Othersistering: A Feminist Praxis in Ethnography for Women of Color Researchers

Borrowing from the scholarship of Black and Chicana/Latina feminist scholars who theorize motherhood and maintain that motherhood for women of color is not the traditional, heteronormative, and dichotomous family structure, we argue that the researcher-participant relationship in ethnographic research for women of color scholars is also not traditional. Within this special issue, we reflect on the relationships we built with our research collaborators across two ethnographic studies. Our separate research experiences have a shared unruly theoretical and methodological perspective. Theoretically, we conceptualize othersistering. Methodologically, we challenge the Westernized approach to ethnography as a distant relationship between the “researcher” and the “participant” and the decision we make to develop deeper relationships with our collaborators – what some might deem as “unethical” or in danger of “subjectivity.” Instead, we engage in ethnographic work that creates unruly sociology, with embodied ways of knowing as Black/Afro-Latina and Chicana feminist ethnographers that materialize in othersistering.