“Situated fieldwork at a distance”: the negotiation of ethics and knowledge production under Gaza’s siege

Institutional ethics reviews frequently label vital research sites such as “war zones” as “high risk,” reproducing Western frameworks that restrict ethically engaged scholarship in non-Western contexts. This perpetuates power dynamics, limiting who can research, where, and how, particularly marginalised communities such as Muslim women in Gaza. Field-based sociological and anthropological studies in Gaza remain scarce because the city’s prolonged siege and recurrent Israeli military assaults severely restrict access, making in-depth, on-the-ground research nearly impossible.¹ Drawing on my remote and digitally mediated fieldwork with Muslim women in Gaza (May 2019–July 2020), this paper develops the concept of “situated fieldwork at a distance”. This approach combines the researcher’s contextual and experiential knowledge, cultural familiarity, and established social networks with digital ethnographic methods, including online interviews, a survey, and digital content analysis. By navigating the overbearing institutional, political, and global constraints that often securitise the “native” researcher, this strategy generates rich, ethically grounded data through a deliberate politics of presence. Prioritising dialogical engagement, sustained reflexivity, and meticulous translation, the framework ensures that participants’ voices emerge with analytical depth and authenticity. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how situated fieldwork at a distance reconceptualises geopolitical limitations as methodological opportunities, asserting the researcher’s epistemic advantage to contribute to feminist and postcolonial debates on ethics, risk, and the politics of knowledge in contexts routinely marginalised as inherently “risky”.