Stories from the Field: Collecting Data Outside Over There

Kritzer, Herbert M.

doi:10.1007/978-1-137-06573-5_9

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Inspired by a long tradition of ethnographic courtroom work (e.g., Clair, 2020; Conley & O'Barr, 1990; Walenta, 2020) we investigated why cases ended up in the magistrates' courts, and how people made sense of the courts as a space, a process, and an actor in the broader “life of the dispute” (Griffiths, 1998; Weeks, 2013). As such, we triangulated observations, interviews, and textual analysis of court documents to build an in‐depth understanding of the role and appeal of the law and courts in a context where people are stereotypically cast as “law avoiders” (Kritzer, 2002).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Maybe we should take the legal ways”: Citizen engagement with lower state courts in post-war northern Uganda

2022

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Lower state courts are the focus of both international and national access to justice policies and programs but remain understudied in Uganda. Drawing on 3 years of ethnographically informed research on citizen engagement with a busy magistrates' court in post‐war northern Uganda, we show the diverse reasons why citizens appeal to the rule‐of‐law in places where state authority is contested. In a context of limited statehood, against a backdrop of high‐levels of corruption and inefficiency in the judicial system, people turn to lower state courts for normative, pragmatic, and tactical reasons that are not well captured by conventional measures of procedural justice. Our findings extend theory on citizen‐authority relations in a global context, shedding light on contextual meanings of legitimacy, trust, and corruption in places where lower state courts are deeply problematic sites for achieving justice.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Maybe we should take the legal ways”: Citizen engagement with lower state courts in post-war northern Uganda

2022

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“…Participant observation, the method most associated with fieldwork, has always been combined with interviewing. But as Kritzer (2002) has pointed out, interviews and observations do not produce the same level of detail or even generate the same picture of the practices under study. Interviews are likely to generate less information about context than observation can because direct questions can only elicit what at some level the researcher already knows to be important.…”

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confidence: 99%