Based on the edited volumes by Amit (2003) ‘Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World’ as well as Coleman and Collins (2006) ‘Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology’, I reflect on the two ‘fields’ I have done research in so far. For my PhD, I conducted one year of anthropological fieldwork on women and politics in Guinea. For my current postdoctoral projects at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern, I am doing an institutional ethnography on intersectionality in a Swiss acute hospital. In this presentation, I think about the similarities and differences between these two, at first sight very distinct ‘fields’. Hereby, I compare the people I researched, the methodological approach I used, my positionality in the ‘field’, and finally the implied ethical issues in both sites. More generally, I self-critically ask what kind of implicit and explicit assumptions I had and how they influenced my fieldwork. How did being (un)familiar with the research contexts influence my anthropological research?

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