How motherhood reshapes ethnography: A mother-ethnographer's fieldwork in Algeria during the Hirak movement

Introduction

3 March 2019, Marseille

The first time I considered conducting ethnographic fieldwork after becoming a mother, I felt conflicted. Should I do fieldwork away from home? If I decide to go, should I leave my baby, Leïla, behind, or should I bring her with me? At times, the decision was beyond my control—bringing my daughter was impossible. These dilemmas led me to consider restricting my research to sites closer to my then-home in Marseille or abandoning ethnography altogether. Writing this article became a way to reconcile motherhood and ethnography, exploring how motherhood reshapes the practice of geographically distant fieldwork while questioning the norms around what constitutes “good ethnography” and what makes a “good mother”—and the tensions between them.

These tensions reflect structural contradictions embedded in how ethnography is imagined and practiced. Since Malinowski's colonial-era fieldwork, prolonged immersion has been ethnography's defining methodological standard. While applied fields have developed alternatives such as focused ethnography (Knoblauch, 2005), justifications for shorter fieldwork remain framed through institutional constraints—funding, time limits—rather than researchers’ embodied realities. Even as ethnography has undergone a reflexive turn that foregrounds how researchers’ identities shape knowledge production (Doucet and Mauthner, 2007), motherhood remains largely invisible in fieldwork accounts (Brown and de Casanova, 2009). This erasure perpetuates the ideal of the autonomous, unencumbered researcher (Barnes and Centellas, 2024), which systematically marginalizes those whose lives are structured by caregiving responsibilities, particularly mothers.

I focus on motherhood specifically because parental expectations remain deeply gendered. Motherhood amplifies career inequalities more than fatherhood (Huopalainen and Satama, 2019; Ivancheva et al., 2019). Feminist scholarship has extensively documented how the neoliberal university's ideal of the “good academic”—highly mobile, fully available, and maximally productive (Edwards et al., 2025; Ivancheva et al., 2019; Steinþórsdóttir et al., 2019)—stands in direct tension with social norms of “good motherhood” (Huopalainen and Satama, 2019). Yet this literature on gendered academic labor rarely engages with ethnography's specific demands, while the emerging literature on mother-ethnographers (Barnes and Centellas, 2024; Gibb, 2021; Jenkins, 2020; Price and Hall, 2024) rarely connects to broader feminist analyses of academic work. What remains underexamined is how the conflicting ideals of the “good ethnographer” and the “good mother” fundamentally reshape not only how fieldwork is conducted and whether it remains desirable, but also what forms of knowledge become possible when care and interdependence are centered rather than erased.

This article draws on an autoethnography of my fieldwork on the Hirak movement in Algeria between 2019 and early 2020, less than a year after the birth of my first child. The Hirak began in February 2019 as a movement against Algeria's president's bid for a fifth mandate and grew into a revolutionary social movement demanding regime change, mobilizing millions in weekly demonstrations before being halted by state repression and the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. As an Algerian emigrant with dual citizenship who started a family in France, and as an Algerian-born researcher trained in Western academia, I occupy an “in-between” position—simultaneously insider and outsider in Algeria (Kamlongera, 2023). Returning to Algeria for research meant working “away” from my home in Marseille, yet also “back” in my native country.

By analyzing how caregiving responsibilities transformed the geography, desirability, and temporality of field engagement while enabling alternative, care-centered modes of research, this article makes three interconnected contributions. First, it challenges the dominance of long-term uninterrupted immersion as the gold standard of ethnographic rigor by demonstrating how episodic fieldwork and alternative geographies can generate distinctive insights. The argument advanced here is not that episodic or care-shaped fieldwork is superior to prolonged immersion, but that it enables different forms of attention. Second, it bridges literatures on gendered academic labor and mother-ethnography by revealing how competing ideals of the “good mother” and “good ethnographer” reshape the conditions of fieldwork and, more fundamentally, its desirability, while demonstrating how care networks function as epistemic infrastructure. Third, it extends scholarship on “back-home” ethnography (Bilgen and Fábos, 2024; Kamlongera, 2023; Mughal, 2015; Siddiqui, 2023) by theorizing how motherhood—as a biographical transition—fundamentally restructures how researchers engage with “home” while reshaping insider–outsider positionality.

