Inclusive Ethnography: Making Fieldwork Safer, Healthier and More Ethical

SAGE 2024

Edited by Caitlin Procter and Branwen Spector

This textbook aims to change the way ethnographic methods are taught, by centering the question: How can you do ethnographic field research in a safe way for you and the people you work with?

With contributions from researchers across the globe, each chapter discusses core challenges faced by ethnographers, reflecting on research from preparation to dissemination and how identity interacts with the realities of doing fieldwork. The book:

  • Promotes an inclusive approach that invites you to learn from the challenges faced by a diverse range of scholars.

  • Addresses underexplored issues including emotional and physical safety in the face of ableism, homophobia and racism.

  • Challenges assumptions of what it means to produce knowledge by conducting fieldwork.

Endorsements for Inclusive Ethnography

  • Inclusive Ethnography offers a broad range of practical and provocative reflections on contemporary ethnography. The book encourages students and established ethnographers to consider the many challenges ethnographic research can entail, to learn from the accounts it presents, and to develop responsive and ethical approaches in their own practices. It is an essential resource

    Dr Christopher Bunn

    Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow

  • Inclusive Ethnography shares lessons learnt from the ethnographic field from a diverse range of contributors. It offers a refreshingly honest, yet academically rigorous, account of methodological, ethical and substantive issues encountered in conducing ethnographic work. Great for beginners and experts alike!

    Anna Galazka

    Lecturer, Cardiff Business School

  • A strength of ethnographic method is its affordance for capturing social phenomena in a human way; in a way that recording devices alone simply cannot. Inclusive Ethnography brings this humanity into focus, celebrating diversity and difference by demonstrating the human contingencies through which field relations and data representation are handled. Each chapter imparts practical knowledge through powerful personal accounts, offering a timely guide for (and from) traditionally overlooked researchers and research.

    Dr Jonathan Ablitt

    Research Associate, Cardiff University

Beyond the State

Politics and Pragmatism among Palestinian Refugee Youth

Under review, Cambridge University Press

This book traces the insidious ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, from the perspectives of young people growing up in a refugee camp on the edge of the city. As the occupying Israeli state continually seeks to exclude Palestinian East Jerusalemite refugees from their homes, this book focusses on the actions of young people who are disrupting that intention.

Analysing the ways that Palestinian refugee youth find to pragmatically engage with the institutions of the Israeli state, the book explains how a deep-rooted revolutionary consciousness is accompanied by a way of thinking beyond the state. The young lives that run throughout this book are a recognition of how the tensions of history and becoming unfold alongside young people’s attempts to be something, or live something other than their constraints, and how this coexists with experiences of being acted upon by structural marginality and subjugation.

Photo Procter, 2018: mural painting in Shu’fat refugee camp, East Jerusalem