This Forum discusses the ‘right to opacity’ in an age of visual excess, tracking and exposure. Based on my ethnographic wanderings in shadow spaces across eastern Estonia, I argue for the epistemological potential of such environments, in terms of questioning the hegemonic and alternative regimes of visibility we engage with.

But what kind of political and epistemological consequences can we take from such an approach? Indeed, the absence of the conditions for visually coded observations and the opacity of our experience in the field demanded the continuation of ethnography by other means, even if this might entail lacking the standardization typically attributed to methods.

The essay is followed by reactions from Patrick Laviolette, Hermione Spriggs, Tamta Khalvashi and Mariana Tello Weiss.