{"title":"Dilemmas of the activist-researcher: Balancing militant ethnography, security culture, and reflexive ethics in Australia","authors":"Élise Imray Papineau","doi":"10.1177/14687941231176933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231176933","url":null,"abstract":"Ethnographic practice in contentious and high-risk spaces raises important ethical and methodological questions. When working with grassroots activists who actively avoid forms of surveillance, the boundary between consensual observation and potentially harmful documentation becomes difficult to discern. This article aims not only to identify the gaps in qualitative research methodologies for scholars working with grassroots activists, but also to think of practical ways in which researchers should mitigate concerns both for participants and themselves. Based on fieldwork in Australia, the author explores the ethical, methodological, and emotional dilemmas of conducting research with activists as a militant ethnographer. The article argues that activist-centred project designs must consider the challenges between the researcher's mandate to collect data and their responsibility to uphold security culture both in and outside activist spaces. Reflexive research ethics, further, should be a part of ongoing research engagement to address the emotional tensions overlooked in standardized ethical protocols.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43354351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visual methods in family and sexuality research: Picturing the everyday, the imaginary, and the void","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/14687941231165892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231165892","url":null,"abstract":"Engaging with visual methodology literature and the concept of ‘family display’, this article examines how visual methods can generate new ways of understanding the (in)visibility of queer family life. Engaging Chinese lesbians in image-making and photo-elicitation interviews, I illustrate how visual methods give access to different ways of making sense of ‘family’, including the ‘everyday’, the ‘imaginary’, and the ‘void’. By exploring the image-maker’s intentions, the presence or absence of the image-maker, and diverse ways of displaying family, I show how visual methods can facilitate the display of family ties, tensions, and ideals. Adopted in an open format that allows flexibility and creativity, visual methods generate space for participants to communicate the unrealisable and unseeable and for researchers to examine how dominant heteronormative representations and discourses around the ‘family’ restrict possibilities of displaying family. I highlight the importance of maintaining openness and sensitivity to cultural peculiarities when adopting visual methods.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41614883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Religious positionalities and political science research in ‘the field’ and beyond: Insights from Vietnam, Lebanon and the UK","authors":"S. Rumsby, Jennifer Philippa Eggert","doi":"10.1177/14687941231165884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231165884","url":null,"abstract":"This article contributes to the growing literature on researcher reflexivity by broaching the often-ignored issue of religious positionalities within political science, as well as speaking to the methodological implications of researching religion more broadly. We present and compare two autoethnographic case studies of research on politico-religious conflict in Vietnam and Lebanon, exploring how a researcher’s religiosity presents unique fieldwork challenges, opportunities and insights. We then discuss the ambivalence faced by religious researchers within the highly secularised academic environment, thus blurring the artificial dichotomy between ‘the field’ and the academy. Our reflections centre around three findings: (1) the importance of taking an intersectional approach which neither essentialises nor ignores religious aspects of positionality, whilst also being sensitive to spatial and temporal shifts in how they interact with a researcher’s gender, ethnicity, class and other identifiers; (2) the opportunities and perils of a researcher’s apparent religious common ground with participants (or lack thereof) in building rapport and negotiating a degree of insider status; and (3) the similarities and differences between suspicions of religious partialism during fieldwork and within academia.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45064389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Research with institutionalized populations: Methodological and ethical dilemmas","authors":"A. Korzh","doi":"10.1177/14687941231165890","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231165890","url":null,"abstract":"While there is a strong body of literature documenting various challenges qualitative researchers face with vulnerable populations in the Global North, there is a dearth of research on the ethical dilemmas arising with institutionalized populations in post-authoritarian and post-socialist contexts in the Global South, or Global East. This article sheds light on the methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas emerging in qualitative research with orphanage youth and incarcerated women in Ukraine. The following dilemmas are discussed: methodological relevance, methodological credibility and reliability, methodological flexibility, constrained freedom and limited privacy, perceived researcher identity as a burden, and complicated reciprocity. These reflections on the dilemmas and lessons learned are informed by the author's qualitative research conducted in Ukraine between 2010 and 2019. They serve to guide budding scholars and graduate students who often times feel unprepared in their graduate studies to conduct emotionally intense research with vulnerable populations.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43450020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Translating (in) the margins: The dilemmas, ethics, and politics of a transnational feminist approach to translating in multilingual qualitative research","authors":"Tanja Burkhard, S. Park","doi":"10.1177/14687941231165889","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231165889","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on two multilingual qualitative datasets (Korean/English and German/English), this paper examines the dual role and positionalities of two researchers who simultaneously act as translators, as well as the implications of this dual role for multilingual qualitative research. This work is informed by transnational feminist translation studies and transnational feminist approaches to qualitative research, and founded on the two researchers' intimate familiarity with their participants' languages, contexts, and meaning-making processes. Considering the complexity of this familiarity, this work presents unique dilemmas—challenges and opportunities—with respect to translating, representing, and writing about multilingual qualitative data.