Luxa’s Prism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Im/mobilities in Pandemic Times

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the ‘experimental collaborations’ that guided the authors in designing and conducting a collaborative ethnography of the social and geographical mobilities of disadvantaged European youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter is based on 30 online video conversations between the two authors: an Italian white male postdoctoral researcher and a Romanian Roma woman who spent most of her youth homeless in Madrid. Together, they examine the practical and conceptual implications of collaborative methodologies involving individuals with diverse socioeconomic and experiential backgrounds. They do so by tracing the multiple origins, arrangements and meanings of their collaboration through a deeply reflexive dialogue that recovers and validates their situated memories, emotions and experiences as legitimate sources of ethnographic knowledge. The chapter particularly emphasizes the potential of digital technologies in reconfiguring the modes of ethnographic collaboration, shedding light on the positive role of uncertainty and failure in reducing power asymmetries within participatory research encounters