Paper short abstract:

Emotional engagement is a crucial part of ethnographic practice. Yet a lack of concrete methodological guidance and discussion of alternatives may leave researchers unsupported and potentially vulnerable. I explore detachment and sensory engagement as important complements to emotional engagement.

Paper long abstract:

With the reflexive turn in the social sciences, emotional engagement is an inevitable and crucial part of data-gathering, analysis and sense-making, and representing fieldwork experiences. In ethnographic literature, emotions thus emerge as a construct for dealing with how ‘close’ one should strive to get to participants. However, there is a glaring gap in methodological guidance to this end. There is little detailed discussion of how emotional engagement may be safely, ethically, and productively leveraged in practice to build, manage, and withdraw from participant relationships, over the whole research process. Further, there is little elaboration of other kinds of engagement beyond the emotional.

In this paper, I argue for and present some theoretically-grounded possibilities and alternatives for approaching and managing the core tension of ‘how close is too close?’ in ethnographic practice. I draw illustrative examples from my own sensory ethnographic research into end of life in England (2017-2019), focusing on entering and leaving the field, and after one has left. In particular, I highlight the affordances of sensory engagement as a route to closeness, and emphasise the important complementary role of distance and detachment. Taking both engagement and detachment as embodied and relational (Evans et al. 2017; Yarrow et al. 2015; Candea et al. 2015), I consider how these together can inform considerations of ethnographic rigour, ethical tensions, and how to better support researchers in navigating the shifting process of ethnographic research.