‘Is he allowed to have a crush on you?’ interrupting adultism in fieldwork with youth^*

* Both authors contributed equally.

ABSTRACT

Scholars have called for ethnographers to reveal the emotional and controversial aspects of fieldwork. Through analysis of our fieldwork with teens in the United States and Japan, this article documents how we, two adult researchers, attempted to address adultism—a pervasive system of oppression that deems young people inferior. We discuss three types of encounters which we believe reflect how adultism operated in our fieldwork and the challenges related to de-stabilising it. The encounters revealed specific patterns and manifestations of adultism including 1) how adults regulated young people’s identities, 2) our assumptions about what rapport and reciprocity with youth meant, and 3) the dilemmas of whether or not to deploy adult power to intervene in youth dynamics we found to be troublesome. This article suggests that adult researchers reflexively examine and document challenging and unsettling moments with youth in fieldwork in order to interrupt and unlearn adultist behaviours and beliefs.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• adultism
• fieldwork
• reflexivity
• power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tomoko Tokunaga http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2456-7020

Notes

* Both authors contributed equally.

1 Relative privilege to refer to the special unearned entitlements or protection given to specific groups within a society (Bell 1995; Kimmel and Ferber 2003; McIntosh 1988; Weber 2001).

2 All names in the article are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JSPS KAKENHI grant numbers 15K17387, 18K13094]