While this study focuses on how becoming a mother reshapes ethnographic practice, the exclusionary logic it foregrounds is not limited to mothers: the same ideal of the autonomous, constantly mobile, and fully available researcher sidelines scholars who conduct fieldwork while navigating disability, chronic illness, elder care, single parenting, or other sustained caregiving obligations. Recognizing care-shaped, episodic, and collaboratively sustained ethnographic practices as epistemically generative—not as second-best or methodologically compromised—is crucial for rethinking both who is able to count as an ethnographer and what kinds of knowledge is treated as rigorous and valuable.

Literature review

To understand how motherhood reshapes ethnography, this review begins by examining debates about ethnographic rigor—particularly regarding time and immersion in the field—to reveal how these methodological standards have systematically erased researchers’ embodied conditions and caregiving responsibilities. It then brings together two bodies of scholarship that have developed independently. Feminist scholarship on gendered academic labor documents how the neoliberal university's ideal of the “good academic” conflicts with norms of “good motherhood,” yet this literature rarely engages with ethnography's specific demands. Meanwhile, emerging scholarship on mother-ethnographers examines how motherhood reshapes fieldwork practice yet rarely connects to broader analyses of gendered academic labor. By bringing these literatures together, this review reveals how intersecting ideals of the “good ethnographer” and “good mother” produce structural tensions that reshape both the conditions and possibilities of ethnographic knowledge production. Finally, as this study is based on autoethnographic research in my country of origin, it engages with scholarship on “back-home” ethnography, which highlights the multiplicity of positionality and the limits of the insider–outsider dichotomy.

Methodology: An analytic-evocative autoethnography of motherhood and fieldwork

Autoethnography provides a methodological lens for critically examining how my experiences as a mother and “in-between” researcher reshaped fieldwork in Algeria. I draw on both evocative and analytic autoethnography.

The evocative approach, championed by scholars such as Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner, emphasizes emotionally engaging, narrative-driven storytelling that aims to connect with readers on an affective level (Ellis and Bochner, 2006). Evocative autoethnography strives to make the “human sciences more human” (Bochner and Ellis, 2022, 8), fostering a form of knowledge that is as affective as it is analytical. As Bochner and Ellis (2022) describe, evocative autoethnography supports a space for uncertainty—a “genre of doubt” (2022, 15)—that helps capture the ambiguities I faced as a mother in the field.

I also draw on analytic autoethnography, as advocated by Leon Anderson (2006), which prioritizes theorization and generalization. Analytic and evocative autoethnography can be interwoven (Tedlock, 2013). I follow Chang's guideline that “the stories of autoethnographers [should be] reflected upon, analyzed, and interpreted within their broader sociocultural context” (Chang, 2008, 46).

My process was iterative and multi-layered. I began by reviewing my analog fieldwork journal and marking passages related to motherhood using dotted stickers. I reread the journal using a different sticker for passages indirectly connected to motherhood—moments shaped by choices I made as a mother but where motherhood or my daughter was not specifically mentioned. I then revisited messages and emails with my husband and family from the Hirak period, focusing on references to my daughter Leïla, and reviewed photos to evoke memories, which I arranged chronologically. Composing the narrative involved vignettes from journals and rewriting them (originally in French and translated into English) using insights from my current perspective.

While the Hirak movement provides the empirical and political context of this study, my primary object of analysis is not the movement itself but ethnographic fieldwork as it was reshaped by motherhood. The Hirak functions here as a situated methodological setting through which transformations in fieldwork practice become visible.

The process was not straightforward. Akehurst and Scott (2023) highlight the emotional labor inherent in autoethnography, challenging the myths—both critical and romanticized—that surround this method. They argue that the process is neither inherently therapeutic nor always an authentic reflection of emotions but is often fraught with frustration, emotional fatigue, and social expectations that can shape and constrain personal narratives. Recognizing these difficulties, I approached my work with critical awareness of the limitations and challenges of producing a coherent narrative from raw affective experiences.

I presented the initial draft in a seminar, where I received feedback from nine colleagues. Initially, I was defensive because of the personal nature of autoethnography. After setting the work aside for several weeks, I returned with a fresh perspective and greater detachment, incorporating feedback and moving toward a more analytical structure.

