Entangled Commitments: The Challenges of Ethnographic Immersion in Social Movements as a Critical Perspectives Academic

This paper explores the affective and epistemic tensions that emerge when critical scholars engage in social movements that are organised around care, love and regenerative principles. Situated at the intersection of activist scholarship, critical accounting and feminist affect theory, the paper contributes to debates on activist ethnography by foregrounding the emotional and ethical labour of critique within movement life. Drawing on a reflexive ethnographic account of my embedded involvement in a climate justice movement, framed through Ahmed’s (Citation2004, Citation2012, Citation2021) work on complaint and emotional atmospheres, the paper examines how movements committed to emotional cohesion may struggle to accommodate critique, particularly when that critique disturbs a fragile sense of alignment. While traditions of activist scholarship call for proximity, care and political commitment, this paper complicates the assumption that solidarity and critique are always mutually reinforcing. It argues that, in some spaces, the desire to maintain relationality and harmony can foreclose reflexivity, rendering the critical scholar’s presence untenable. In doing so, the paper asks how scholars can remain present in spaces that may not be able – or willing – to hold the tensions their presence reveals and reframes withdrawal not as methodological failure but as a form of accountable disengagement.