A few months back, I wrote an explainer Twitter thread on “Doubly Engaged Ethnography: Opportunities and Challenges When Working With Vulnerable Communities”, the article Dr. Kate Parizeau (University of Guelph) and I published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods (IJQM). I had explained that this article emerged as a result of a conversation Kate and I had back in 2013 on the ethics of doing ethnographic fieldwork in vulnerable communities. We both studied informal waste pickers in Argentina and Mexico, and this article is the first of several collaborations we have in the works.
The phenomenon of “parachuting scholars” (who drop into communities and engage in extractive research practices) has been widely discussed already. @KateParizeau and I argue that we (and by we, we mean EVERYONE) need to consider a set of ethical questions regarding research…
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 18, 2019
… and in that sense, by considering vulnerability, I argue (a la Robert Goodin) that we ought to evaluate how our research practices may affect our informants and the communities/spaces/places we research. Goodin says vulnerability is a relational property (vulnerable TO…)
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 18, 2019
… well, marginalized populations may be vulnerable to our research practices/projects. We owe it to them to consider the ethics of how we do research, our positionality, reflexivity, insider/outsider communication and representation. Hence our article. </end thread>
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 18, 2019
It’s free to download and read from the IJQM website and definitely one of my favourite pieces.
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