Nonviolent Communication as Scholar Activism: Autoethnographic Reflections from Fieldwork with Polish Anti-Gender Movement

This paper discusses ethnographic research as activism by examining how methodological choices can actively intervene in polarised social worlds. Drawing on six months of fieldwork with anti-gender networks in Poland, as well as prior training in Nonviolent Communication (NVC), I reflect on the emotional, ethical, and methodological challenges of engaging with politically contentious groups while remaining committed to social justice principles. I argue that NVC functions not simply as an interview technique but as an activist research practice that resists polarisation and challenges the assumption that direct engagement necessarily legitimises discriminatory positions. The ethnography responds to a limitation in existing scholarship on anti-gender movements, which has largely focused on analysing narratives and strategies without empirical engagement with activists themselves (Ayoub and Stoeckl, 2024; Butler, 2024; Dietze and Roth, 2020; Holvikivi et al., 2024). Following Agnieszka Pasieka (2024), I argue that this methodological distance constrains understanding of how anti-genderism becomes meaningful, emotionally compelling, and morally justified in everyday life. By avoiding engagement with activists as interlocutors, scholarship risks reproducing abstraction, moral distance, and the very polarisation it often seeks to critique. Through autoethnographic reflection, I demonstrate how NVC enables ethical engagement by creating conditions for dialogue across deep ideological divides. The article outlines the core principles of NVC and shows how they can be applied in ethnographic research with right-wing groups to shift attention from abstract claims to lived experience, and from slogans to underlying feelings and shared human needs (Marshall, 1999). I argue that NVC-informed ethnography constitutes scholar-activist practice because it disrupts polarising dynamics and models an alternative politics of engagement — one in which dialogue itself becomes a form of resistance and understanding a necessary condition for meaningful social change.