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I had a wonderful conversation with @TheDapperChef at #ISA2019 on publishing methods articles, and I have additional thoughts. While I've published stuff on water and toxics governance, on transnational environmental organizations, last year was my first publishing on methods.
My good friend and coauthor @KateParizeau and I had been thinking (separately) about the importance of discussing ethnography of vulnerable communities. All these shared conversations started in 2015. We decided that we could use our work on informal waste pickers to inform this.
.@KateParizeau had done work studying practices of informal waste picking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and I've done the same in Leon, Mexico. We recognised informal waste pickers as highly marginalized populations that deserved robustly ethical treatment by scholars.
We proposed a conceptual framework that we dub "doubly-engaged ethnography" where we encourage researchers to think hard about their own positionality, engage in reflexivity and ensure that their representation of highly marginalized communities does not obscure their own voices.
We published this article in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods @IJQMonline as it's open access and is a wonderful outlet for the exact type of work we wanted to share. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/16…
Publishing methods work should not be left solely to those who are "at that stage in their careers" in terms of seniority or number of publications - I think this is a misconception. You can (and should) publish on methods when you have something to say about a method.
Our article is important for a lot of reasons, not the least of them the fact that we often see plenty of articles from parachuting scholars who visit a location with very marginalized communities and all of a sudden feel it appropriate to write about those, often misrepresenting
Marginalized, highly vulnerable populations (people who experience homelessness, elderly people, individuals facing extreme poverty) deserve better treatment, and scholars ought to be very careful about the choices they make, and to ensure that they do not engage in extractivism.
We were concerned and continue to be worried about scholars who write about marginalized communities (and interview them, and engage in participant observation) who may not properly follow ethical procedures that ensure that these communities are protected/well treated.
Our article is not intended to be the final word on how to ethically engage in ethnography of vulnerable communities, but at least, as a starting point for an important conversation. We hope the conversation continues, and that's why we published a methods piece. </fin>
