Qualitative methodology has developed sophisticated tools for examining how researcher identity and reflexivity shape knowledge production, yet has paid far less attention to a prior question: how structural inequality determines which research sites become accessible—and therefore knowable—in the first place. This article examines how structural inequalities within South Africa’s quintile-based school funding model shape research access, fieldwork encounters, and the conditions under which qualitative knowledge is produced. Drawing on fieldwork conducted as part of my doctoral study on representations of Pan-Africanism in South African history classrooms, the article introduces the concept of unequal research geographies: stratified research landscapes in which socio-economic inequality structures the accessibility and legibility of research sites. The analysis draws on 37 semi-structured interviews with history teachers across three provinces, supplemented by systematically documented access attempts, field notes, and non-response records, all treated as methodological data. The findings show that under-resourced schools (Quintiles 1–3) face administrative fragility, infrastructural instability, and unpredictable work rhythms that constrain sustained research engagement, while well-resourced schools (Quintiles 4–5) remain disproportionately accessible, producing a methodological distortion embedded in the structure of the field itself. The article further develops the concept of hybrid positionality, showing how my ambiguous location was co-constructed through the micro-dynamics of interview encounters, shaping trust, disclosure, and interpretive ambiguity. It also demonstrates that in politically sensitive research contexts, ethical reflexivityfunctions as a central methodological practice through which risk, vulnerability, and the boundaries of disclosure are negotiated. By tracing how access, positionality, and ethics operate as interconnected dimensions of fieldwork in unequal contexts, the article argues that structural inequality does not merely form the background to qualitative inquiry but actively configures its epistemic conditions.