A ‘sense of failure’? Everydayness and research ethics

Abstract

A key legacy of much recent theorising in Anglo-American Human Geography has been the realisation that the ‘excess’ and ‘messiness’ of (too-easily and too-often overlooked) everyday events, geographies and experiences ought to have far-reaching conceptual and methodological implications. The aim of this paper is to elaborate some (as yet relatively implicit) ethical dimensions of this challenge, via a consideration of one particular notion and domain of ethics (research ethics in Human Geography) and, then, via one specific case study (re-presenting moments from my experiences of – and small ‘failures’ in – conducting qualitative research with children, as an adult male, in the UK, in 2000–2002).

Keywords:

• everydayness
• Children's Geographies
• research ethics
• ‘failure’

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Kraftl, Faith Tucker, Michelle Pyer and three anonymous referees for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

The author was a guest editor for this edition of Children's Geographies: to ensure the robustness and anonymity of the refereeing process, the process of reviewing this paper was co-ordinated by the Journal's Editor.

A much lengthier array of metaphors for this kind of ‘excess’ – drawn from a wide selection of classic and contemporary social theory – was listed in a recent paper by Marcus Doel (2006).

The countless extant Disciplinary, Professional, Institutional and Departmental research ethics guidelines, codes and committees typically exemplify this observation.

In so doing, I have chosen to eschew a point-by-point answering of the questions posed (to myself) in my research diary vignettes. These sorts of ‘answers’ are available from the author, on request. This emphasis upon broadly resonant ethical challenges of everydayness might disappoint readers anticipating a finer-grained account of being a male researching with children. However, I hope that the vignettes presented are themselves densely, albeit implicitly, illustrative of my experiences of being a male researching with children (and, moreover, suggestive of my own positionality in and of these experiences).

The following provisos are necessarily attached to the use of vignettes in this paper. First, of course, there will always be a problematic gap between an event, and words written about/after it. Second, of course, the vignettes presented here are thoroughly partial and subjective, being written by one person, there and then, and thus saying little about the experiences of others who participated in, and were affected by, the incidents described here. Thus, moreover, the vignettes privilege a particular (white, British, university-educated, twenty-first century male) positionality. Third, of course, in re-presenting just a handful of incidents, so much has been omitted: there were many other incidents which I wrote down at the time – and many, many more moments of research which I did not – all of which had the potential to matter, ethically; all of which necessitated ethical practice. And, fourth, there is, of course, a danger that writing about ‘everyday’ moments renders them extraordinary and atypical. Nevertheless, I contend that the use of vignettes is a useful tool for reflection and discussion in this context: see Horton and Kraftl (2006) for an extended methodological and theoretical case for this mode of writing, and a discussion of the representational status of such vignettes.