Reversing the gaze: methodological reflections from the perspective of racial- and ethnic-minority researchers

Abstract

In the current literature on methodology and knowledge production, there is a substantial imbalance in interracial and interethnic research: the perspective has primarily been that of the ‘white gaze’. This article reverses that gaze and attempts to initiate a methodological discussion that is missing today: what occurs when non-white researchers interview a white-majority population or persons of the same racial but different ethnic background? Based on the experiences of a female researcher with an East Asian background (Sayaka Osanami Törngren) and a male researcher with an African background (Jonathan Ngeh) who conducted interviews in Malmö, Sweden, this article analyzes incidents in which the boundaries between race, ethnicity and non-Swedishness in relation to non-whiteness are implicitly and explicitly communicated between the researcher and the researched. Our experiences reveal that the demarcation of these boundaries is not fixed but highly fluid.