Abstract Our skin functions as ‘the unstable border between the body and its others’ (Ahmed, 1998: 27), serving as a crucial site through which social relations are constructed, including in ways that cause various kinds of discomfort. During fieldwork for two distinct research projects in and around my hometown, the South Indian city of Chennai, I was often forced to confront my ‘sanctioned ignorance’ (John 1996) of the many aspects of my own privilege, including the colour of my skin, that operated in that socio-spatial setting. However. upon returning to the UK, where I was pursuing a research degree, I found myself, as a South Asian woman, discursively changing colour; having abruptly become ‘Brown’, I was consequently faced with a qualitatively different form of discomfort. In this reflexive article, I grapple with my personal sense of dissonance while traversing these divergent spaces, where the multiplex renderings of my supposedly immutable skin colour marked me variously as ‘upper-’/Other. Building on existing scholarship within cultural and feminist geography, I utilise my own embodied experience to make a methodological argument about paying attention to the context-specific and deeply relational articulations of skin colour in race-related research and activism.

中文翻译：

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面对色彩斑斓的自我：跨多个地理区域的肤色自动人种学分析

摘要 我们的皮肤是“身体与其他人之间不稳定的边界”（艾哈迈德，1998 年：27），是构建社会关系的关键场所，包括导致各种不适的方式。在我的家乡南印度城市钦奈及其周边的两个不同研究项目的实地考察期间，我经常被迫面对我对自己特权的许多方面的“认可的无知”（John 1996），包括我的肤色，在那个社会空间环境中运作。然而。回到我攻读研究学位的英国后，我发现自己作为一名南亚女性，在话语上改变了肤色；突然变成了“棕色”，因此我面临着一种性质不同的不适。在这篇反思性文章中，在穿越这些不同的空间时，我努力克服我个人的不和谐感，在这些空间中，我所谓的不可变肤色的多重渲染以不同的方式将我标记为“上-”/其他。在文化和女权主义地理学现有学术研究的基础上，我利用自己的具体经验就在种族相关的研究和激进主义中关注肤色的特定背景和深层关联表达进行了方法论论证。