Short Abstract:

This workshop will collaboratively investigate ethical issues that emerge in the fieldwork processes of early-career researchers (ECRs). We will together envision a collective ethics that addresses the precarity that we live and work in as ECRs.

Long Abstract:

This online workshop is meant to offer an opportunity to investigate ethical quandaries that emerge in the complex processes of ethnographic data production, with a particular focus on fieldwork experiences of early-career researchers (ECRs). Many ECRs encounter challenges stemming from academic methodologies prescribed by institutions, which may deviate from real-life experiences. Furthermore, we face increasingly precarious living and working situations, with less funding (or none at all) and more pressures on our time. Given these constraints, how can we ensure safety and wellness for all of our research participants? The convenors posit that when confronting epistemically and materially suffocating treatment from research institutions, which create environments of competition and un-wellness, the response must be collective and based in praxis.

The workshop will begin with the convenors’ sharing of perspectives and examples from their respective research backgrounds (Camille from educational ethnography and working with children, Selin from punk scholarship and its methodologies) by a brief presentation of extracts from their field notes and personal practices in the field. Then the convenors will open the space so that participants can voice their encounters from the field that illustrate the problem of precarity and ethics. We will discuss these shared experiences and conclude with a collaborative Padlet that puts together our ideas and proposed ethical practices. We hope that the result of this gathering will be a collective ethic that not only prioritizes knowledge production but also wellness and joy for all (human and non-human) actors involved in our research processes.