Producing Intimate Knowledge: re-turns to feminist epistemologies in times of uncertainties

In this paper I examine experiences of friendship and activism as ethnographic methods in times of political uncertainty. Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork experience in and on (transnational) Turkey I analyze different research moments and contexts and explore the meaning of (personal and political) closeness and trust as foundations for producing ethnographic knowledge under distressing conditions. The ethnographic examples I work with span extended research experiences with 1) feminism and gender relations in the late 1980s Turkish village societies, 2) anti-racism in the early 2000s Austrian right-wing populism and 3) my engagement with mobility justice and border politics after the migration crisis 2015 in the Turkish Aegean. All my research experiences are shaped by my own belief in political struggles and they all generated friendships which sparked shared knowledge production. It is these intimate personal and political relationships, I argue, that allow to produce meaningful and
generalizable intimate knowledge as well as represent a continuous challenge to research ethics and open science.