What have you noticed today? Methods School on Political Ethnography
Marga ter Maat
What have you noticed today?
This is the question we discussed at the start of each morning during the online ECPR Methods School in Political Ethnography led by Dr Kristin Eggeling that I attended from a sunny, snowy, and rainy Maastricht last month. Such discussions on noticing weather changes or lingering smells on the streets after festivities smoothly fed into discussions on field sites, observation, ethnographic sensibility, and positionality. In this post, I reflect on three points covered during the school and how these can relate to our Food Charities project: volunteering as a researcher, writing and reviewing ethnographic work, and finally, what is political about political ethnography?
First of all, volunteering in different food charities is going to be an important part of entering and learning about the field of charitable food provision. Indeed, ethnographies on food support organisations take such an approach. This certainly involves the need to consider typical questions in doing ethnography: what position do you take by both participating and observing, and how does your position of being an outsider but also becoming an insider over time? One suggestion from to school is to work with the notion of “hyphen-spaces” such as “sameness-difference” and “political activism-active neutrality” (Cunliff & Karunanayake, 2013). Thinking with these notions can help to researcher to think about power relations, their position, and the (ethical) decisions we take in the field. Additionally, one could also reflect on the ways in which the researcher as a volunteer really would impact the field. While recognising the aim to avoid harm and to consider ethics, it is probable that many structural phenomena in the field would be happening with our without our presence as researchers.
Secondly, we spent a good amount of time thinking about writing ethnographies, writing “ethnographically” and the review of ethnographic work. This was particular insightful to me as it matched my current work on a review of ethnographic work. We discussed and tried using different writing styles on the same piece of text to reflect on the effectiveness and impact of using a specific style to convey your argument. To illustrate, multiple papers that we read aimed to present their argument not only by spelling it out but also through their specific linguistic devices (see Pachirat, 2009; Cook, 2004) which adds palpability. On the other hand, while we were reviewing a monograph that vividly described the unhygienic and run-down living conditions of an interlocuter which illustrated the arguments made about the desperate situation of those living in poverty in this work, some felt that this description shamed the participants and was disrespectful or even inhumane. This discussion therefore fed back into earlier discussions on how we portray our participants through our writing and to think carefully about what detail is necessary to present our argument effectively and accurately when ‘thick description’ is key to ethnography.
Finally, and perhaps centrally in a school on political ethnography: what is political ethnography and what is political about it? Political ethnography was mainly described as being political in two ways: firstly, the use of ethnography to study typical political settings or settings that are not immediately thought of as political (yet are found to be, such as the home or the street). Secondly, political ethnography is seen as a broader sensibility, the application of which can provide for normative grounding, epistemological innovation, and can broaden the meaning of ‘the political’ (Schatz, 2009). While recognising these benefits of ethnography for political science, coming from a sociology background, my conclusion – for now at least – is that perhaps all good ethnographic work is political. Who we choose to study, observe and talk to; what position we have in the field; how we frame our observations; what we leave out: these points all concern power and power relations and could perhaps have political impact. I do not mean to say at all that all ethnography should be about “politics all the way down”, but I think that ethnography is political in certain important ways and therefore requires continuous reflexivity.
A big thanks to Kristin and the other participants for an insightful, fun week and for the intriguing additions to my reading list. I hope we get to meet in person one day.
#ethnography #ECPR #methods #school #politicalscience #sociology #phd #writing
References:
Cook, I. (2004). Follow the Thing: Papaya. Antipode, 642–664.
Cunliffe, A. L., & Karunanayake, G. (2013). Working Within Hyphen-Spaces in Ethnographic Research: Implications for Research Identities and Practice. Organizational Research Methods, 16(3), 364–392. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428113489353
Schatz, Edward. (2009). “Ethnographic Immersion and the Study of Politics.” In Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, edited by Edward Schatz, 1–23. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
