Transnational approaches to feminist and queer ethnographies: Rethinking dynamics of friendship in the field

The following case study is based on a 5-year collaborative research project that explored the multifaceted interactions between feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other (LGBTI+) activists within and across national borders in contemporary Scandinavia, Russia, and Turkey. Using a multisited, multiscalar transnational feminist approach and ethnographic methods in online and offline contexts, the study aspired to approach the transnational in variegated sites and on multiple scales. This case study focuses on the use of dialogue as a way to overcome the limitations of methodological nationalism (i.e., a strict comparative methodology that risks to reproduce hierarchies between geographical contexts or social locations). It explores the possibilities of active and interactive exchanges between researcher and research participants through notions of friendship in the field. Focusing on what dynamics of friendship, intellectual exchange, and shared devotion can contribute to research, the case study illuminates how relationships of respect, support, love and mutual admiration can allow us to go beyond conventional notions of individual or personal friendship and identify the potential of friendship in the field as a shared engagement to enable reciprocal learning. Students will gain an insight into why and how to navigate in queer feminist ethnographic research at moments where boundaries between the roles of researcher and friend are blurred.