017), matters of security and mental health during research (Thurmann [forthcoming]), and even single parenthood (Ghodsee 2009) have become more prominent topics, in literature on accompanied research, narratives of color (Tahir 2024) continue to be hardly found; even less so queer of color perspectives. Thus, this paper engages the reflexive practice of „invading ethnography“ (Adjepong 2019) to enrich accompanied ethnographic research theory and methods with a queer of color perspective. Drawing on my ethnographic research experiences as a queer mother of color with queer and trans communities in Lagos, Abuja, and Ilorin, Nigeria, I promote Adjepong’s (2019) „invading“ approach to disrupt normative assumptions about the multiple positionalities brought to and encountered in research environments. Invading ethnography not only “disrupts normative ethnographic narratives”, but provides them with „language through which to grapple with discomfort and marginality“, therefore a tool that assists in articulating the engendered and relational body in research environments.

Keywords: Queer of color critique, invading ethnography, parenthood, positionality