‘We are like mice here, in a lab!’ Visibility as a reflexive tool for qualitative research

The article develops visibility as a tool for qualitative research. Visibility carries positionality further: it allows to analyse the researcher's effects not only on the knowledge produced, but also on research participants’ standing and power positions. This is especially relevant in research with marginalized people. Building on visibility concepts advanced in social and political theory, I develop enabling and constraining types of (in)visibility and trace them in my own ethnographic fieldwork conducted with refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin and Vienna in 2019 and 2020. The analysis reveals that even when researchers aim to create enabling types of (in)visibility, their practices of seeing can always also have unintended, more constraining consequences. Visibility allows for and invites honest reflection on this ambiguity.