This contribution stems from the tensions I encountered while conducting ethnographic research on informal labour in Morocco. Throughout my fieldwork, I was struck by the gap between academic attempts to define and categorise informality, and the lived realities of the people I met—street vendors, food sellers, and precarious workers whose economic lives are marked by constant movement, negotiation, and change. Their practices do not neatly align with scholarly labels; they shift roles, combine activities, and adapt to uncertain conditions in ways that often escape fixed definitions.
These encounters made me question not only how we study informality, but also what our methodological tools do to the phenomena we seek to understand. Academia often asks us to frame our work within stable categories, yet the very nature of informality resists such stability.
This paper reflects on how informality is not only a field of study but also a challenge to our methodological certainties: it pushes us to embrace ambiguity, partiality, and the ephemeral as constitutive elements of ethnographic inquiry. In doing so, it invites a broader reflection on the politics of knowledge production, suggesting that embracing uncertainty may be key to engaging with informality on its own terms.