Description
How can we, students of politics, approach and research people whose political positions and worldviews do we find morally repugnant and alienating? Since, as feminist reflections have made clear, it is impossible to step out of the social histories and positionalities we are embedded in, what are some of the steps we can take to mitigate our personal discomfort when seeking to represent people we deeply disagree with, and on whose lives we base our scholarly claims? Drawing on my research among Israeli settlers in the West Bank and other fieldwork accounts fieldworks that engage behaviour that respective scholars find morally reprehensible, I propose two ways how to better come to terms with ethical behaviour we find repugnant. First, I argue that we should situate moral codes and their lived embodiment in larger structures of power and societal relationships which underpin and inform different notions and experiences of morality. Second, following the foundational principle of ethnography positing the researcher herself as the main research tool, I suggest juxtaposing the ethical phenomena we research with our own moral conduct. I argue that these steps could help us to bracket off the aversion we might feel towards our interlocutors and facilitate our efforts to take their ethical choices seriously.