In addition to analyzing my experiences of fieldwork as a mother, I revisited earlier ethnographic experiences conducted before motherhood. Initially conceived as background context, this material became integral to the analysis as it revealed early tensions between ideals of the “good ethnographer” and the “good mother.” Inspired by Ghosh and Chaudhuri's (2023) reflexive examination of how immigrant academic mothers contend with competing ideals, I also examined the social and cultural norms of motherhood I had internalized.

Through this analytic-evocative approach, I seek not only to document the tensions of fieldwork under motherhood but also to interrogate how these tensions themselves produce knowledge, revealing care and interdependence as epistemic conditions.

Fieldwork before motherhood and the conflicting norms of the “good ethnographer” and the “good mother”

Algeria is my native country. My family emigrated to France during the Black Decade. ³ My father left in 1992, and in 1994, when I was nine, my mother, my sister, and I followed, with my brother joining us a year later. After 1997, as violence began to subside, we, like many other emigrants, returned for annual trips during summer holidays.

From the outset, I focused my research on Algeria. My desire to understand a country I had witnessed torn by violence and often misrepresented in France, its former colonial power, led me to pursue graduate studies in Comparative Politics at Sciences Po Paris, specializing in North African and Middle Eastern politics. The area studies program placed strong emphasis on local knowledge and language proficiency. For the first time, my native tongue, the Algerian dialect, was not stigmatized but valued as an academic asset, transforming a marker of difference into a source of epistemic legitimacy.

During my academic training, long-term, immersive fieldwork was considered a hallmark of empirical rigor and academic legitimacy, closely aligning with the ideals of classical ethnography. I fully internalized this understanding of what “proper” fieldwork should look like, and it framed my early career and sense of self as a researcher.

In 2011, I returned to Algeria for a year-long fieldwork as part of my doctoral research. In my twenties, with no children and minimal personal obligations, I could fully dedicate myself to the field. Being Algerian provided undeniable advantages: my fluency in the local dialect and the absence of visa restrictions facilitated access and allowed for immersive, detailed research that would have been more challenging for foreign researchers.

Approaching Algeria as an ethnographer gave me, for the first time, a sense of independence in my native country. Before becoming a researcher, my social world in Algeria had always been mediated by family ties. Every encounter was filtered through kinship relations. I had been socialized into a world where cousins are also friends, where—as a teenage girl and later a young woman—I rarely went anywhere by myself without visiting someone, and where movements and interactions were embedded in familial networks. Fieldwork disrupted this pattern: stepping into the role of an ethnographer allowed me to move beyond familiar, family-mediated circles—visiting cities, entering neighborhoods, and meeting people whom my family networks would never have led me to. In doing so, the outsider role of the researcher gave the insider in me a different, more layered understanding of my native country.

After completing my PhD, I was hired by an anthropologist as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne for a collective research project in Tunisia. My ability to conduct fieldwork in Maghrebi dialects was a key reason for securing the position. In 2015, I spent 8 months in Tunis. At that point, I had been in a relationship for a couple of years with a French man (my future husband). We hardly saw each other; I returned to France only once, and he visited me once.

It was not until I became a mother that my relationship with fieldwork changed fundamentally. Pregnancy, in retrospect, foreshadowed this shift. In October 2017, I began a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at Aix-Marseille University, in Marseille, France, to embark on a new research project on visa policies and mobility restrictions involving significant fieldwork in Algeria. I was already pregnant but not yet showing. I felt I had to demonstrate that I could finish the project and fieldwork as though my pregnancy had no impact. At the time, I was in a precarious position without a permanent academic job, which heightened the pressure to absorb and conceal the embodied realities of pregnancy.

I soon traveled to Algiers and stayed there until February 2018. I believed gathering substantial data was imperative before my child's arrival, anticipating a hiatus from fieldwork for at least 1 year, possibly longer. My husband joined me in Marseille but remained there to job hunt while I was away. Although I was not yet a mother, fieldwork in Algiers felt different. I scheduled monthly returns to France for prenatal care and often felt that my body was no longer only my own. My husband and I spoke more frequently than usual during our time apart, and I sent him regular updates with photos of my growing belly, keeping him connected to the changes from afar.

