Contested knowledges: Negotiating the epistemic politics of engaged activist ethnography

Abstract

This article offers a methodological reflection on what it means to practise politically engaged ethnography with contemporary alter-European activists. While politically engaged research has a long history in the social sciences, it continues to present methodological and epistemological challenges to ethnographers who want their work not only to be academically rigorous, but also politically relevant. In this article, I build on scholarship conducted in collaboration with activists and social movements and what has come to be known as ‘militant ethnography’ in particular. Reflecting on three years of fieldwork with alter-European activists conducted between the UK’s vote to leave the EU in 2016 and the European Parliament elections in 2019, this article suggests that engaged knowledge production, here, is as an ongoing process of contestation. The article introduces four conceptual pillars along which these epistemic politics may be negotiated, understanding the knowledges produced as contextual, corporeal, contradictory and collective.