Researching With Friends: A Black Feminist Ethics of Friendship as Method

This paper theorizes friendship as method through a Black feminist ethics of care, drawing on doctoral research in which six Black women, all existing friends of the researcher, participated in an interpretive phenomenological analysis study of empowerment through semi-structured interviews and follow-up co-analysis meetings. Against the objection that intimate-other research introduces bias and compromises validity, I argue that friendship does not relax the demands of rigor but intensifies them, requiring more reflexivity, emotional labor, and attentiveness to power than conventional methods of inquiry ask. Drawing on feminist theories of embodiment and affect, I introduce embodied attentiveness, a practice of informed noticing in which the friendship's relational grammar becomes an epistemic resource, and iterative consent, the ongoing, specific renegotiation of what counts as data when researcher and participant share a history that precedes and outlasts the research. The paper examines the distinctive stakes of anonymity, resistance, and co-analysis when participants are friends and treats the entanglement of researcher and friend as an enduring condition to be made visible rather than resolved. It closes with orientations for researchers undertaking intimate-other research.