Critical ethnography. Feminist ethnography. Auto-ethnography

Critical ethnography

The critical ethnographic approach openly encourages researchers to dig under- neath everyday meanings and look for significant events that reveal underlying structures of power and control. For instance, researchers could look for the details in significant meanings and events that might indicate the motivations for and the responses to everyday instances of classism, racism, sexism and other forms of domination. Researchers are encouraged to discover precisely how people are subjugated – in the sense of their rights, life chances and expressions of their own culture – by dominant social groups. Classic critical ethnographies, such as Willis’s (1981) exploration of class in school and work and Street’s (1992) exploration of how daily conflicts related to structural power bear down on nurses’ autonomy, focus on underdogs to expose power relations, methods of subjugation and struc- tural imbalances in social relations. The ensuing ethnographic data and analysis can inform policy and encourage activism amongst the subjugated, with significant reform or social transformation in mind. Problems in this approach include the assumption of the subjugated as passive victims (Fleetwood, 2014) rather than already active resistors, and the possibility that the rhetoric of ‘empowerment’ gives the subjugated false hope for the resolution of problems that require more funda- mental political intervention in economy and society.

Feminist ethnography

This approach is associated with critical ethnography, but researchers are encouraged to discover in fine detail how historical and structural subjugation specifically affects women’s lives, an approach that should be distinguished from traditional ethnogra- phies that happen to be conducted by women. For instance, McLintock (1995) examines the experiences of South African women in the structures of race and gender in the context of a declining British imperialism. Some feminist ethnogra- phers argue that there is a natural or perhaps cultural affinity between women and qualitative data, and an orientation to regarding people as humans rather than num- bers (see O’Reilly, 2009). Some also suggest that women are notably adept at forging equal and appreciative relationships with participants and conducting all interactions in a warm and receptive rather than an interrogative manner (2009). Like critical ethnographers, feminist ethnographers are open about the theoretical assumptions and cultural identity politics that give purpose to their work (see Scheper-Hughes,

1993). However, because these assumptions and political positions tend to essential- ize women and be resistant to critique, it is questionable whether feminist ethnographic research conforms to the principles of inductive research that some argue should be the norm in the ethnographic approach.

Auto-ethnography

This is quite new to criminology. However, the use of personal experience in the gathering and analysis of data has a fairly long history (Wakeman, 2014), so the term ‘auto-ethnography’ could be criticized as an unnecessary neologism. Hallsworth’s (2013) auto-ethnography uses recollections of his personal experience of life on the streets in the 1970s and 1980s to question the ontological claim behind the ‘gangland’ thesis. Do ‘gangs’, he asks, actually exist as positivists and realists describe them? He argues that we see arboreal (static and tree-like) gangs rather than transient and nomadic networks because of our historical tendency to think like that. However, to counter the claim that gangs exist he draws on moral panic theory, which is not really using unaffected personal experience to provide a fresh inductive analysis but simply claiming that the opposing nomadic metaphor is correct because that’s the way the theory suggests we should see it. Some argue that this approach is self-indulgent and inappropriate in its over-generalization of limited singular experiences (see O’Reilly, 2009), and that memories are not reliable repre- sentations because they come into operation after the experiences they are supposed to represent (Winlow, 2014). There is no way to verify data that exist exclusively in the memory of the researcher, and it could be argued that a third party would be able to evaluate data and theoretical concepts in a more balanced way. However, Wakeman (2014) claims that the researcher’s own personal experiences and beliefs have always influenced the researcher; therefore ethnography has always been, to some extent, auto-ethnographic. Because of the difficulty of access that plagues criminological ethnography, auto-ethnography could prove valuable in the future.