Entangled: On the Social and Ethical Friction of Fieldwork

Abstract

This paper asks what we owe to our teams and our informants when we engage in research with and about people. Participant-observation – the defining methodology of ethnographic praxis – has long had trade-offs resulting from the many frictions inherent in it, all of which are essential to producing the unique insights and findings of this approach As practitioners, we've often turned a blind eye to these, suggesting the significance of our work outweighs the consequences. But is that always true? This paper offers an equation of sorts for articulating and assessing the underlying forces creating friction in ethnographic research. While it does not posit an all-encompassing metric, it provides a way for researchers to be more cognizant about and deliberate with the ways we use friction in our projects.