Ethnography On-the-Go: Youth, Mobility, and Queering the Research Process

• In Event: 44.069 - New Approaches to Queer Methodologies in Education: Engaging the Queer Research Process

Abstract

This paper examines the methodological implications of an ethnographic study about the everyday experiences of trans, queer, and genderqueer youth (TQG). Specifically it centers on issues that arise when the chosen field of study involves researching in times and spaces that challenge normative ideas about where research should take place and how research should be done. The focus on everyday experiences of young people necessitates centering times where youth are moving between the spaces of school, home, and work and when they are outside of the view of adults charged with their oversight and care. This project builds upon qualitative research in education about TQG youth that moves away from a focus on their experiences in schools to examine their experiences in other educational and youth spaces, on the streets, in public spaces, and online (Brockenbrough & Boatwright, 2013; Cruz, 2011; MacIntosh & Bryson, 2007; Reck, 2009).

The theoretical framings of this study insist schools, research, and policy would benefit from loosening their desire to know exactly who TQG youth ‘are’ (Airton, 2013; Gilbert, 2014; Talburt, 2004) in order to better appreciate that youth and knowledge about them is always on the move and in the making. As such, the methodological orientations of this project were designed with similar mobility. Employing the method of “go-alongs” (Kusenbach, 2003), a combination of qualitative interviewing and ethnographic participant observation, I accompanied and talked with youth as they moved through their everyday lives. I performed almost 40 go-alongs with 11 youth (ages 18-23) which included: taking public transit to and from home, school, and work, helping move between group homes, going to the gym, grocery and clothes shopping, and hanging out in public libraries and parks. By moving with youth through these locations this study explores times and spaces where knowledge about TQG youth is produced.

This research project’s mobility differs from ethnographies of youth communities that are often situated inside of schools or youth centers. This paper accounts for potential ethical quandaries raised by the utilization of this method, including: what does it mean for the researcher to move through society with youth participants without the being accompanied by adults?; how do passersby appraise the relationship between researcher and participant?; does the presence of the researcher in the participants’ daily lives put them at risk, make them safer, or both? Given the differential of power dynamics imbued within traditional approaches to researcher/researched relationship, I work “from a relational perspective, [where] the researcher is one who becomes in the process of inquiring alongside another” (O’Donoghue, 2013, p. 403). This becomes especially important when accounting for privileges attached to my whiteness, maleness, educational status, and gender presentation as compared to my participants who were predominately of color, trans and gender non-conforming, and homeless or precariously housed. Such a focus on mobility, both theoretically and methodologically, allows for new ways to encounter and learn from TQG youth in the research process.

Author

• Sam Stiegler, The University of British Columbia