Rethinking fieldwork in critical algorithm research: slippery positionalities and generative vulnerabilities

Abstract

This commentary proposes an approach to reflexivity in positionality in critical algorithms research that situates our ‘fieldwork’ at the intersection of the different sites where algorithmic practices materialize. Drawing from feminist epistemologies and transgender sensibilities, I suggest foregrounding researchers’ embodiment and vulnerability as a way to access and represent vulnerabilities, contradictions, textures and frictions present in the ‘field’, which algorithmic logic itself tends to erase. For that, I describe a speculative pre-fieldwork exercise based on my own position as migrant, transgender researcher, studying platform labour and preparing to start fieldwork in a potential hostile environment. Transgender and other border-dwelling identities are particularly attuned to the very fluid and contextual nature of our positionality and the co-constitutive aspect of our encounters with research participants and the social-political-affective economies in which our research unfolds. I argue that we approach the anticipation work around fieldwork anxiety, unpredictability and vulnerability generatively, and incorporate them as tactics for a more nuance and grounded approach to the study of algorithms as situated practice.