The anticipated incompatibility between ethnographic fieldwork and motherhood lay as much in the norms of being a “good ethnographer” as in those of a “good mother.” Based on Ghosh and Chaudhuri's (2023) reflexive examination of how immigrant academic mothers negotiate the tensions between idealized worker and mother roles, I revisit the origins of my maternal ideals here. I grew up in a context where feeding, changing, and bathing children were unequivocally considered women's responsibilities. Men—fathers or uncles—might take children out for an ice cream or a walk, but the daily work of caregiving was women's domain. In my family, my father spent extended periods abroad for his academic career or to prepare for our migration during the Black Decade. Once we arrived in France, my mother put her career on hold despite having educational credentials comparable to my father's. She remained at home with us for many years, caring for us as we learned French and adapted to a new life. From an early age, I equated “good mothering” with constant physical presence, time devoted to children, and a willingness to set aside professional ambitions.

My family and cultural norms about motherhood were further shaped—and at times challenged—by my life in France. In my social milieu in Algeria, children are freely integrated into social and public spaces and often live according to the family's rhythms. In contrast, France's educated urban middle class, which I observed through friends who became mothers before me, emphasizes structuring age-appropriate childhood experiences, limiting screen time, and strictly respecting children's routines. I was also to become a mother in quite different circumstances from my mother, not only because of differing social and cultural norms but also due to a very different familial and social environment. Unlike my mother, I was isolated from extended family, without the daily presence of a sister, mother, aunt, or lifelong neighbors. However, I had a husband who was committed to being actively involved in caregiving.

Leïla was born on May 3, 2018.

At the beginning of 2019, the Hirak movement began to unfold in Algeria, prompting me to reassess how motherhood intersects with fieldwork much sooner than I had anticipated. Leïla was only 9 months old.

Fieldwork after motherhood

Motherhood profoundly altered the geography, desirability, and temporality of my fieldwork practices. Before having my daughter, I would likely have boarded my first flight to Algiers after the first day of the massive protests, eager to immerse myself in the field for as long as necessary. With my daughter now anchoring me, this level of spontaneity and long-term engagement no longer felt possible. However, I could not fully detach myself from the field; my professional and personal identities were deeply intertwined with Algeria.

Between 2019 and early 2020, I conducted four field trips ⁴ to Oran to engage with and observe the Hirak movement directly. Two of these trips were undertaken with my daughter and two without her, with durations ranging from 10 days to 3 weeks. When I was not in Algeria, I followed the protests in Marseille, participating in local demonstrations on Sundays and closely monitoring developments on social media each Friday.

Conflicting norms and the (un)desirability of fieldwork

My training emphasized physical presence in the Maghreb, and as an Algerian, I sincerely wanted change for my country. Staying at a distance felt impossible.

Thursday, 28 February 2019, Marseille

My eventual decision to go to Algeria, initially without my daughter, was riddled with ambivalence and apprehension. I knew that women in my family would, with questions and remarks, remind me—subtly but insistently—that I had left her behind.

Thursday, 7 March 2019, Oran

The expectation that I should be caring for my daughter was not just something others imposed; it was something I carried inside myself. Each time I prepared to leave, I felt a heaviness settle over me—a mix of guilt and worry. I felt responsible for contacting friends to ensure my husband had support caring for our daughter.

Email exchange, March 5, 2019, Marseille

As a mother, I began questioning the legitimacy of being and remaining in the field. I grappled with many questions: Was I going to Algeria for work, specifically my ethnography? Or was it my personal longing for political transformation that drew me in? Did I crave the energy of mass protests, or was I seeking to proclaim later, “I was there”? I could justify the trip as work—that felt legitimate; otherwise, it seemed selfish. Even after arriving, these questions persisted.

Once alone in Algeria, I struggled with the reality that every ethnographer knows: some days are slow, and sometimes people do not show up or cancel on you. This had never been an issue for me in the past, but now these quiet moments heightened my doubt about whether my presence in the field was justified. In October and November 2019, Leïla had just begun to articulate “mama,” which added a layer of guilt to my absence. I felt fieldwork would need to be intense if Leïla were not there. I thought, Did you leave her to sit behind your computer?

Financially supporting my research trips without a paid academic position amplified these feelings, especially as another job application cycle passed without success. After approximately 10 days of fieldwork, I would visit the Air Algérie website each night before going to bed to check seat availability on the Oran–Marseille flight the next day and the corresponding prices. I consistently asked my husband if he needed me to cut my trip short. On every occasion, his response was a resolute “no.” Each time, I experienced a combination of disappointment and relief.

