In this paper, I reflect on the ethical dilemmas of engaged ethnography with urban subalterns. Subalternity is a condition of exclusion and silence suffered by populations occupying a space of subordination and difference, outside of those occupied by rights-bearing citizens and possessors of the grammars of knowledge. When subalterns struggle to protect their homes and livelihood in the midst of fragmented socialities and competing claims among people’s organizations, ethical choices of an engaged ethnographer become evidently political. This necessarily privileges a particular representation of space, being, and temporality, that in turn affects access to different knowledges and spaces. Within this intricate urban subaltern politics, I relied for guidance less on academic ethical standards, and more on constant reflexivity of my personal political convictions and on democratic dialogues with subaltern communities. When the researcher struggles to become a political partner of subaltern-historians, ethnography diverges from academic and funding frames and transforms lives toward subaltern-scholar solidarities and liberative knowledge mobilization.
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