The co-constructed ethnographer: Fieldwork with children and the relational production of positionality

This article introduces the concept of co-constructed positionality to argue that researcher identity is not a fixed, pre-defined attribute but an emergent property of interaction in the field. Drawing on eighteen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with children in Helsinki, Finland, and Santa Marta, Colombia, I examine how interlocutors actively interpret, negotiate, and sometimes challenge the researcher’s role. Through a series of ethnographic vignettes, I illustrate how my own positionality was produced through repeated everyday encounters and demonstrate how children were reading my presence through specific interpretive lenses. These encounters highlight the inherent relational vulnerability of fieldwork, where access and belonging depend on ongoing intersubjective recognition rather than institutional authority alone. Ultimately, I argue that treating ethnographic role negotiations as primary data provides deep insight into social relations and shifts the analytical focus of reflexivity from the ethnographer and towards the intersubjective processes through which ethnographic knowledge is produced.