Role Conflicts and Aftermaths: Introduction

The article demonstrates how relationships between the respondents and the researcher were developed while conducting an ethnographic research in a sub-district in the northern part of Bangladesh, where people were protesting the establishment of an open cut coal mining in their vicinity. During the field work it was experienced that the position of the researcher which was not fixed but multiple and shifting had greatly contributed in the relationship building. The field experience played an important role not only to gain ethnographic materials but also to understand motivations and perceptions of human security of the protesters of the social movement. However, fear of mass displacement among locals, an important motivation of the protesters to join the social movement, had also thrown the researcher in the dilemma of balancing engagement and distance with the research community. The field experience reinforces that each anthropologist should be viewed in terms of shifting identifications amid a field of interpenetrating communities and power relations (Narayan 1997:23). The experience also converses with the engagement of anthropologists Svensson, 2006) in public debate and advocacy.

Geopolitics, 2020

This special issue addresses the urgent need for reflexive introspection about conducting research in violent contexts. To do so, it explores two interrelated dimensions of the places where researchers conduct fieldwork: 1) temporality; and 2) power. In the current political moment, fully engaging with these dimensions of field sites has become an ethical and security imperative, as well as a methodological imperative. Once we put these two dimensions at the centre of analysis, the need to reconceptualize fieldwork beyond the binaries of here/there and insider/outsider also becomes apparent. Thus, this special issue approaches fieldwork, not only as a means to a research end, but instead, as an opportunity for social action in itself. From a variety of methodological and epistemological positions, the contributors to this issue build on recent feminist work that explores fieldwork's geopolitical dimensions. Collectively, these interdisciplinary essays argue in favour of reimagining fieldwork as an imaginative and transformative act.

Symbolic Interaction, 1994

Qualitative sociologists typically privilege fieldwork over interviews. What happens to fieldworkers who now ask questions but no longer hang out? What about those who rely exclusively on intensive interviewing while participant observation remains the standard? The authors examine the negative consequences of privileging fieldwork for identity and practice, the unique contributions of in‐depth interviewing, and the differences in the tales that fieldworkers and interviewers tell. An inclusive identity anchored to the analytical assumptions fieldworkers and interviewers share would increase qualitative researchers' confidence and lead them to do better work.

There are critical disjunctures between aspects of everyday behaviour in the field and the University's institutional frameworks that aim to guide/enforce good ethical practice, as the conduct of fieldwork is always contextual, relational, embodied, and politicized. This paper argues that it is important to pay greater attention to issues of reflexivity, positionality and power relations in the field in order to undertake ethical and participatory research. Drawing from international fieldwork experience, the paper posits that such concerns are even more important in the context of multiple axes of difference, inequalities, and geopolitics, where the ethics and politics involved in research across boundaries and scales need to be heeded and negotiated in order to achieve more ethical research practices.

2021

The article recapitulates field research experiences of a native researcher in Eastern DRC. In many cases, a native is considered an insider. However, the field research took place in an ethnically polarized context where an insider researcher can be mischaracterized and amalgamated to her own ethnic community. Besides polarization, the fieldwork took place in a volatile setting to the extent that it increases security concerns for a researcher who belongs to a “contested community”; meaning, researcher’s position is likely associated with his ethnic community. Based on the field experience, the article shares insights of dealing with this complexity, volatility, and uncertainties. While the article does not claim that insights can be generalized across different contexts, it specifically proposes some attitudes to take when a researcher faces a dilemma of touching the ground realities while he might individually be amalgamated within socio-cultural differences. The article recalls ...

Ethnography, 2018

For many, reflexivity is a core tenet in qualitative research. Often, scholars focus on how one or two of their socio-demographic traits compare to their participants and how it may influence field dynamics. Research that incorporates an intersectionality perspective, which brings attention to how people’s multiple identities are entwined, also has a long history. Yet, researchers tend to pay less attention to how we strategically draw on our multiple social positions in the course of field work. Drawing on data I have collected over the past several years and extending recent sociological work that goes beyond a reflexive accounting of one or two of researchers’ demographic characteristics, I argue that each researcher has their own ethnographic toolkit from which they strategically draw. It consists of researchers’ visible (e.g. race/ethnicity) and invisible tools (e.g. social capital) and ties qualitative methodologies to research on how culture is strategically and inconsistentl...

