The politics of self-reflexivity in ethnography

This short commentary aims to describe the role of political subjectivity and the researcher’s memory in fieldwork by focusing on a self-reflective account of my ethnographic fieldwork. This reflection comes after two years of ethnographic inquiry into sensory experience and observation of how memory is performed in relation to personal photographs and objects. It is part of an ongoing Ph.D. thesis about the post-memories of Armenian Genocide descendants in the diaspora, where I seek to understand how they remember the past in the present by observing their sensory engagement with the past. As well as this, the fieldwork shows the necessity of auto-ethnographic inquiry of the researcher, given that I am Turkish. This commentary ultimately asks what the role is of political subjectivity in ethnographic fieldwork, thinking especially of visual mediation in the diaspora.