Summary: Ethnography and Participant Observation

2020

There are several frameworks and approaches, addressing how to conduct ethnographic and qualitative field work in various settings. However, going by the book might not be an option when conducting research in politically charged, unstable or simply non-western regions. Politics, social pressure and even someone's personal safety might be necessary to consider. Another important area to consider are research ethics. Privacy policies might do their work with regard to existing laws which differ from each country and should ensure no harm for all involved parties, but how can this be guaranteed and does it also cover all aspects of ethics? Including stakeholders as a basis for user-centered work and design is common. But what does participation mean in such contexts? The questions are: What is important to consider when conducting ethnographic field work in such settings? How can we foster different degrees of genuine participation? How can we ensure, that the work we do is ethically correct without endangering the research outcome? In this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners to rethink existing methods and approaches and start working on guidelines, that better serves the needs of such specific and to some extent critical circumstances.

transcript, 2024

coauthored by Pascale Schild, Usman Mahar and Tim Burger As ethnographic fieldwork blurs the boundaries between ›private‹ and ›professional‹ life, ethnographers always appear to be on duty, looking out for valuable encounters and waiting for the next moment of disclosure. Yet what lies in the gaps and pauses of fieldwork? The introduction to this edited volume explores methodological and ethical dimensions of multi-sided ethnographic research. Personal relationships, passions and commitments drive ethnographers in and beyond research, shaping the knowledge they create together with others.

Evidence Based Nursing, 2017

Table 1 Approaches to participant observation 7 Method Approach Complete observer Covert approach, the researcher is detached and invisible to the participants. Observer-as-participant Overt approach, researcher role is to undertake research with brief exposure to collect observation data, often used for exploration in follow-up interviews. Participant-as-observer Overt approach, the researcher aims to integrate into the setting and their role within the context of the study is acknowledged. Complete participant Covert approach, the researcher is fully immersed and integrated into the setting, referred to as going native, without disclosing themselves as a researcher.

Sociological Research Online, 2017

The environments in which ethnography is currently being played out are in many ways shifting as part of a world where academic research is increasingly implicated in applied and public scholarship and practice. This calls not simply for new ways of applying ethnographic insights to societal, industry, and policy problems but, we argue, for a reconfiguration of how we understand the possibilities, potentials, and impacts of ethnographic practice when situated as part of a world in progress. It invites us to revise how we understand ethnographic processes, practices, and ethics as they are played out with and through different sets of stakeholders, beyond researchers, participants, and the academic communities of critics (Strathern, 2006) who were their traditional audiences. This new context, we argue, takes us beyond past iterations of applied ethnography because there is a more widespread and institutionally driven aim to seek to do ethnographic work that has impact and may intervene in the world. This new institutionally endorsed and indeed encouraged way of practicing as an ethnographer and scholar brings new configurations and considerations to our profession. It makes partnering with industry or with creative practitioners unsurprising, yet at the same time potentially challenging. This Special Section represents our interest in exploring how this new and emerging context might be conceptualized and how it might be played out through responsible and ethical ways of conducting ethnographic research and forms of intervention in contemporary worlds. Ethnography has never been just one practice, approach, or orientation to the world. It is claimed by different disciplines, by different inflections, and through the use of different technologies. It is contested and critically debated. For example, traditional anthropologists, who make a claim on long-term field work being at the core of their work, are critical of the ways that designers or consumer researchers might use shortterm ethnographic techniques to understand user or consumer experiences. However, it can be argued that in fact anthropology and ethnography are not necessarily the same practice (Ingold, 2008) and that they should not be considered inseparable. Indeed, while it might be argued that what was then called the ethnographic method emerged from the experiences of anthropologists involved in long-term field work among groups of people previously unknown to them, ethnography has also been long since established as a sociological research method (see O'Reilly, 2005). Ethnographic practice has often been seen to be at the core of more than one disciplinary-focused research practice and that anthropology, ethnology, and some branches of sociology and design research have adopted it as such. In each of these contexts, different relationships between theory,

2007

Ethical dilemmas and self-reflexivity in ethnographic fieldwork, 2022

Whilst ethnography has been increasingly adopted by translation researchers in examining various sociological aspects of translation (e.g. Marinetti and Rose 2013; Olohan and Davitti 2015; Anonymous 2020), the ethical dilemmas that an ethnographer encounters are often overlooked in translation studies literature. Drawing on the fieldnote data, this presentation sets out to engage in a self-reflexive analysis of the following issues: What ethical dilemmas did I grapple with during the fieldwork? How did the doubts and anxieties change my behaviour in the field and my perceptions of research participants? How can an ethnographer cope with these challenges? I first briefly introduce the study of online collaborative translations in China for which I undertook fieldwork in order to collect first-hand data. Then I move on to discuss an ethnographic methodology underpinned by hermeneutics and its core method of participant observation. My fieldwork can be broadly divided into three stages, i.e. descriptive observation and non-participation; focused observation and moderate participation; and selective observation and active participation (Anonymous 2019). The ethical challenges that I encountered at each stage were influenced by different factors as my familiarity with the research participants and the depth of the involvement in the field evolved. In the initial stage, I struggled between undertaking covert or overt research (Lugosi 2008: 133), asking myself if I should be a “candid ethnographer” (Fine 1993: 282). In the second stage when I started to interact with the community members, I became a ‘self-censored ethnographer’, mostly yielding to others, including the moments when I felt uncomfortable with the gender-biased remarks made by one of the participants. In the third stage, which was also the stage when I felt ‘native’ in the community, I questioned myself if I was a “fair ethnographer” (ibid.: 285) and whether I kept a balance between the multiple roles that I played simultaneously. The self-reflections and analyses in hindsight reveal that the ethical dilemmas that one may encounter in the field can be heterogeneous, highly contextual and personal, subjecting to particular interactive instances. As an ethnographer, one may continue to struggle with unpredictable ethical challenges with which may be best dealt with constant, critical and conscious self-reflexivity.

Networking Knowledge Journal of the Meccsa Postgraduate Network, 2007

Reinventing and Reinvesting in the Local for Our Common Good, 2020

Sweden. Her upcoming dissertation investigates entwinements of knowledge production and cultural expressions in contemporary evidence based biomedicine.

Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory , 2017

This essay focuses on the core of ethnographic research—participant observation—to argue that it is a potentially revolutionary praxis because it forces us to question our theoretical presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the margins, or was silenced. It is argued that participant observation is not merely a method of anthropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action; it is praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realized in action. Four core aspects of participation observation are discussed as long duration (long-term engagement), revealing social relations of a group of people (understanding a group of people and their social processes), holism (studying all aspects of social life, marking its fundamental democracy), and the dialectical relationship between intimacy and estrangement (befriending strangers). Though the risks and limits of participant observation are outlined, as are the tensions between activism and anthropology, it is argued that engaging in participant observation is a profoundly political act, one that can enable us to challenge hegemonic conceptions of the world, challenge authority, and better act in the world. " That's enough about ethnography! " says Tim Ingold (2014). It was a provocation to those who value ethnography, but it seems to me that the substance of the debates that have ensued, in the Cultural Anthropology Forum and in this volume of Hau, shows more agreement than disagreement with what is special about the process of our fieldwork and writing. In this essay I seek to clarify why ethnographic research carried out by anthropologists is important beyond the confines of our own discipline, why how we do it has the potential to contribute new knowledge