This article derives from my own fieldwork experience as a female anthropologist working in the field of gender and male sexual dissidence. Taking my early fieldwork in the 1990s as a departure point, and drawing on my recent fieldwork with Spanish Lesbian, Gay, Transsexual and Bisexual activists, I reflect on the researcher’s position, both in the field and in the construction of the field, through a discussion on ethnographic authority and management of the roles of insider/outsider. In adopting a critical perspective, I propose that the position of the researcher and of other actors in these social situations be continually and thoroughly negotiated, thus revealing the flexiblilty of the frontiers of/in research. This negotiation of positions is related to the complex process by which anthropological ‘difference’ is constructed, and to the dynamic configurations of ethnographic ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ in fieldwork. Positions, alterations, intersections and negotiations are seen to be permeated by the rational and the emotional construction of ‘otherness’.

The Craft of Qualitative Research: A Handbook, 2018

The pleasures, challenges, and discomforts of qualitative research are found in the doing, and in the practical, everyday life experiences of the observer and the observed-of researcher and participants. This chapter offers some observations about practical problems of disquiet, mistrust, and conflict that can arise in field settings in the context of the relationships that develop over time between the researcher and those in the field. At the risk of asserting the obvious, to effectively undertake field-based observation the researcher needs to find a social location from which to observe. Quite apart from how researcher access and initial entry into the field is facilitated (e.g. prior relationships, via gate-keepers, personal experiences), every social location that a researcher occupies offers up a mixture of insight and blindness (Rosaldo 1993). It cannot be otherwise, for the social locations that we hold allow us to see some aspects of the social world more clearly than others. The magician sees the performance differently than the audience (Prus and Sharper 1991), the chef offers different perspectives than the front-of-house staff (Fine 2008), and serious amateur sports enthusiasts experience their activities distinctly from professional athletes (Stebbins 1992). However, all of these roles allow for an exceptionally useful observational vantage point that allows for the ethnographic gaze-for the ability to tell a story that would not otherwise be told. In considering the observational location in the field and the research enterprise more generally, ethnographers have long attended to: 1) the importance of the identity of the researcher in the field, 2) the need to learn from those in the field, and 3) the ethical requirement to limit harm (e.g. Shaffir and Stebbins 1991). However, considerably less attention has been placed on field relationships and the generic social processes that accompany potential conflicts therein. In his recent book, Athens (2015) argues for the importance of attending to the processes of domination and subjugation in everyday life. These are distinct yet related social processes. Domination is played out in the roles we play in our interactions with one another and the corresponding subordination and superordination that go with them. It is one of the ways in which the subjugation of human actors occurs. One of the truly fascinating things about domination is that it is rarely accomplished in the most explicit and direct ways. Rather, domination activities occur as an ongoing, mundane, regularized feature of everyday life. Consider the student/teacher relationship in university and college settings. Even in the most collegial and open of classrooms, the faculty member engages in domination activities through such everyday work as creating syllabi, determining tasks at hand, grading, and the accompanying determination of the subcultural value of students' efforts and work. This pragmatic reality takes nothing away from the emergent, negotiated, ad-hoced qualities of everyday life, but it does remind us of an important aspect of everyday life-that dominance and domination practices may be in play whether or not overt conflict is present. This is an important consideration as one undertakes the practical work of doing field-based qualitative research.

Fieldwork in Religion, Vol. 8, no. 1 (2013): 27-49

This article focuses on the various ways in which research relationships evolve and are negotiated by paying particular attention to the embodied nature of ethnographic research. By drawing on my own research experience of interviewing South African Muslim women about sexual dynamics, I critically engage debates concerning power dynamics in research relationships as well as researcher positionality. I argue that researchers should pay increasing attention to the multiple ways in which doing research always is an embodied practice. I present three case studies that highlight the complex ways in which research encounters speak to notions of intimacy, vulnerability and affect. In this way I argue that research encounters forge primary human relationalities that are marked by moments of convergence, conflict and despondency.