Doing Team Ethnography in a Transnational Prison

Abstract

This article has three main purposes: (1) To describe an in-prison methodology for measuring the moral quality of life, developed organically out of experience and necessity. It is conducted over an intense but exceptionally brief period of time. (2) To reveal and reflect on our intellectual methodology: how do we describe, think, interpret and theorise about prison life in our work together, especially in a transnational team? (3) Finally, to consider the benefits and challenges of collaboration and intense immersion across national boundaries, in a study of Norgerhaven prison in the Netherlands. We found that our own implicit prison moralities varied significantly, as we worked together to describe a prison that surprised us, and our participants, hugely.

Reflexivity of discomfort: Two women outsiders doing sport research in prison

“…This way they can share their fears, problems, or concerns with someone (Scheirs and Nuytiens, 2013). We thus confirm the strength of ethnographic research going hand in hand with group reflection, this relationship being fundamental, even more so in intense and complicated contexts such as prison (Liebling et al, 2021; Waters et al, 2020).…”

“…However, the fact that it was a recurring comment from male officials and directed at two young women, sparked our "scientific" intuition. That intuition referred by Liebling et al (2021), to verify that, indeed, it was not a simple anecdote. Our experience in this regard bears a certain similarity to that of Bosworth (1999) who stated that during her fieldwork in prison she was questioned about being a "proper" researcher because of her age and her status as a student.…”

On fieldwork in the hybrid field: A “methodological novel” on ethnography, photography, fiction, and creative writing

“…Nowadays, we should distinguish between 'team fieldwork'--when scholars work together--and we defined it as 'collaborative fieldwork' if one or more participant is invited to join the scholars to work and publish together. It is of course more complicated than that but you can refer to Doing Team Ethnography (Erickson and Stull, 1998;Liebling et al, 2021), to The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (Lassiter, 2005), and to Qualitative Research and Complex Teams (Davidson, 2019). Do you get why this last distinction is pretty crucial?…”

Conducting team ethnography with African migrants in Mexico: The dynamics of gendered and racialised positionalies in the field

“…After some snow-balling, she eventually got in contact with Carlos, a Mexican researcher, who—after a quick zoom meeting—agreed to work together in the project. Unlike other reflective studies on team ethnographies (Liebling et al, 2021; Markowitz, 2002), we did not know each other before, neither did we choose each other because of complementing factors in our positionalities, vis a vis the researched group. Carlos was a Latino Mexican social scientist without any research link to Africa.…”