Paper short abstract:

Doing fieldwork with sight loss sometimes forces researchers to ask informants for support with describing visual details and getting around. This paper considers how building this familiar rapport may add rather than detract value from any research- as both disabled and non-disabled scholars.

Paper long abstract:

The rise of an increasingly reflexive, collaborative anthropology has helped us to move away from a rigid version of the researcher-informant relationship. In fact, the notion of outsiders being informed from the inside now seems to suggest unhelpful holist conceptions of culture and the bygone archetype of a colonial era anthropologist. Yet, the rapport between researchers and those we study is still often defined by maintaining some distance and preserving the ethnographer identity, especially through adopting participant observation.

As a blind ethnographer, I found myself closing the distance, since when I could not observe and needed support to participate, I asked my informants, theatre audio describers. Despite regularly describing visual details in productions for visually-impaired theatre-goers, they were much more reluctant to discuss skin colour, body language, and attire beyond the auditorium. This, and my request to be guided in new locations by linking arms, required us to quickly build trust and familiarity. Having absorbed thinkers who praise the researcher's unobtrusive, independent presence in the field, I was anxious about letting familiarity undermine the quality of my findings, to the extent that I did not always reap the benefits of greater immersion.

This paper will first highlight some advantages I experienced after accepting proximity with informants. It will also call on anthropology teaching to explore how to best use familiarity and dependence in researcher-informant relationships, stressing the value of these considerations for disabled and non-disabled scholars.