Productive Tensions: Ethnographic Engagement, Complexity, and Contradiction

Abstract

This article discusses engagement, complexity, and contradiction as resources for, rather than simply impediments to, good research. Drawing on examples from her own work of the past three decades on body image, commercial sex, and the medical use of marijuana, the author examines the benefits of, as well as some of the challenges presented by, this approach to scholarly practice.In her 2008 Pacific Sociological Association Presidential Address, Jodi O'Brien opened a conversation about contradiction and engagement within sociology and within our lives as sociologists. In her remarks, she observed that "tensions in our own understanding of ourselves," "contradiction in the methodologies and theories we generate," and "personal engagement" with those conflicts should be seen as resources for, rather than impediments to, good scholarship and should be brought "more systematically into our collective discourse" (O'Brien 2009, 6-7). As one whose work has always been marked by a personal investment in the subjects I have studied and by a deep appreciation

Treacherous Elasticity, Callous Boundaries: Aspiring Volunteer Initiatives in the Field of Refugee Support in Rotterdam

“…Anthropologists, in studying life as it is experienced, are part of the world that they study, and their findings are intersubjective and situational (Chapkis 2010;Small 2009). In negotiating my position as researcher, making explicit previous engagement in the field of refugee support pushed my research forward-for this prevented my endeavors from being experienced as 'crisis chasing' (Cabot 2019).…”

The ethical tightrope: politics of intimacy and consensual method in sexuality research

“…Relevant experiences may be produced during the research process and these experiences could be incorporated as part of what is sought to be understood or questioned. As Chapkis (, 495) points out, ‘accounts of resistance, resilience and endurance can sustain both subjects of our research and the researches who do it’.…”

“…The position of social sciences researcher in the fieldwork is not fixed and stable, but is itself a fluid category of analysis to the extent that the researcher's subjectivity is also produced by the same social relations and political struggles that he or she often seeks to understand (Chapkis ). The strategic use of research methods may be a potent way of analyzing and challenging power relations that arise within the research process between the researcher and the researched.…”

“…Many authors have shown how employing ethnography can originate rich experiences for researchers to take seriously the existence of their sexed and gendered bodies and the implications they produce, in fieldwork (Braz , ; O'Byrne ; Chapkis ; Jackman ). These experiences can also raise important ethical issues related to relations among participants.…”

“…In what follows, we argue that ethics created within a politics of intimacy in sexuality research may be productive using a consensual method in which researcher/participant agree to be part of the process and by considering the implications of understanding the researcher's body as a sexed, gendered and sexualized matter in fieldwork. The main goal here is to explore the ways in which these methods can contribute to the production of a politically engaged knowledge, as Chapkis () evokes and to escape from the moral matrix that implicitly determines and rigidly separates the positions of researcher/participant—and the positions of ethnographers/ethnographed subjects, as Fine () criticizes. As a politics of intimacy is proposed here as an ethical research tool, based on a consensual method among the participants, ‘intimacy’ must be taken as a mode of relation in which the bureaucratic moral that dictates the distinction between researcher and participant is questioned.…”