BEING REALLY THERE AND REALLY AWARE: Ethics, politics and representation

This chapter will explore the ethics and politics of ethnographic research; how such issues emerged within the social sciences and why they shifted from marginal concerns to central methodological issues, particularly in relation to ethnographic fieldwork. It will draw on a range of examples from within sociology and criminology. Within this, it is important to consider how researchers confront ethical issues and what strategies they use to incorporate consent, representation and empowerment within their research on the social world. This chapter will ask what the ethical and political implications are of doing ethnographic research and why we should choose to conduct such research; it will also consider examples of unethical work to illustrate the possible consequences and impact this can have. These questions underpin all research which takes the daily life of human participants as its key focus. A critical ethnography which is aware of social dimensions and relations of research, does not come simply or easily.