Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Do No Online Harm: Balancing Safeguarding with Researchers and Participants in Online Research with Sensitive Populations
- 2 The Ethical Challenges of Researching Sexting with Children and Adolescents
- 3 Responding Reflexively, Relationally, and Reciprocally to Unequal Childhoods
- 4 Researching Children’s Experiences in a Conflict Zone and a Red-light Area: Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in India and Kashmir
- 5 Capturing Narratives: Adopting a Reflexive Approach to Research with Disabled Young People
- 6 Youth Social Action: Shaping Communities, Driving Change
- 7 A New Panorama of Child Voice in the Child Protection Context
- 8 A Bump on the Head in the Graveyard: Palimpsests of Death, Selves, Care, and Touch
- 9 Owning Our Mistakes: Confessions of an Unethical Researcher
- Index
9 - Owning Our Mistakes: Confessions of an Unethical Researcher
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Do No Online Harm: Balancing Safeguarding with Researchers and Participants in Online Research with Sensitive Populations
- 2 The Ethical Challenges of Researching Sexting with Children and Adolescents
- 3 Responding Reflexively, Relationally, and Reciprocally to Unequal Childhoods
- 4 Researching Children’s Experiences in a Conflict Zone and a Red-light Area: Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in India and Kashmir
- 5 Capturing Narratives: Adopting a Reflexive Approach to Research with Disabled Young People
- 6 Youth Social Action: Shaping Communities, Driving Change
- 7 A New Panorama of Child Voice in the Child Protection Context
- 8 A Bump on the Head in the Graveyard: Palimpsests of Death, Selves, Care, and Touch
- 9 Owning Our Mistakes: Confessions of an Unethical Researcher
- Index
Summary
Introduction
When I started my PhD in social anthropology my fellow students had pinned a cartoon to the wall with the title ‘The Post-Modern Anthropologist’. It was a picture of an old-school anthropologist, in a pith-helmet, talking to an informant. Under the title there was a speech bubble coming out of his mouth, which read ‘That’s enough about you, let’s talk about me.’ It rather neatly encapsulated some of the dilemmas of doing fieldwork at that time. On the one hand there was a welcome reflexive turn within the discipline where the role and the responsibilities of the researcher were called into question, yet, on the other, a worry that this sort of reflection could lead to insularity and navel gazing and a greater concern with the anthropologist’s own feelings and experiences than those of informants.
I had chosen to do my PhD research on child prostitutes in Thailand, a topic which, with the naiveté and sense of invincibility that comes with beginning a project in your early 20s, I thought I could ‘sort out’. I believed that with the right methods, and indeed the right attitude, I could shed new light on the problem, change perceptions of how to intervene, and influence national and international policy. Backed up with an interest, and sincerely held belief, in children’s rights, what could go wrong? And indeed, in many ways it was a success. I found a small group of children relatively easily who were happy to let me spend time with them. I moved in with a wonderful NGO led by inspirational leaders who gave the children practical and emotional support and looked after me as well. Four years later I received my PhD and, as I got older, got scholarships, jobs, and promotions based, in part, on this initial work and my analyses of it.
Yet there was much I left unsaid and unexplored and which only now, with the benefit of long hindsight (and cynics might say with the benefit of a secure university post) that I have started to rethink and explore.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Critical Perspectives on Research with ChildrenReflexivity, Methodology, and Researcher Identity, pp. 157 - 171Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023