The Shadow Side of Fieldwork draws attention to the typically hidden or unacknowledged aspects of ethnographic fieldwork encounters that nevertheless shape the resulting knowledge and texts. Addressing these invisible, elusive, unspoken or mysterious elements introduces a distinctive rigor and responsibility to ethnographic research. Luminaries in anthropology dare to explore the 'unspeakable' and 'invisible' in the ethnographic encounter Considers personal and professional challenges (ethical, epistemological, and political) faced by researchers who examine the subjectivities inherent in their ethnographic insights Explores the value, and limitations, of addressing the personal in ethnographic research Includes a critical discussion of the anthropologist’s self in the field Introduces imaginative rigor to ethnographic research to heighten confidence in anthropological knowledge

Why should researchers be interested in their feelings and emotions as they carry out research? Emotion is what it is to exist, to be human, and is present in every sphere of our lives. All activities are infused with emotion, even those that are constructed as ‘rational’, because rationality and emotionality are interpenetrated and entwined because all thinking is tinged with feeling, and all feeling is tinged with thinking. This book illuminates the emotional processes of doing social and organizational research, and the implications of this for the outcomes of research. With contributions from leading academics and research practitioners, it addresses the significant issue of the sometimes intense emotional experiences involved in doing research and the implications it has for the theory and practice of social research. By examining the nature of feelings and emotions, it explores how we might understand researchers’ emotions and experiences, and considers the often powerful feelings encountered in a variety of research contexts. Topics discussed include: power relations; psycho-social explanations of researcher emotions; paradoxical relations with research participants and the sometimes disturbing data that is gained; research supervision; the politics of research; gender; publishing, undergoing vivas and presenting at conferences. This book will therefore be a valuable companion to researchers and research students from the start of their career onwards.

This book illustrates the role of researchers’ affects and emotions in understanding and making sense of the phenomena they study during ethnographic fieldwork. Whatever methods ethnographers apply during field research, however close they get to their informants and no matter how involved or detached they feel, fieldwork pushes them to constantly negotiate and reflect their subjectivities and positionalities in relation to the persons, communities, spaces and phenomena they study. The book highlights the idea that ethnographic fieldwork is based on the attempt of communication, mutual understanding, and perspective-taking on behalf of and together with those studied. With regard to the institutionally silenced, yet informally emphasized necessity of ethnographers’ emotional immersion into the local worlds they research (defined as “emic perspective,” “narrating through the eyes of the Other,” “seeing the world from the informants’ point of view,” etc.), this book pursues the disentanglement of affect-related disciplinary conventions by means of transparent, vivid and systematic case studies and their methodological discussion. The book provides nineteen case studies on the relationship between methodology, intersubjectivity, and emotion in qualitative and ethnographic research, and includes six section introductions to the pivotal issues of role conflict, reciprocity, intimacy and care, illness and dying, failing and attuning, and emotion regimes in fieldwork and ethnography. Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography is a must-have resource for post-graduate students and researchers across the disciplines of social and cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, cultural psychology, critical theory, cultural phenomenology, and cultural sociology.

This volume focuses on advances in research methodology in an interdisciplinary field framed by discourses of identity and interculturality. It includes a range of qualitative studies: studies of interaction, narrative studies, conversation analysis, ethnographic studies, postcolonial studies and critical discourse studies, and emphasizes the role of discourse and power in all studies of identity and interculturality. The volume particularly focuses on critical reflexivity in every stage of research, including reflections on theoretical concepts (such as ‘identity’ and ‘interculturality’) and their relationship with methodology and analytical practice, reflections on researcher identity and subjectivity, reflections on local and global contexts of research, and reflections on language choice and linguacultural aspects of data generation, analysis and communication.

This book is a collection of essays written by anthropologists who examine the multiple relationships between their fieldwork locations and experiences and their personal lives.

This volume considers the confluence of World History and historical materialism, with the following guiding question in mind: given developments in the field of historical materialism concerned with the intersection of race, gender, labour, and class, why is it that within the field of World History, historical materialism has been marginalized, precisely as World History orients toward transnational socio-cultural phenomenon, micro-studies, or global histories of networks? Answering this question requires thinking, in an inter-related manner, about both the development of World History as a discipline, and the place of economic determinism in historical materialism. This book takes the position that historical materialism (as applied to the field of World History) needs to be more open to the methodological diversity of the materialist tradition and to refuse narrowly deterministic frameworks that have led to marginalization of materialist cultural analysis in studies of global capitalism. At the same time, World History needs to be more self-critical of the methodological diversity it has welcomed through a largely inclusionary framework that allows the material to be considered separately from cultural, social, and intellectual dimensions of global processes.

This book presents a vivid description of the solutions that researchers have discovered for ethical dilemmas that pose themselves at studying disadvantaged, vulnerable and victimized populations. Ethical codes prescribe that the scholar should in all circumstances avoid potential harm, that informed consent is necessary and that the limits of confidentiality should always be respected. However, in the practice of research among women involved in prostitution, illegal immigrant workers, enslaved children, people who sell their organs and all the traffickers thereof, the ethical rules cannot always be followed. This book shows that there is a surprising variety of arguable possibilities in dealing with ethical dilemmas in the field. Authors reflect on concrete experiences from their own fieldwork in a wide variety of settings such as the USA, Singapore, Kosovo and The Netherlands. Some choose to work on the basis of conscientious partiality, others negotiate the rules with their informants and still others purposely break the rules in order to disclose and damage the exploiters. Researchers may find themselves in a vulnerable position. Their experiences, as presented in this volume, will help field workers, university administrators, representatives of vulnerable groups, philosophers of ethics and most of all students to go into the field well-prepared. This is a book that every researcher planning to do fieldwork in the difficult field of hidden, illicit and victimized people should read in advance. Dr. Frank Bovenkerk, Professor (Emeritus), Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands This book allows a peek in the kitchen of empirical fieldwork, going into not only “best practices,” but mistakes made, in a frank, courageous and honest way. Dr. Brenda C. Oude Breuil, Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands