The Outsider within: Implications for Studying Race and Difference in Europe

In this paper, based on ethnographic research with the middle-class segment of the North African second-generation in the Parisian metropolitan area, I discuss difficulties in studying race and difference in a society that does not recognize racial and ethnic categories as legitimate. Moreover, I discuss potential methodological difficulties as an outsider to such a context, and the strategies used to remedy such difficulties (including snowball sampling). I then address how these difficulties were findings if and of themselves, revealing in different ways how race and ethnicity operate as a marker of difference in French society. I connect these findings to other researchers’ examinations of migration in Europe from an outsider perspective.