Fieldwork Under Surveillance: Rethinking Relations of Trust, Vulnerability, and State Power^*

* We first and foremost thank the people of Xinjiang and Osh who made this paper possible, but whom we cannot acknowledge by name. We would also especially like to thank Natalie Koch and Jennifer Fluri for their ideas and comments on previous versions of this article, as well as David Kaplan and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All errors are exclusively our own. We acknowledge financial support by the U.S. Student Fulbright Program (Kyrgyzstan, 2015‐2016); and the National Science Foundation Grant #DGE 1144083 (2014‐2017, China).

Abstract

Encounters with the surveillance state during fieldwork are common, raising practical and intellectual challenges for qualitative research methods. Despite a number of studies on this topic, surveillance in illiberal and liberal contexts tend to be treated as separate problems. We provide a comparative case study that addresses the impacts of surveillance on sensitive research topics in the relatively weak state of Kyrgyzstan and the stronger state of China. Drawing on stories about negotiating the surveillance state with our research participants, we argue that (1) surveillance changes the relations of trust and rapport that are essential for knowledge production, (2) that it operates across unevenly positioned subjects, and (3) that the effects of surveillance on research outcomes do not substantially diverge across different state formations, such as China and Kyrgyzstan. The stories illustrate the intimate geopolitics of surveillance.

Keywords:

• authoritarianism
• intimate geopolitics
• qualitative research methods
• surveillance
• trust

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

  ¹ For these same reasons, the names we use here are pseudonyms.

  ² That was their reasoning; I do not know if they were correct in that assumption of local IP address being safe or not. Later, they would change their mind about this.

  ³ In order to protect the NGO from further accusations of bias and to distance them from my independent work, I have chosen to conceal their full name.

  ⁴ The visiting donor representative was actually collecting photos and interviews for the donor’s outreach materials, and Chynara’s NGO did not know much about his activities or have the power to refuse his visit.