ABSTRACT
Disconcertment pinpoints the happening of concepts in ways that are problematic epistemically, ethically, culturally, and/or politically. Concepts here are seen as coming to life as entities, in particular sets of collective practices. Disconcertment brings moments of contention in situated knowledge-making and doing, into the foreground. The felt disturbance of disconcertment arises as epistemic discomfort and ethnographers can hone and tune that discomfort as an indicator of troubles. Ethnography pursued in mobilizing disconcertment is relationally experiential rather than empirical, since it does not gather data to test empirical assumptions. Relational experientialism evades the authorial displacement that necessarily characterizes ethnographic empiricism. Instead, inquiry made through the field-device of disconcertment has the concept of the knower who experiences trouble, embedded in the troubled concept as it becomes a known, as a multiplicity. The conceptualized knower is inextricably caught up within the very trouble they know. In being constituted within it, albeit in attempting to resist and/or subvert in naming, as conceptualized entity the ethnographer as knower as much as the known are one with the trouble in being changed by it.
