ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to help researchers focused on gaining a lived, everyday, personal, and/or intimate understanding of the lives of those operating in secretive environments. It offers practical advice on how researchers can access the secrets. The chapter outlines perhaps the most broadly applicable method suitable for this purpose: ethnographic interviewing and re-enactment. The challenges in accessing lifeworlds are multiple. For researchers seeking ‘micro’ level insights into secretive domains, however, accessing these lifeworlds can be crucial. The process of self-declaration is then about broadening our understanding of how secrecy is maintained by connecting the lifeworlds of its practitioners back to our own. Gaining ethnographic access to the worlds of intelligence agents, military practitioners, police forces, major corporations, and beyond, is often equally difficult. Indeed, literal re-enactments are often an important part of the ethnographic-interview process, emerging either at the request of the researcher or spontaneously.
