Going Back and Giving Back: The Ethics of Staying in the Field

Abstract

This article analyzes the benefits and ethical dilemmas of going back and continuing to write about the troupe of drag queens featured in our book, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret. The benefits include providing the drag queens the opportunity to revise and add to the stories we told about them and, through deepening friendships, changing the balance of power among us. Challenges include dealing with responses to the book, including those of family members, and conflicts over the royalties we shared with the troupe. Despite the pitfalls, going back contributes to public sociology by continuing conversations about research findings.One day, out of the blue, seven years after the publication of our book, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (Rupp and Taylor 2003), we received an email from a Key West resident we don't know: "Great book. I have what might appear to be a dumb question; do you have a favorite drag queen currently performing at the 801?" he asked. It was a question we could not have answered had we not remained "in the field" since we finished the project, and it reminded us how much staying involved with the drag queens we studied has shaped what we continue to write. Most of the time, the relationship between researchers and the researched ends when the project is finished-or, in the case of feminist research, participatory action research, or other methods sensitive to ethical responsibility to the researched-when the final product is shared with the subjects of the research. But sometimes the relationship continues, either Qual Sociol (2011) 34:483-496

Representing Gender and Sexual Dissidence in Southern Africa

“…I initiated this new project in part to understand the cultural, temporal, and national specificity of political homophobia in different African nations and to undermine racist assumptions that Africans are homophobic (Epprecht 2008). Although I am not currently "in the field" in the ways Barton (2011), González-López (2011, and Rupp and Taylor (2011) are, I am reminded of how representational ethics affect qualitative researchers engaged in conventional fieldwork and those of us who are not in the field (Einwohner 2011). In my current research on political homophobia in sub-Saharan African nations, I remain mindful of how digging in SWAPO's past for evidence of homophobic rhetoric has revived some of the same ethical dilemmas that emerged in my ethnographic research on LGBT organizing in Namibia and South Africa.…”

The Ethics of Researching Friends: On Convenience Sampling in Qualitative Management and Organization Studies

“…We joke around about it but I don't really understand the concept of exploitation. We're smart people’ (quoted in Rupp and Taylor, , p. 487). My respondent Madeleine agrees: ‘I was perfectly fine about the whole thing’, she wrote to me,

and think that for you and for us (researchees) there [were] two entirely separate things going on but I didn't feel a conflict at all – [I] simply felt we would speak about stuff and you would then do your thing with it.

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“…Neal and Gordon, likewise, note that their research with friends ‘will continue to be part of our lives and of the lives of the women who shared information with us’ (2001, paragraph 34). So the usual assumptions that research fields are ‘there’ or ‘elsewhere’ (Browne, , p. 134, following Sparke, ) – or that researchers leave the empirical site ‘when there is little else to learn’ (Rupp and Taylor, , p. 484) – do not apply to my situation. I think the same is true of any MOS scholar who has pre‐existing and enduring connections with their respondents, because everyone involved must live with the eventual research text(s).…”

Beyond the Field: Ethics after Fieldwork in Politically Dynamic Contexts

“…Travel to Crimea (via Russia) is also illegal from a Ukrainian perspective making future travel to Ukraine problematic. 61 Rupp and Taylor 2011, Huschke 2015. 62 Carapico 2006.…”