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Paper short abstract

The aftermath of a polarising event can lie outside of fieldwork’s embodied temporal frame. Polarisation as a process speaks to the inseparability of time-space in the analysis of ethnographic encounters when considering collective possibilities that open & foreclose as polarisation builds.

Paper long abstract

Ethnographic presence at an event that is seen as a “catalyst” for micro-level polarisation is often not documented or analysed in the same way we, as ethnographers, might for moments of large-scale polarisation. Ethnographic practice privileges temporal and spatial presence which allows for "sense making" of social worlds and world views. Yet, for the ethnographer facing precarity, the aftermath of a “catalyst” fieldwork event – throughout which macro-level polarisation can build – lies outside of the in-person, embodied frame of fieldwork.

By considering “catalyst” events alongside further processes of polarisation, I juxtapose an ethnographic encounter with the fluctuating presence/absence of post-fieldwork returns. I take the example of a particularly polarising neighbourhood meeting in 2012, held by a group with which I spent time. Make sensing of the polarising effects of the meeting on both the group and the neighbourhood required a longer temporal frame than ethnographic fieldwork allowed.

Using the post-fieldwork fragmentation of the chronotope as part of the ethnographic method allows for an analysis of polarisation as a process. It incorporates new information – both from fragmented post-encounters and our interlocutors’ reinterpretations – into sense-making of the original ethnographic encounter. As a method, it necessarily couples Peirce’s (1955) framing of how social meaning is made with Bahktin’s (1981) theorisation of chronotopes. As such, it speaks to the inseparability of time and space when considering 'collective possibilities that open and foreclose' throughout processes of polarisation and, thus, during both the ethnographic encounter and subsequent chronotopes of ethnographic analysis and production.