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Abstract
In this article, I describe multi‐context engaged learning – a research methodology that I developed in response to the challenge of conducting intimate and engaged fieldwork within a highly complex and shifting milieu typical of those faced by many researchers today. Moreover, I argue that it is the ethnographer’s ‘presence’ in terms of her accountability and membership within a shared context that should ideally constitute the site of research, and that this in turn demands an honest and forthright approach to the issues of exchange that are at the heart of most field research.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Catherine Charsley, Ulf Hannerz and Steven Vertovec for their advice and insights.
Notes
1. Gandhi died before this could be fully implemented, although he had been influencing groups in the West with this idea since 1920s (see Royden, Citation1931, pp. 6–8).
2. This is an alias. Despite this organization maintaining a relatively high public profile, I have used the term ‘alias’ because some of its members, who were also my informants have founded or belong to other organizations that engage in relatively high risk behind the scenes, work within repressive and draconian states.
3. For one of the first and arguably the best survey of this area, see the work of Schirch (Citation1995).
4. Others researching meaning within social movements have adopted a similar approach by stating that the actors’ motives are the meanings that researchers are trying to uncover (Schreiber, Matthews, & Elliot, Citation2003, p. 155).
5. Context might refer to a particular moment of interaction with or by a particular individual, group or institution in a particular place, while the site would be the underlying and overarching condition of permanency that both binds and contains this context in common with all others that constitute the site.
6. Which like many innovative methods is still limited by the politics of funding (see Gwyther & Possamai‐Inesedy, Citation2009).
7. For an excellent discussion of reflexive autobiography in terms of interpretation, see Twyman, Morrison, and Sporton (Citation1999).
8. The absence of power from discussions of empowerment and disempowerment across the behavioural sciences is a parallel and connected example of this (Boje & Rosile, Citation2001).
9. In many instances, experimental idealism is, at least where the peace and human rights realm is concerned, related to religious idealism. This is perhaps not surprising, since the term was arguably first associated with the work of the theologically inspired political scientist and educator John Dewey (Buxton, Citation1984, p. 462). At its most basic and non‐religious, experimental idealism can also speak to the application of ideals in a practical context with a view to improving some aspect of the human condition. The many and varied social experiments in creating more harmonious human communities that have taken place over the centuries might also be seen as examples of this more general kind of experimental idealism. Moreover, as some authors have suggested, since the seventeenth‐century idealist experiments in community have also acted as levers for encouraging change in the wider society (see Bestor, Citation1950), it is perhaps for this reason that they have often been associated with sub‐cultures (Clarke, Citation1974, p. 432).
10. I first became interested in this approach after reading Jankowski’s account of his research into the US urban gangs (see Jankowski, Citation1992), during which he participated to the extent of fighting along side gang members and joining one of their bowling teams. I first attempted this approach to fieldwork during research conducted in a housing development in Watts, Los Angeles. However, I soon discovered that I was an appalling bowler.
11. See Hannerz (Citation2006) – an excellent overview of these issues.
12. Indeed, whereas previously much could be seen to draw upon the shock of the exotic, many recent ethnographers seem to have to deal with the loss of the exotic (di Leonardo, Citation1998). Also, work on tourism and the consumption of the exotic is worth thinking about in these terms (Hoskins, Citation2002).
13. Third cultures are the cultures that mediate between cultures, such as legal experts, and which can take on some of the cultural attributes of the countries from which they originate (see Featherstone, Citation1991).
14. The tendency towards conducting ethnographic research is not new. Since the early 1980s, academics have noted trends towards studying at home that have been driven by such factors as funding shortages and loss of unchecked access to the isolated and the exotic (see Messerschmidt, Citation1981). My own experience has shown that this change is especially marked among doctoral students where the pressure put upon them to complete their degrees within a three‐ or four‐year funding window has limited the scope of their endeavours to readily accessible places where people speak the same language as they do. Hence, many overseas students return ‘home’ to conduct their fieldwork.
15. Indeed, even the fieldworker that seeks out the exotic does not necessarily encounter the concomitant isolation, finding that she can use such means as the internet and mobile telecommunications to remain somewhat anchored within their ‘home’ environment (see Lyon, Citation1999).