‘Wearing down of the self’: Embodiment, writing and disruptions of identity in transformational festival fieldwork

Abstract

Immersive ethnographic research can be profoundly destabilising for researchers' sense of identity, and the attempt to inhabit and reconcile dual identities as researcher and participant can take a severe emotional toll. Prior to the reflexive turn in qualitative sociology, this identity work remained largely unacknowledged. Feminist critiques of positivist social science, along with personal accounts portraying the messy, chaotic aspects of research, have helped to create a new climate in which researchers can openly examine their identity conflicts and even recognise them as an integral part of their research. However, advice on navigating these situations remains somewhat limited. This article is a reflexive account of issues encountered while researching the practice of psychedelic support-the provision of emergency care to people undergoing drug-related crises-within the transformational festival scene in the United Kingdom, the United States and Portugal. Transformational festival settings are engineered to disrupt everyday experiences of identity and selfhood and induce emotional vulnerability. Thus, they throw issues of researcher identity and its management into sharp relief. Physically and emotionally intense fieldwork settings can bring about non-ordinary mental states in the researcher which can put habitual working practices and capacities out of reach. This effect contributed to a painful disjunction between my researcher and participant identities, which centred on the struggle to create linear, written narratives of largely embodied and non-verbal experiences. However, I found that the effect was somewhat mitigated by developing fluid, nonlinear, multisensory working practices and documentation methods which were more appropriate to the research setting and the mental states it induced. I conclude that ethnographers in intense or extreme field settings can benefit greatly from methods and tools which work even when we are out of our everyday minds.

A case study for a transformational festival creation in Lourinhã, Portugal

“…The questionnaire results suggest market potential and that transformational festival participants are more informed than nonparticipants due to their participation outside Portugal. The trademark rejection by these participants (Gauthier, 2013;Ruane, 2017) confirmed their preference for venues in nature and their preference for electronic dance music (TEDxTalks, 2011). From all the segments identified in the literature as attending transformational festivals (Gauthier, 2013;Yeganegy, 2012;Bottorff, 2015), bohemians and carnivalesque were not confirmed, the latter of which we believe is connected with the fact that one of the biggest carnivals in Portugal takes place in a nearby municipality, with high community participation.…”

Conceptualising safety and crime at UK music festivals

“…Within criminology and sociology, in the last decade researchers have turned their attention to large music festivals and dance club tourism as sites of transgression, liminality and intoxication (e.g. Bhardwa, 2013;Hesse and Tutenges, 2008;Morey et al, 2014;Ruane, 2017;Turner, 2018). Within this emergent field of Festival Studies, however, studies have rarely extended to an examination of gendered risks and experiences at music festivals and this has been undertaken predominantly by students (e.g.…”

Innovating the Craft of Phenomenological Research Methods Through Mindfulness

“…One was conducive to the other (Davies and Heaphy, 2011). Reflexivity is a core value of high-quality qualitative research which Subedi (2006) defines as the researcher becoming more open to, and accountable for, how they participate in the research and produce knowledge (Berger, 2015;May, 2010;Ruane, 2017). Bloor and Wood (2006) and Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2011) both use the word 'mindful' to explain the concept of reflexivity, stating that reflexivity 'encourages researchers to remain mindful that they themselves are part of the social world they study and should, therefore, consider how their own values and … experiences may influence their perceptions' (p. 23).…”

“…To an extent, the researcher does need to listen to their intuition and reflexively respond to the conversation in order to pose appropriate follow-up questions and shape the interview to gain the best possible data (Berger, 2015;Brown, 2010;Rowley, 2012). Moreover, at the same time, mindfulness can aid the semistructured interviewer in keeping thoughts and attitudes in check, which also helps the researcher in their embodied experience (Ruane, 2017). The judgement is of a different quality much more akin to the gentle attitude of non-judgemental curiosity advocated in DBT mindfulness.…”

“…It is a conscious choice which needs practice and awareness to develop (Berger, 2015;Chan et al, 2013;Subedi, 2006). Pillow (2003) even goes so far as to say that reflexivity, like mindfulness, is not a natural attitude and because of this fact, it pushes the researcher towards an unfamiliar experience, to challenge assumptions and operate in a space which is cognitively uncomfortable (Ruane, 2017). Certainly, DBT mindfulness skills find resonance theoretically and practically with developing the awareness needed to enact reflexivity providing a solution and allows more abstract understandings to unfold (Hammond, 2018), which are indeed core elements of qualitative and phenomenological research.…”