Abstract
The feminist criminological research process has focused on minimizing power imbalances between the researcher and the researched. Generally, this has meant adjusting an imbalance that assumes the researcher holds an absolute monopoly on power. According to feminist methodologies seeking to redress this, steps must then be taken to elevate the research subject in the relationship between researcher and researched. Gender alone, however, does not provide a sufficiently sophisticated lens through which to analyze power dynamics in ethnographic research. Both structural and situational factors will play a role in the researcher’s reception. In this article, I aim to move beyond the debate of whether a researcher causes harm. Instead, it is a manner of degrees. Drawing on my experiences from an ethnographic study of police, I argue that if the field of criminology better facilitates reflexive methods and allows the researcher to reflect on how her own background may bias her conclusions, we may minimize this harm to some degree.
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17 January 2023
The original online version of this article was revised due to author's ORCID number removal.
Notes
A term that quickly becomes familiar to all budding ethnographers, a “gatekeeper” is an individual within a group or organization that assists—or perhaps even controls—the process of accessing a researcher site and interviewees.
The Patten Commission, constituted to address police reform, produced its report and recommendations in 1999. Northern Ireland has strived to meet those recommendations in the subsequent decades.
Because this article focuses on reflexivity and autoethnography, there is simply not sufficient space to include more than a cursory discussion of system-level bias as presented here. Nevertheless, academic institutions and researchers alike could benefit from more robust analysis of such bias—if any. Such an analysis may more easily engender productive conversations around methodology and inclusivity in the field and in knowledge production, more broadly, and certainly should not be limited to the rather limited binary gender analysis touched on in this article.
Indeed, I became such a “known” quantity in policing circles on Twitter that I ultimately ended up deleting my account following the close of my research.
I included the description of my experiences in my PhD thesis because I consider it important that there is a record of them. I also believe that other researchers need to be aware of and prepared to deal with such issues which, in my view, will inevitably arise in certain contexts, and such researchers should be empowered to make an informed decision regarding their own safety and the challenges facing them in research. That said, I feel strongly that such issues cannot be allowed to become a smokescreen behind which female researchers are excluded from certain research environments or have their observations and findings invalidated.
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Ball, K.M. Object not Agent: Reflexivity and Violence in Police Research. Crit Crim 29, 237–252 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-020-09506-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-020-09506-4