Researcher Safety? Ethnography in the Interdisciplinary World of Audit Cultures

Abstract

Anthropologists intermittently reflect on the danger and risk that ethnography can involve.Here, we advance this question in a contemporary research environment where the regulatory logics of occupational safety and health (OSH) encroach increasingly on anthropological practice through institutional research governance. We draw on our research into workplace OSH in the construction, healthcare, and logistics sectors Ð a research field dominated by behavioural theories that support the preventative logics of OSH regulation. Taking an autoethnographic approach, we explore how researching in potentially dangerous environments requires ethnographers to learn how to be safe through othersÕ situated safety logics and through those of researcher safety. It is, we argue, through these engagements with the improvisory ways that workers generally, and researchers specifically, engage with safety, that another set of inconsistencies between OSH preventative logics and our anthropological understanding of how ethnographic knowing emerges become visible.

The Unintended Consequences of Risk Assessment Regimes: How Risk Adversity at European Universities Is Affecting African Studies

“…10 The current risk assessment regime is also problematic insofar as it typically treats security as static and approval as a discrete event that happens ahead of fieldwork. This is in line with the traditional OSH approach, which operates through anticipation of risk and audits that assess security at a given point in time (Morgan and Pink, 2018). Yet travel security can change very quickly.…”

“…11 This may prevent researchers from adapting their plans based on security information obtained in the field or to respond to a rapidly changing security situation. Thus, current procedures to over-prepare for "uncertainties" can be counterproductive (Morgan and Pink, 2018).…”

“…There is also evidence that the current risk assessment regimes do not factor risks to local partners in the same way for Western researchers and marginalize their voices. The bureaucratic logic of risk assessment is predicated on the fallacious idea that risks can be prevented by suppressing uncertainty rather than by encouraging researchers to learn how to respond to events in the field (Morgan and Pink, 2018). It is not adapted to the realities and needs of social research, and in some cases, can be counterproductive.…”

“…For instance, the ICS recommends that institutions adopt “standardized provision of information about, and adherence, to safety protocols,” develop “a code of practice for risk avoidance” and that “appropriate risk avoidance and mitigation be included in research curricula” (ICS, 2017). Such risk assessment advice is inspired by occupational and safety health (OSH) standards, whose logic is driven by the “anticipation” of harm and the suppression of “uncertainty” (Morgan and Pink, 2018: 401). This trend has resulted in the strengthening of bureaucratic procedures in some countries, like the UK, and in the introduction of risk assessment in places that did not use to have a formal procedure, like some German research institutions.…”

Refiguring global construction challenges through ethnography

“…This has meant that we have been able to contribute ethnographic knowledge and the unique insights it offers directly into debates in the industry itself and around its key existing challengesin our case relating to worker safety. Second by bringing ethnographic research in the construction industry into other fields of research, for example in journals of Mobile Media and Communication (Pink et al 2014), Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Pink et al 2016), New Technology, Work and Employment (Pink et al 2017) and into debates about research methodology (Morgan and Pink, 2018). This has meant that our examples drawn from ethnographies in the construction industry have influenced thinking in other fields, thus, meaning that ethnographies in the construction industry become more visible in broader academic debate.…”