ABSTRACT

Fieldwork and ethnography are increasingly part of the lexicon of methods and methodologies for security studies, offering distinct advantages as well as contradictions for feminists looking to see gender at work in the world of security. Fieldwork is an umbrella that covers a wide variety of research methods: in-depth interviewing and oral history, participant observation, collaborative data analysis, reflective writing or field journaling, among others. The chapter describes conflating fieldwork with ethnography, as many others do, a methodology drawn from the discipline of anthropology. Anthropology, the discipline with which ethnographic fieldwork is most intimately associated, provides a methodological literature that is also conscientiously caught up in ethical debates, in large part due to well-placed criticism that the practice of ethnography has undergone for its historical ties to colonialism. Edward Bruner argues that the genesis of ethnography stems in part from an "imperialist nostalgia", which longs for the cultures decimated by the colonial project.