Strategic Sites as a Tool of Ethnography for Political Science

• In Event: Reconsidering the Field: Researchers, Subjects, and Positionality

Abstract

Given that there is growing interest in ethnographic research in political science, we suggest that some ethnographers in the discipline might borrow from the ethnographic tools of other social sciences. We argue for the utility of the concept “strategic site” developed originally by the sociologist Merton (1987) as an important methodological tool for conducting and writing about ethnographic work. A strategic site is “the empirical material that exhibits the phenomena to be explained or interpreted to such advantage and in such accessible form that it enables the fruitful investigation of previously stubborn problems and the discovery of new problems for further inquiry (Merton 1987).” But there is no set list of what these sites might be, as they depend on the problems faced by the researcher at the time. Merton argues that these sites may be selected by the researcher or found serendipitously, but in any case, require “specifying ignorance” about a particular phenomenon beforehand. Merton’s process for selecting research material can aid the researcher to select a field site before beginning fieldwork, and it can also aid ethnographers in providing an explanation and rationale for the selection or discovery of a particular site, strengthening the arguments for research that does not strive for generalizability of results as their main goal. The concept of strategic site, as developed by Merton, is interesting in that it provides a language of science that is based on complex causality and the description of processes as a central aspect of science (such as what occurs in biology, which is the natural science used by Merton to develop this concept). We suggest that the concept of strategic site can help bridge methodological differences, which is a particularly important objective for a discipline with such methodological pluralism as political science.
The Mexican Initiative for Deferred Action (MIDA) project, housed at Baruch College (City University of New York), and headed by Dr. Robert Smith, is an ongoing, multi-sited, longitudinal, comparative ethnographic project examining the effects of lacking, gaining, and losing legal status among immigrants in New York State. Based on research conducted within MIDA, we show how the experience of driving while undocumented is a strategic site for studying numerous dynamics of immigrant inclusion/exclusion. In the paper, we use the concept of strategic site to show that driving while undocumented reveals a series of complex processes and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion for undocumented immigrants and their mixed-status families, advancing the study of institutional exclusion of immigrants in the United States. As previous research has shown (Epps et al. 2014; Baugmanter et al. 2018; and Seo 2019) police have great discretion when conducting traffic stops in the US. We show that immigrants fear interactions with the police because they can lead to deportation. We explain some processes whereby undocumented immigrants adapt to interactions with the police and also adapt their driving habits to avoid deportations. The paper shows how DACA, as it allows the children of undocumented people to obtain driver’s licenses, serves to attenuate exclusion while also transforming the role of immigrant children within the family. By illustrating the application of the strategic site as a tool for research, we hope to establish how other ethnographic political science research may benefit from the use of strategic sites to conduct fieldwork and report on results.

Authors

• Andres Besserer Rayas, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Robert Courtney Smith, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, and Sociology, Grad Center, CUNY