Sistah-to-Sistah fieldwork: a Black feminist methodological approach to ethnography for Black women researchers

For Black women researchers, shared racial and gendered experiences with participants can generate expectations of kinship, emotional care, and mutual accountability that complicate conventional (Eurocentric) researcher–participant ‘boundaries' (Kinitz, 2022). Prior Black feminist research has used ‘sister-to-sister' (Brown, 2012) and ‘sister friend' (Caldera et al., 2020) to capture the intimate relational dynamics of this type of fieldwork. But there is room to unpack how these dynamics unfold as an embodied experience in the field. I expand upon this line of inquiry to advance Sistah-to-Sistah Fieldwork, a Black feminist methodological approach that re-imagines the proverbial boundary separating researcher from participant into a relational space with permeable thresholds that must be negotiated before, throughout, and after the research process. Drawing on my ethnographic research on Black women's global relocation, I identify four relational spaces where tensions materialized and thresholds were negotiated—relational intimacy, professionalism, privacy management, and permission. Attending to the complexities of Black women's Sistah-to-Sistah Fieldwork invites communication scholars to recognize embodiment and relationality as foundational to ethnography in practice.