Foreword: Entering the Field and Leaving Intact
Author | Yvonne Jewkes |
Position | Professor |
In July 2013 I was invited to give a plenary talk at the British Society of Criminology conference, the theme of which was ‘Criminology on Trial’. I am honoured that my presentation that day has helped to inspire this special collection of thought-provoking articles written by colleagues at relatively early stages of their careers. In my talk, I decided to put ethnographic fieldwork on trial and I discussed why I think that many established academics do a disservice to new scholars contemplating entering the field for the first time, by writing up their methodology and findings as if everything has gone completely smoothly. They have entered the field without any problems concerning access or ethics, they have gained a rapport with every one of their participants, elicited rich and novel data, and left the field with it (the field), and their own mind, body and self entirely intact. But as this collection testifies, anyone who has conducted criminological ethnography knows this to be untrue - and the tricky process of ‘getting in, getting on and getting out’, as ethnography is so often characterized, does not necessarily get much easier as one makes the journey from fledgling researcher to ‘quirky professor’ (see Carl, this volume). No matter how ‘established’ we are in our careers, how well connected or experienced, or how resilient we imagine ourselves to be, we all face obstacles (sometimes insurmountable) in the course of our research lives, and we all confront challenges in the analysis and writing-up phases of our studies (Fleetwood, this volume). Yet rarely do we discuss them in our work.
I also put ethnographic research in criminology on trial because, in contrast to many other social sciences, criminology has largely resisted the notion that qualitative inquiry has emotional dimensions, often reflecting aspects of the researcher’s own biography and life experiences. Not only do subjectivity and the self nearly always inflect our research, to the extent where ‘fieldwork is, in part, the discovery of the self through the detour of the other’ (Hunt, 1989: 42) but, when done properly, reflexive, self-attuned ethnography has the capacity to reach and uncover data that we might not otherwise have access to; indeed Liebling (1999) has gone so far as to state that ‘emotions constitute data’ (my emphasis; see also Liebling, 2014, Rowe, 2014). Examples of recent scholarship that illustrate the point - with a frankness that goes well beyond classic sociological studies (Becker, 1967; Merton, 1972) of ‘insider/outsider’ positionalities, or deciding whose side we are on - include Wakeman’s (2014) account of participant observation with heroin and crack cocaine users and dealers, as a former user and dealer himself; the contributions in the 2014 special issue of Qualitative Inquiry 20(4) on ‘Doing prison research differently’; and the chapters in The Pains of Doing Criminological Research, edited by Beyens et al. (2013).
Criminological ethnographers face a multiplicity of emotional challenges, including; being superficially judged by our research participants (Waters, this volume) and our peers, ‘bearing witness’ to the frequently painful experiences of others, and dealing with the intended and unintended consequences of the...
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