In the last three decades, there have been lively discussions about methodological concerns amongst feminists in scholarship on politics and international relations, although those deliberations have only occasionally seen a published end (Wibben, 2016). Yet, feminist research is best understood as a series of actions and not as a label we use to describe ourselves (hooks, 2015). This article foregrounds the examination of my own epistemic practices and seeks to present an overview of a feminist ethnographic process, through a depiction and analysis of care as practices and care as ethics. To engage with this idea, I reflexively scrutinise ethnographic encounters and relationships with participants to my research, rural women who live in an unstable subregion of Colombia. I trace the caring practices that shape the field and the relationships arising from ethnography while reflecting upon the gendered ways in which care sustains research.
I present two vignettes from which I build my main points. First, I show that this ongoing ethnography is made possible through practices of care structured by gender and the specific context in which those take place, thereby arguing that care sustains academic research. Second, I underline how caring relationships are central to making research more robust because such relationships foster trust, responsibility and agency. Third, I use this opportunity to reflexively scrutinise the power differentials that shape my research and propose that adopting an ethics of care can help mitigate such power discrepancies, including questions of coloniality of power (Mignolo, 2007).
Overall, this paper contributes to the body of work which delineates how feminist (social) sciences are made. More precisely, by making visible otherwise invisible or invisibilised practices, I argue (1) that there is a place for care in academic scholarship on politics and international relations, (2) that care makes for better research and (3) that it offers a critical standpoint from which one can reflexively analyse power.