I sometimes sought to reconcile motherhood with my ethnographic fieldwork in Oran. Bringing Leïla with me often made me feel better or less guilty. However, this was not always possible, even after she had her passport. My husband sometimes could not or would not join us and preferred not to be away from our daughter for long periods. As such, we compromised: out of my four trips to Oran, Leïla came with me twice. Looking back, although I framed it as an act of transmission—bringing Leïla to Algeria so that she could experience it, as she is also Algerian—much of the time, I managed her presence or even organized her absence. Ethnography and motherhood were performed separately. Often, it was my mother who cared for her while I was documenting the protests. With few opportunities to be in the field, I felt frustrated that being with Leïla came with far more familial obligations. Introducing my daughter resulted in multiplied social commitments that I felt intruded upon my research schedule. When the trip ended, I wrote the following:

Monday, 15 July 2019, Oran

I could neither fully embrace her presence nor her absence.

Discussion

This discussion examines how my fieldwork experience illuminates three interconnected dimensions of mother-ethnography. First, I analyze the conflicting temporalities of motherhood and ethnography, demonstrating how episodic fieldwork—structured by caregiving necessities—both challenges and extends debates about immersion while revealing distinctive epistemic affordances. Second, I examine how these temporal reconfigurations intersect with gendered ideals of the “good mother” and “good ethnographer,” reshaping not only the conditions of fieldwork but also its desirability and the relational networks through which knowledge is produced. Third, I show how motherhood fundamentally reconfigured my positionality as an in-between researcher, transforming the hybrid field-home space in ways that extend existing scholarship on back-home ethnography by foregrounding biographical transitions as constitutive of insider–outsider dynamics.

Motherhood reconfigured the temporality as well as the geography of fieldwork and unsettled my desire to be in the field. This shift exposes how gendered ideals of the “good mother” and the “good ethnographer” generate logistical and affective tensions. Exceptions to long-term immersion are typically justified in institutional terms—limited funding, teaching loads, administrative duties—but rarely through researchers’ embodied realities. The assumption that intensity can compensate for duration (Knoblauch, 2005) presumes a level of autonomy and energy that many researchers cannot sustain because of fatigue, pain, or caregiving demands.

Rather than asking how marginalized researchers might adapt to existing ethnographic ideals, we should ask how ethnography itself can be reimagined when diverse embodied realities and material constraints are treated not as exceptions but as constitutive of the field. This is a question of legitimacy: who is recognized as a producer of knowledge, and what kinds of knowledge count as valuable?

Conclusion: Rethinking ethnographic legitimacy

What began as an article about guilt—about feeling inadequate as both mother and ethnographer—is ultimately an invitation to rethink what counts as “good ethnography.”

Taken together, the transformations in time, space, and relationality invite a broader reflection on what ethnography values and whom it privileges. While this study focuses on motherhood, its implications extend to other positionalities marginalized by ethnography's able-bodied, carefree ideal—those navigating disability, chronic illness, or care for older adults. These experiences differ in many ways but converge in revealing the need to pluralize what counts as valuable ethnography. This is an epistemological imperative: diverse embodied realities produce distinct insights, and ethnography impoverishes itself by privileging a narrow range of practitioners and practices.

This reimagining aligns with longstanding feminist calls to view all knowledge as situated, foregrounding embodiment and relationality as sources of epistemic strength rather than bias. Yet one question remains unresolved: are there research projects that genuinely require conditions incompatible with certain life circumstances? I have argued for pluralizing ethnographic practice, but does this pluralization have limits? And who decides where those limits lie? The question should not be whether constrained research is “good enough,” but whether unconstrained immersion produces insights so valuable that they justify systematically excluding many would-be ethnographers. Reframed this way, the answer seems far less obvious.

My capacity to conduct this research—and to write this article—also reflects considerable privilege: a supportive partner, retired in-laws willing to travel, family in Algeria, and dual nationality granting mobility. If, even with such advantages, the ethnographic ideal proved difficult to sustain, this underscores how deeply academic systems marginalize those without similar resources. This study remains circumscribed by a particular configuration—a heterosexual couple with one young child, middle-class resources, and transnational family support. Different family structures, children's ages, or socio-economic contexts would produce other ethnographic conditions. Recognizing these limits reinforces the broader argument: personal conditions are not peripheral but central to how ethnography is conceived and enacted.