Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Sociologists have studied the causes and consequences of collectively blaming and negatively portraying Muslims, but less attention has been paid to how collective blaming and negative descriptions affect researchers’ categorisations of such vilified groups. Drawing on 22 months of fieldwork with Muslim men in Norway, I elucidate how racialisation can influence interactions in field research when studying a controversial subject with a racialised group. I identify three patterns in which racialisation affects field interactions: accepting a racialising view, defending the racialised group and developing a shared story between a researcher and participants. I argue that, in this case, desires to present positive views of Islam and Muslims, attempts to distance oneself from religious extremism and attempts to categorise radicalised Muslims as neither Norwegians nor Muslims illustrate racialisation’s influence. My findings suggest that racialised understandings enter field interactions but remain opaque unless the researcher reflects upon their own and participants’ positionality and membership in a racialised group. I conclude that shared experiences of racialisation between a researcher and the participants deepen the researcher’s understanding while limiting enquiry.

Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2023, Page 22-42
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Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
Responses to chemsex have largely fluctuated between punishment, moral censure and indifference and have been weaponised to justify anti-drug policies and to protect established norms of gender and sexuality. As drug prohibition and heteronormativity interlock, men who engage in chemsex are finding themselves at an intersection of multiple systems of oppression that produce feelings of exclusion and rejection both from society in general and within growing numbers of LGBTQ+ spaces. This article explores specific notions of homonormativity performed by gay men as a way to advance their own recognition and respectability among society, resulting in the isolation of those who engage in chemsex who are ostracised simply for the way in which they have decided to express their sexualities. Such homonormative articulation of an open rejection of chemsex in exchange for social recognition and legal protection appears to have become an easy bargaining chip to show how “good gays” have moved away from historical markers of stigma, including drugs and HIV, making chemsex the most recent currency to publicly prove their disavowal of those who remain outside of the kinship norms of marriage and ‘normal sex’.