Gendered encounters in mobility: Women researching migrant construction workers

Abstract

Writing about sexism and sexual harassment in the field is still generally discouraged outside gender ethnography, despite a growing gender reflexivity in research. This is mostly due to certain established norms and expectations about ethnographic work that tend to ignore how these issues contribute to women’s fieldwork experiences and subsequent ethnographic accounts. In this article, we go against this tendency by setting out our gendered experiences as female ethnographers conducting research on labor mobility in the male-dominated construction industry among Brazilian internal migrants in Rio de Janeiro and among Polish migrant workers in Europe. We foreground how gendered dynamics affected our fieldwork experience and how they generated a degree of self-doubt and self-blame about our methodological choices. Our hope is that writing about our experiences will help female ethnographers to better prepare for and consider the different kinds of sexism that will inevitably shape their knowledge production.