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

## Details

**Authors** Sequeira

**Year** 2026

**Publisher** Ethnography

**Discipline** Anthropology

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381261475040) 
10.1177/14661381261475040

## In authors' words

### Abstract

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.

### What they found (results)

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with children in Helsinki and Santa Marta, the study found that child participants actively negotiate and reassign the researcher's role through everyday encounters, making researcher positionality an interactional outcome rather than a pre-given trait.

## Commentary

### In short

The observer's vantage point is not a fixed attribute but is actively produced through interaction with those being studied — perspective as an emergent, relationally-constructed structure rather than a stable property.

**Patterns it shows** R, P

**Added** 2026-08-14

**How to cite this** Sequeira (2026). The co-constructed ethnographer: Fieldwork with children and the relational production of positionality. Ethnography.