On knowing how it feels

The article by Zempi and Awan brings together two studies that bear upon a longstanding epistemological question about the connection between subjectivity, experience, and knowledge. Both studies emerged out of a similar interpellation that occurred during the process of doing research: a recurrent comment by the research subjects to the researchers, suggesting that the latter ‘don’t know how it feels like’. As the two researchers take up different social positions in relation to the Muslim communities they study, these interpellations were different in kind, yet both led the researchers to decide to ‘step into the shoes’ of their interlocutors, or, more accurately in this case, to don the long garments, face-veils, beards, and caps that their interlocutors wear on a quotidian basis. Thus the researchers took on the visible markers of an Islamic identity in the public sphere with the aim of reaching a better understanding of the Islamophobia that was so central to the narratives of their research subjects. Whether autoethnography is the most adequate term to capture the aims and commitments that speak through this research effort is something I leave to those more knowledgeable about autoethnography and ethnography at large, such as my colleague Annelies Moors. In this brief comment I want to pursue some thoughts about the complex relationship between subjectivity, experience, and knowledge. And I do so from the perspective of standpoint epistemology at large, which I understand as quite a spectrum of different bodies of scholarship that seek to think through the ways in which consciousness and knowledge are always somehow connected to material, historical, and social conditions, and are grounded in lived experiences and the body. I would like to state that I appreciate Zempi and Awan’s article. As the existence of Islamophobia continues to be denied, contested, or minimized, the importance of scholarly work that documents the forms of racism which, for better or for worse, we have come to call Islamophobia is pressing. Documenting what remains unseen, misrecognized, or ignored through established frames is a crucial commitment of critical scholarship, and it does seem to be one of its more forthright commitments. The very act of documenting has, as we know, a great potential Ethnography 2017, Vol. 18(3) 390–392 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1466138117721723 journals.sagepub.com/home/eth