This panel session is based on chapters from the upcoming anthology ”The politics and ethics of representation: Moments of discomfort” (Routledge, forthcoming). The qualitative research process is often filled with moments of discomfort. These can appear during all stages of the research: when choosing the subject of your research, during fieldwork, in the process of analysis and when presenting research findings to different audiences. We take these moments of discomfort seriously and use them productively as a starting point for reflections on the politics and ethics of the research process. Starting from our experiences in carrying out eight different research projects as PhD-fellows, we analyse moments of discomfort as sites of knowledge production that help us gain important analytical insights into methodological, theoretical, ethical and political issues that are crucial for the fields in which we engage. We argue that moments of discomfort relate to an anxiety of representation. Hence, the main questions that we address during the panel session are: How can we create an ethical representation of those with whom our research is concerned? What can be said or not in certain contexts? What are the tensions between aims of what we wish to represent and how this representation is understood by different audiences in specific contexts? The chapters presented during the panel session correspond to three areas that are crucial for issues of ethics and politics: (1) writing and naming; (2) power and silences; (3) stories and audiences. The session addresses different issues such as the practices of anonymisation, acts of rejection in relation to informed consent, silences in the fieldwork and in relation to representation, and considerations of representing stories from the field for different audiences.