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65952612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"More than participatory? From ‘compensatory’ towards ‘expressive’ remote practices using digital technologies","authors":"Susanne Börner, Peter Kraftl, L. Giatti","doi":"10.1177/14687941231165882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231165882","url":null,"abstract":"Based on the shift from face-to-face participatory action research (PAR) with groups in situations of vulnerability to digital methods during COVID-19, we reflect on how we can go beyond compensating for the physical absence of the researcher from the field. We argue that instead of simply aiming to replace face-to-face research with a digital equivalent for maintaining ‘participatory’ and ‘inclusive’ research practices, remote practices have the potential of being more-than compensatory. We suggest that when producing multi-method digital approaches, we need to go beyond a concern with participant access to remote practices. By rethinking remote PAR in the light of expressive rather than participatory research practices, we critically reflect on the (sometimes experimental) process of trying out different digital research method(s) with Brazilian youth in situations of digital marginalisation, including the initial ‘failures’ and lessons learned in encouraging diverse forms of participant expression, and ownership using WhatsApp.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42731690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Qualitative research in crisis: A narrative-practice methodology to delve into the discourse and action of the unheard in the COVID-19 pandemic","authors":"J. Boéri, D. Giustini","doi":"10.1177/14687941231155620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231155620","url":null,"abstract":"This paper develops and applies a methodology of qualitative inquiry that equips researchers to capture how social actors produce and contest accepted forms of knowledge at the margins of mainstream globalizing discourses in times of crisis. Standing at the intersection between conceptual and empirical research, our methodology builds on the common epistemological premises of ‘narrative’, as stories constructed and enacted in social life, and ‘practice’, as tasks and projects composed by ‘doings’ and ‘sayings’. Overcoming the dualism between ‘action’ and ‘discourse’ in traditional social theory, this methodology integrates narrative theory and practice theory into a joint framework for fieldwork and interviews. The use of the narrative-practice methodology in ethnographic case studies – such as interpreters’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Qatar – allows researchers to gain analytical granularity on participants’ storied practice and practiced stories of the crisis, to harness ‘peripheral’ knowledge and refashion public discourse.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46452785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ethical challenges in participatory research with children and youth","authors":"J. Loveridge, B. Wood, Edward Davis-Rae, H. McRae","doi":"10.1177/14687941221149594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941221149594","url":null,"abstract":"The growth of relational, participatory, collaborative and emergent research approaches in recent years has brought new ethical challenges for research with children and youth. These approaches require greater consideration of the specific social and cultural contexts of the research, along with the greater emphasis on researcher–participant relationships that often occur over sustained periods of time. Very few tools are available to help researchers think through the everyday ethical dilemmas such research can raise. In this article, we review the theoretical underpinnings of feminist and indigenous research methodologies that have encouraged these emerging approaches. Through examining an 18-month Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project case study, we critically review ethical moments relating to negotiating consent over a sustained period of time, enhancing co-design and navigating power issues between adult and youth researchers. We conclude with a number of questions to ‘think with’ when reflecting on ethical research with children and youth.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42571163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On fieldwork in the hybrid field: A “methodological novel” on ethnography, photography, fiction, and creative writing","authors":"L. Gariglio","doi":"10.1177/14687941221149584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941221149584","url":null,"abstract":"This is an autoethnographic note on conducting fieldwork with the purpose of documenting; first, outside academia––doing documentary photography; and second doing ethnography and autoethnography within academia. It explores different ways to conduct fieldwork (alone or in groups, ethnographically or autoethnographically) and different traditional and innovative ideas about how the “field” was interpreted commonsensically in the past and could be interpreted now, using the analytical dimension of the hybrid field. It is written both autoethnographically and creatively and includes a short methodological “novel.” The research note concludes with a reflection on a particular field-work experience, tackling its limitation and imagining different ways to perform it.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65952553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Collaborative sensemaking through photos: Using photovoice to study gas pipeline development in Appalachia","authors":"Erin Brock Carlson, M. Caretta","doi":"10.1177/14687941221149582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941221149582","url":null,"abstract":"Photovoice is an increasingly popular research method across disciplines due to its flexibility and capacity for generating rich data. This article argues that while its practical virtues are abundant, the theoretical contributions of photovoice to qualitative research are just as important. We argue that photographs can act as boundary objects that enable collective sensemaking at multiple stages of a research study. This is fulfilled through a case study of gas extraction and distribution networks and their social consequences in West Virginia, a state in the United States deeply entrenched geographically and culturally in natural resource extraction. Ultimately, this case study demonstrates that photovoice as a process and photographs as artifacts are sites for rich collaborative interpretation and provides a model of how to operationalize photos in multiple stages of research so that study designs are centered around participant experiences.","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44554699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}