The use of force 1

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

“…I have learned that different field-work approaches––photography and social science––allow us to explore and document society differently, adopting different points of view and research tools. I also learned that any approach can learn a lot from one another (Becker, 1974, 1981) and that «qualitative research [could] be understood as art and method» (Flick, 2014: 531), as bricolage (Gariglio, 2017; Kincheloe, 2005) and as montage (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003) or, which I would suggest, as a photographic sequence. My taken-for-granted understanding of field and work were too anecdotical and naïve; but I also learned that methodological knowledge can be challenged to avoid the reification of traditional approaches addressing «the “difficulty of escaping customary habits of seeing and thinking”» (Jones et al, 2010: 479).…”

“…Rethinking my ways of using pictures, I can now see that exploring society with the goal of documenting it is a very rich, complex task than can be achieved only partially. Rather than dismissing the knowledge produced by documentary photography, I would suggest taking the medium of photography seriously in order to enrich our capacity to translate the world into a text engaging with the senses, combining words and images, as Howard Becker and Doug Harper have shown (Gariglio, 2016, 2017), remembering that neither words nor photographs are “innocent,” and the active role of readers and spectators should also be considered. My experience suggests bearing in mind that: (1) any phenomena can potentially be documented both offline and online, and we have to learn new modes of inquiry to adapt our practices to these new circumstances; (2) doing documentary fieldwork alone as a “lone wolf” is neither the only nor the best way to do it, even if it remains the most common.…”

“…To conclude, looking backwards at the solo-traditional ethnography I conducted in a total institution (Gariglio, 2017), I can underline two significant traits I would now address differently, not having considered them thoroughly thitherto. The first refers to my solo approach.…”