Three days in the 'pool - Part 2

Notice how calling a post '...Part 1' cleverly implies there's a Part 2 and thus creates an obligation to provide it? See what I did there?

Spending time with lots of talkative, engaged and smart people both in presentation space and in the pub threw up all sorts of interesting ideas. Some of them are merely specific to my own work, some not. There was lots going on; it's taken me a few days to process and decide on what I really learned from the experience. So here goes: two relatively unrelated issues that I want to explore some more:

1) What happens when a queer researcher is doing fieldwork in a completely heteronormative space?

I really hadn't thought through the implications of being an out lesbian woman working in a maternity unit. This seems a bit of an oversight now: maternity units are overwhelmingly catering for heterosexual couples (of course not exclusively, but I didn't hear reference to a single queer woman during my time in either of the units I was spending time in). I also failed to find any lesbian or gay midwives and only perhaps one or two other healthcare workers who were either out (to me) or who I could identify by means of gaydar. The place is straight. Midwives gossip about their husbands and boyfriends, about their children and impending family weddings and, in attempting to keep up with the enthusiasm for wedding dresses, I passed.

I hadn't decided on an outing strategy before hand and, when faced with the realisation that perhaps I needed one, I opted for 'don't ask don't tell'. Then, in the one moment in the first unit when an 'ask' occurred, I bottled. I never lied; I just diverted the truth. The 'ask but didn't tell' moment felt significant for me. This was almost the first time I had done this in almost 10 years and I felt like I betrayed myself, my partner and the midwives who were trusting me with all sorts of their secrets. I was in a situation whereby I was trying to coax out other people's 'truths' about their lives; asking them to talk about themselves and what they care about and yet unwilling to do it myself. Things were a little easier in the second unit. It was smaller, I became closer to the people working there, I was more confident with what I was doing and they made it pretty clear they were easy with anything. I came out selectively but gossip will spread and I have absolutely no problem with that.

Being in an albeit temporary closet is not a familiar feeling for me and it's difficult to explain why I stayed inside. Perhaps those of you who work in similar places might understand what I'm getting at without having to dig around for a coherent explanation. I can't even find any academic articles about queer researchers' experiences doing research in straight places. There's lots on the advantages of being gay when doing research with gay people and one book 'Out in the Field' on gay anthropologists' stories of doing fieldwork, but at nearly 15 years old, things have moved on.

All I want is to read a shared story and now it looks like I'm just going to have to be the one who writes it.

2) Don't take your moral position for granted.

Tony Watson of Nottingham University was an outraged man. On stage he stood and, verging on tears, told us how during his time spent observing the life of a small family construction firm in England, the disreputable manager of the firm had run off with the wife of his contractor. The contractor had been abused and bullied by his boss, cheated out of money and, in the end, out of his relationship. Yes, it was a particularly masculine telling of the story; the women remained half-drawn as characters and as much as I liked Tony as a person, I would have pulled him up for that. But narrative failings aside, Tony had spent a lot of time with these families. He had come to know them well and through a long and drawn out tale of betrayal and anger, he tried to ask us what to do. Should he tell the story in published form as it was? Was this morally justifiable? How could he himself come to terms with his own feelings about the experience?

When it came to the audience discussion, one comment shifted my thinking in a way that I haven't experienced for some time. Rather than simply finding a way to deal with his outrage, Tony might choose to explore his moral position as historically and culturally situated, rather than simply taking a position of moral outrage. Why did Tony feel this way about the adultery? In that moment I realised how so often we assume our values are the way they are for a reason; that situations are essentially right or wrong. But when you think outside of yourself; when you look at yourself as someone born of a particular time and a political situation, your certainties begin to need justification. The joy of doing this kind of research, or simply of being able to see someone else's life so close up is that it allows you to understand your own, differently.

Three days in the 'pool - Part 1

This week I was in Liverpool: home of The Beatles, European Capital of Culture 2008, one time nurturer of slavery and, in the early 21st century, a really nice city. I thought it was great: a perfect mix of shiny new and decrepit, with quirky shops and bars and the many fruits of a committed investment in the arts this year (thanks to tonnes of money for the European Capital of Culture gig). The YHA youth hostel was also fantastic.

I feel bad for being surprised. My city has a reputation for being boring, ugly and industrial which I truly believe it only very slightly deserves. I am trying to remember not to diss until I have proof.

I enjoyed wondering around the city (I even went for an early morning run around the regenerated docks), but I was really there for a conference on the subject of ethnography. Ethnography for those of you as yet unenlightened, is a method of doing research whereby the researcher spends many hours, weeks, months and sometimes years integrating themselves into the culture of a village, school, hospital or any other area of a manageable size. You observe daily life, help out a bit and generally loiter with intent.

It has a dodgy history: steeped in colonialism and empire. Once upon a time ethnographers were those white guys who made trips into the jungle to observe the primitive lives of native savages. Here's Malinowski sort of demonstrating what I mean:

Things have moved on in so many ways. Yes, white guys still go into jungles to do research on people not like them, but these days with almost excruciating levels of reflection on ethics, power and ethnic difference. The discipline of anthropology has atoned for its sins by decades of penitence, guilt and reflexivity. People have begun to study cultures close to home: to make what they may have thought familiar, strange. The idea is that to truly understand people's daily lives (or at least their daily working lives), you need to pay attention to the tiny actions which no one notices because, well, they just do them. Think back to your time at high school: how many weird rules or happenings can you remember? I bet they all made perfect sense at the time but now....er....what were we thinking?

I think ethnography is a wonderful and very special method of research. It embraces uncertainty, bias, complexity, creativity and messiness. It doesn't try to order life in a way that it can never truly be ordered. In ethnographies, writing is seen as a craft, through which a picture of a tiny corner of life is painted. That painting is then used to help us understand whole other parts of the world. Like a little patch of purple on a mural which, if you notice it, suddenly makes you see all the other patches of purple where you never saw them before. The flip side is that you're left trying to craft a story from versions of the truth woven together, so complex you barely know where to begin.

The messiness and creativity in ethnographic research makes it open to attack for lacking such things as 'rigour' and truthtelling or that it's woolly and biased. I'm not going into why I think this is nonsense right now - explanations available on request; but to be in a space with 70 other people who all think ethnographic research is amazing is a rare and welcome treat.

I have also come to the conclusion that ethnographers are disproportionately extrovert people. Few shy people would put themselves through the experience of walking into somewhere and trying to persuade a large number of people to let them watch their work. Trust me, it's horrible. 70 extroverts in a confined space for three days with an enormous amount of free wine: fun, exciting, educational, hilarious, never dull but completely and absolutely exhausting.