Paper short abstract:

Drawing on personal fieldwork experiences, I discuss the line of disclosure between ‘work’ and ‘life’, which is represented by the paradox of ethnography as both synonymous with and separate from the everyday life of the researcher, and continuously constructed.

Paper long abstract:

Disclosure has been a key tenet of ethnographic practice guided by ethical principles, a critical aspect of anthropology in the academy. However ‘covert’ research can be approved by ethics committees, and find its way into the ethical framework of projects on sensitive or ‘dangerous’ issues and information. Yet it is these topics, those deemed sensitive, that can on the other hand be seen as those where disclosure is all the more important. The line between the ethnographic and the everyday is both iterated and blurred in practice; drawn and redrawn along personal ethical lines. For myself, studying gender and sexuality within a population sometimes deemed vulnerable, these issues have made my work both problematic and rich, often coming up as a result of the epistemological issues of having and being a (female) body in the field. I consider these issues alongside those in other works, including those acknowledged by Gloria Wekker (2006) in her intimate ethnography of one woman’s life. Within such dilemmas about disclosure within the ‘public’ and ‘private’, it is interesting to consider where our ethical considerations protect those individuals we research with, where they speak for and silence them, and thus where they might seek to prevent epistemic violence but may actually commit it. This speaks to similar issues within broader non-fiction and other narrative, and begs the question as to whether anthropology ‘going public’ might alleviate or exacerbate our concerns about disclosure, sensitive information, and where and when research itself is meant to begin and end.