Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge

• In Event: 197 - Regular Session. Ethnography/Ethnographic Studies

Abstract

Despite the widespread nature of sexual harassment during ethnographic research, this issue is rarely addressed in courses and literature on qualitative research. Why is this the case? What are women ethnographers’ experiences of harassment in the field? How do these experiences shape their research? Based on 47 in-depth interviews, our paper examines how women ethnographers' embodiment requires that they frequently confront their bodies as both contested sites and sexualized objects while in the field. Our findings suggest that many women feel unable to discuss their experiences openly with colleagues and peers for fear that their data will be considered biased, polluted, or illegitimate. We suggest that our discipline as a whole has remained silent regarding sexual harassment in the field due in large part to enduring positivistic and patriarchal assumptions upon which ethnographic methodology is still predicated. Our analysis focuses on the common and frequent occurrence of sexual harassment in ethnographic fieldwork, the failure of the discipline to talk about it, and what both of these mean for the construction of ethnographic knowledge.

Authors

• Patricia Richards, University of Georgia

• Rebecca Annice Hanson, University of Georgia-Athens