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"Ethnography Fieldwork Methodology."
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Fieldwork in Political Theory: Five Arguments for an Ethnographic Sensibility
This article makes a positive case for an ethnographic sensibility in political theory. Drawing on published ethnographies and original fieldwork, it argues that an ethnographic sensibility can contribute to normative reflection in five distinct ways. It can help uncover the nature of situated normative demands (epistemic argument); diagnose obstacles encountered when responding to these demands (diagnostic argument); evaluate practices and institutions against a given set of values (evaluative argument); probe, question and refine our understanding of values (valuational argument); and uncover underlying social ontologies (ontological argument). The contribution of ethnography to normative theory is distinguished from that of other forms of empirical research, and the dangers of perspectival absorption, bias and particularism are addressed.
Journal Article
Time and the field
Radically rethinks the notion of the 'field' in terms of time rather than space. By considering the field in terms of time, the relationship between field and fieldsite is destabilized and emerges as a dynamic and ever-shifting constellation. Updates the discussion of contemporary requirements to ethnographic research practice.
eBook
Ethnographic Dilemmas and Reflexive Thoughts of a Contemplative Jewish Anthropologist
During ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists of religion grapple with various dilemmas regarding their participation in the rituals they study. How do they make real-time decisions between full participation and observational distance? Do they manage to participate harmoniously in religious activities even during moments of doubt or questioning of their own faith? Based on my three-year fieldwork in Israeli Reform Jewish congregations, which included observations and in-depth interviews, I demonstrate how my reflexive experience which exposes my internal Jewish dialogue, shaped my patterns of participation and motivation in engaging with various rituals. This autoethnographic description illustrates that my deliberate abstention or avoidance from participation, stemming from differences in religious habitus and my anthropological research approach, enabled congregants to engage in communal activities and thereby contributed to broadening my understanding of different communal scenarios. I discovered, thus, that the vector that determines the nature of participation is a product of the researched practice – in this case, religious performances/practices. Therefore, I suggest that this methodological decision develops ethnographic honesty and loyalty on both sides, the ethnographer’s as well as the informants’.
Journal Article
A Methodology for the Marginalised: Surviving Oppression and Traumatic Fieldwork in the Neoliberal Academy
This article proposes that survival may be considered a research method for social researchers, especially if they are undertaking fieldwork within marginalised communities of which they are a part. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of conducting research while trans, it shows how marginalised researchers may encounter both challenges common within the neoliberal university, and troubles specific to the researcher’s social identity, touching on experiences of casualisation, distressing fieldwork, trauma, and suicide. The article concludes that marginalised researchers should not be held individually responsible for their own survival; rather, they require the active support of research communities and institutional frameworks.
Journal Article
The Space Between: On Being an Insider-Outsider in Qualitative Research
Should qualitative researchers be members of the population they are studying, or should they not? Although this issue has been explored within the context of qualitative research, it has generally been reserved for discussions of observation, field research, and ethnography. The authors expand that discussion and explore membership roles by illustrating the insider status of one author and the outsider status of the other when conducting research with specific parent groups. The strengths and challenges of conducting qualitative research from each membership status are examined. Rather than consider this issue from a dichotomous perspective, the authors explore the notion of the space between that allows researchers to occupy the position of both insider and outsider rather than insider or outsider.
Journal Article
We Are All Netnographers Now? Fieldwork in an Age of Participatory Warfare
This article explores the ethical and practical challenges of conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork in conflict zones in an era of widespread smartphone and social media use. It argues that digital technology not only transforms methodological approaches but also reshapes the nature of war itself. Drawing on insights from fieldwork in various conflict zones, including Somalia, Ukraine, and South Sudan, it asks: How does rapidly acquired digital connectivity change the way we conceptualize, approach, and conduct fieldwork in conflict zones? When smartphones are both research tools and potential weapons of war (Ford and Hoskins 2022), how can we use them ethically? Reflecting on three online/offline complexities of the author’s fieldwork experiences in Somalia/Somaliland in 2021, the article suggests that participative warfare and digital research methodologies are intertwined, driven by the proliferation of connected devices. Practical, ethical, and security concerns arise from this intersection. First, researchers may become direct participants in war, whether physically present or not. Second, there is limited awareness of the security risks posed by technology, especially given the rise of mis- and disinformation in conflict settings. Finally, since the traditional notion of the “field” has collapsed, making us potentially reachable anywhere and at any time, we need to reconsider how we establish temporal boundaries to ensure safe and sustainable research practices. The article concludes that researchers must navigate a blended field of offline and online phenomena, underscoring the need to safeguard in-person fieldwork while allowing sufficient time to engage with the digital realm.
Journal Article
Border security as practice
The ambition of this special issue is to contribute to contemporary scholarly analyses of border security by bringing more focus onto a specific field of inquiry: the practices of the plurality of power-brokers involved in the securing of borders. Border security is addressed from the angle of the everyday practices of those who are appointed to carry it out; considering border security as practice is essential for shedding light on contemporary problematizations of security. Underscoring the methodological specificity of fieldwork research, we call for a better grounding of scholarship within the specific agencies intervening in bordering spaces in order to provide detailed analyses of the contextualized practices of security actors.
Journal Article
Seamful Spaces: Heterogeneous Infrastructures in Interaction
Understanding contemporary environments in the laboratory and elsewhere requires grappling conceptually with multiple, coexisting, nonconforming infrastructures which actors engage at the same time. In this article, I develop the analytical vocabulary of \"seams\" for studying heterogeneous, multiinfrastructural environments. Drawing upon six years of ethnographic fieldwork with two distributed science teams, as well as studies in Ubiquitous Computing, I examine overlaps among infrastructures and how actors work creatively with and across their seams. Rather than suggesting that actors are hemmed in or incapacitated by multiple infrastructural commitments, inclusions, and exclusions, I show instead how they work artfully to align them in ways concordant with membership and how this produces both consequences for their work and opportunities for analysis.
Journal Article
FIELDWORK, BIOGRAPHY AND EMOTION: Doing Criminological Autoethnography
This article presents an introductory yet critical overview of autoethnographic research in criminological contexts. Drawing on experiences of participant observation with heroin and crack cocaine users and dealers, as a former user and dealer of these drugs myself the article demonstrates how the domains of fieldwork, biography and the emotions intersect to render clear a progressive account of heroin addiction. However, this is offset against some negative occurrences directly reducible to doing ethnography where biographical congruence exists between the researcher and the researched. Ultimately, it is argued here that an increased consideration of the self—biographically and emotionally—both permits and facilitates the presentation of analytic yet stylized data in the form of what is termed below, 'lyrical criminology'.
Journal Article