Pol ethno, class 10

Ethnography of political T-shirts

Pol T-shirts

• Function as ethnographic objects

• Circulate across left-wing and right-wing movements

• Are widely accessible and central to digital activist economies

• Can convey simplified, misleading, or even incorrect political narratives

• Operate at the intersection of activism, consumption, branding, and identity

• merchandise attempts to detach stigma from certain identities while reinforcing others

Follow-the-thing methofology

Cook et al,

• Objects have social lives (Appadurai, 1988)

• To understand meaning, researchers must follow objects across their entire trajectory

• Meaning emerges through the interplay between people, things, places, and practices

• Rejects bounded, single-site ethnography

• Encourages ethnographic travel across space and time

• Focuses on non-linear commodity chains

Following the T-shirt

• Design and production

• Distribution (online and offline)

• Consumption and everyday use

• Disposal or reuse

•  different T-shirts require different research strategies, depending on ideology, circulation, and context.

Fieldwork

The ethnographic project was intentionally fragmented and multi-sited, reflecting the object’s mobility.

• Object interviews and object diaries

• Written contributions

• Screenshots tracking T-shirts in digital spaces

• Studying objects is a powerful way to study politics

• Ethnography offers many methodological choices

• For exams: students must be able to design a research project from a research question

Ethical challenges and access

Researching politically extreme groups raised several issues:

• Lack of existing networks

• Deep mistrust toward researchers

• The framing of the far-right as “distant” or “other”

• Privacy, consent, and safety concerns

Positionallity

Open vs Covert

Impossibility of full political neutrality

Difficulty communicating across deep political divides

Empathy, complicity an emotional ethics

Ethnographic encounters often blurred lines between:

• Empathy and political sympathy

• Understanding participants and appearing to support their ideology

Body and presence in the field

• Being young and female reduced perceptions of threat

• Bodily presence itself carried ethical weight

• Gender politics influenced interactions and safety

Possible methdological solutions

-              Fragmented and multi-sited approach

-              Flexibility

-              Solving tensions of political relationality

-              Helping build trust

-              Debunking common assumptions

-              Rethinking ‘depth’ in the field