Ethnographers often find themselves wrestling with choices about their relationship with respondents: choices experienced by researchers engaged in many other methodologies. This article examines the agentic and political nature of those relationships using the notion of hyphen-spaces: a concept that offers a way of recognizing their complexity, making choices about how to position ourselves and work within them, and understanding the implications for research identities and practice. Drawing on Fine’s notion of “working the hyphens” and personal experience of ethnographic fieldwork in a tea plantation in Sri Lanka, we propose four hyphen-spaces of insiderness-outsiderness, sameness-difference, engagement-distance, and political activism–active neutrality. We believe an understanding of these relationships will help us become more informed and ethical researchers interested in engaging in different methodologies. Finally, we emphasize the fluid and agentic nature of researcher-respondent identities and the implications for practice.

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We argue that lived spaces play a crucial role in influencing how people can or cannot enact their agency. Based on an interpretive ethnographic study of work in a large Sri Lankan tea plantation and drawing on the conceptual lenses of relational agency and social ecology, we explore how workers experience their ability to act agentically in relation to their social circumstances and examine the personal and social consequences. In doing so, we extend conceptualizations of relational agency as a dialectic of belonging and not belonging within a social ecology – an ongoing flow of intertwined activities and ways of being and relating to each other that create and reproduce social orders and forms of accountability.