Experiencing ‘white fragility’: Cultivating discomfort and the politics of representation in feminist research practices

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Feminist and postcolonial anthropology have long stressed the need to perceive the researcher as a positioned and biased subject (Collins 1991, Rosaldo 1989, Weston 1997) and it is, therefore, important to reflect on one’s position in the field as well as the writing practice. Today it has become standard practice to have at least one student assignment on ‘positionality’ in anthropology or human geography classes. However, in my PhD research, the need to reflect upon my social and cultural position was not only prescribed by social and cultural anthropological practice but also demanded from the interlocutors themselves—because I am a white German woman researching Afrodescendent and Black26 identities. Also, I work with Black feminist activists, who form part of a political community in which questions of representation are a core theme. In this essay I reflect on fieldwork experiences I made at conferences and with research interlocutors and explain how I deal with my own positionality as a white female researcher.