ABSTRACT
The idea of a collaborative ethnographic practice seems almost counter-intuitive in a research environment in which the ‘reflexive’ turn has led to an ever greater focus on the individual relationship between researcher and research participants and the capacity of the individual researcher to account for the personal ‘baggage’ they bring to the field. As demonstrated in Chapter 10, relationships with research participants are complex and emotionally charged and their negotiation requires not only ‘reflection’ but sustained emotional labour. Team-based research can be helpful in this respect, as it provides an intellectually and emotionally supportive environment for individual researchers. At the same time it can generate claustrophobic situations, limiting the space for individual reflection. It also brings with it additional sets of relationships (researcher-researcher, ‘other’ researcherresearch participants) that must be managed. This becomes particularly problematic when writing up the research, since the ‘self’ that constructs, and is constructed through, the text must retain credibility not only with the reader (including potential participant-readers) but also with research colleagues who may be profoundly implicated in the construction of this ‘self’. Notwithstanding these challenges, this chapter suggests that the precariousness of subjectivity experienced in conducting team-based ethnographic research should not be seen primarily negatively, as distorting the research relationships for which the researcher ‘accounts’ through reflection. On the contrary, it can help avoid the fetishisation of individual reflections on fieldwork and help enact reflexivity as a process of placing ourselves as researchers within rather than outside the social relations of research.
