In the Francophone context, the relationship between the researcher’s social position and their qualitative research design remains mainly unexplored. Since the 1990s and the ‘ethnographic turn’ in the social sciences, a number of studies have focused on the influence of class relations in fieldwork situations. However, there are still very few studies that examine the way in which class relations interlock with gender relations and, even more so, with race relations. In line with recent epistemological and methodological critiques of Western social sciences, this special issue focuses on the ‘racial conditions’ of qualitative research, i.e. how race shapes and structures fieldwork practices. Based on reflexive and intersectional contributions using ethnography, the issue looks at the effects of the researcher’s racialization on the construction of relations in the field, and at the strategies implemented on the basis of these relations in order to conduct qualitative research. Ultimately, the issue seeks not only to provide input in terms of mere methodology, but also to make methodology a place for knowledge production on race and social relations.