Across the Rifts: Intimate Possibilities in Qualitative Research

• In Event: Witnessing From/Within Intimately Critical Perspectives

Abstract

In this methodological reflection on the affective experience of ethnographic research, I consider love’s capacity to re/shape the relationships adult researchers forge with the young people we study. Re-analyzing fieldnotes from the school-based Beyond Bullying Project (Gilbert, Fields, Mamo, and Lesko 2018) as an account of methodological choices, I trace, on one hand, my hope that people in the school settings will embrace Beyond Bullying and me and, on the other, my recurring encounter with love’s opposites—antagonism and indifference. I argue that witnessing the hope and disappointments that thread through my fieldnotes is crucial to recognizing the ways white scholars cannot help but occupy the racialized imaginary of “we and they” that organizes U.S. schooling (Dumas 2014, p. 20).

Author

• Jessica Fields, University of Toronto Scarborough