“NOW IT’S YOUR TURN!” IDENTIFYING POSITIONALITIES ANDBOUNDARY SHIFTING IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK

In the field of migration studies there has been significant debate around the advantages associated with sharing a national or ethnic belonging with research participants. This article joins the recent contributions of female migrant investigators who have opted for what I here refer to as positional reflexivity, questioning the aprioristic conditions of insiderness or outsiderness and advocating for a constant revision of the positionalities and negotiations of power that come into play in the field. I describe the considerations generated by the implementation of this approach in a qualitative study I carried out in the Italian region of Veneto, in which I examined the complex and shifting boundaries that were explicitly mentioned during my encounters with key informants in institutional and associational environments, as well as during interviews with first and second generation Argentinian migrants. I observe that multiple positionalities such as legal status, university position, national and provincial origin, ethnic origin,migratory generation, gender and age conditioned my interactions with research participants.