Riding shotgun – Front-seat research and the socio-material considerations of ethnography on the move

Introduction

In this article, we conduct an empirical exploration of the car, as a research space, from a socio-material perspective. Inspired by ‘the material turn’ (Mutlu, 2013), we illustrate the car’s thing-power as we study how the car influences the social interaction that takes place within it, including research itself. We explore how the car defines and mediates the relationship between the researched and the researcher and how it affects the researcher role. The symbiotic relationship between the car and the driver has transformed the material environment and the nature of sociality in late modern societies (Dant and Martin, 2001). Fincham et al. (2010: 10) suggest that ‘there is something different in social relations constituted in motion’ and that ‘data generated on the move is somehow distinct in character’. Different mobility practices thus influence the quality of relationships between people because mobility influences the sense of being connected to people (te Brömmelstroet et al., 2017: 3, 4). This illustrates that there is a relationship between research and context (McGuinness et al., 2010).

Comprehensive discussions of being connected through mobility are scarce. Different modes of transport, such as driving, riding, using public transport, cycling and walking, offer different conditions for social interaction (te Brömmelstroet et al., 2017) and, consequently, for doing research on – and within – such activities. Although ethnography has an obvious interest in place and space, these matters must be taken into consideration in more focused ethnographical approaches. While the car is a core object shaping social relations of mobility (Dant, 2004), research on life in cars is limited. Perhaps it is too trivial, ‘as a space not of state, city and politics’ (Laurier et al., 2008) but a space for more mundane activities. ‘The interior of a car is relatively small compared to other in situ research contexts (such as for example homes). Therefore, observers can barely keep themselves in the background. In field studies there is always the danger of influencing or biasing participants, this is even truer in the confined space within a car’ (Meschtscherjakov et al., 2011: 110). Accordingly, methodological reflections related to research conducted in the car cabin are needed to qualify such ‘research positions’ for various field explorations. By examining the car as a research space from a socio-material perspective, we aim to add to the various ethnographic methods to which the car is relevant. In addition, exploring the impact of researcher positions in car-based research may inform ethnographies within other limited spaces.

Methods and empirical material

We will draw on data derived from a research project on police work on mobile organised crime groups, predominantly based on observation of operational police who work in a specialised crime task force that conduct directed surveillance; however, they also work inside the police station, searching databases and helping out with certain investigative steps. The first author conducted participant observation for all aspects of the process (but mainly in cars) and, additionally, 45 recorded in-depth interviews with police officers about the investigation of such crimes. The use of various data sources has supported cross-checking and triangulation (Adler and Adler, 1994).

Mobile organised crime groups drive across police districts to commit crimes, making it more complicated for the police to catch them. This is due to the fact that collaboration across police districts is fairly limited. Directed surveillance of such mobile organised crime groups is often conducted by car. During our field work, the task force was focussing primarily on an organised criminal offender group that was specialised in stealing steering wheels and airbags from BMW cars. Consequently, we spent even more time than normal in cars when conducting directed surveillance. Similar to much research on policing (see, for example, Finstad, 2000) our observations were also made ‘from the inside’ of a car. However, as opposed to uniformed patrol cars, in which police officers act in pairs, car-based covert physical surveillance is primarily conducted by only one officer in a car at a time. In this ethnographic setting, there were only two people in the car involved, the operational intelligence officer and the ethnographer, and thus, it was natural for the latter to sit in the front-seat.

Even limited fieldwork may provide relatively large amounts of useful empirical material (Tjora, 2019), which was also the case in our study. While observation periods could be quite brief, the first author took certain steps to increase variation, driving with various officers, studying the surveillance of different types of crimes, and performing observation during both day- and nightshifts. The fieldwork provided a deeper insight into the phenomenon of car-based directed surveillance and how it is conducted, as well as how it was accounted for during spontaneous discussions between researcher and officer. The actual findings from the fieldwork are, however, not the topic of this article. Rather, the process of doing fieldwork in itself and how this was informed by being done in a car is our focus here.

The car as research space

This section explores the car as a research space from a socio-material perspective in general. As mentioned above, the empirical material consists of both recorded interviews and observations, including non-recorded in situ interviews which were more informal in unmarked police cars. The first author found that a benefit of conducting research in a car is that it is often quite self-evident where the researcher should sit. Only on rare occasions will a researcher be sitting in the front seat if there are two or more other people in the car. For this fieldwork, however, a police officer and the first author were the only two people in the car; and the obvious seating for the researcher would be in the front passenger seat. Obvious seating positions help researchers to slide naturally into the situations that are to be observed, without subtle negotiation or struggling to finding the proper position.

Our experience is that the people studied opened up more during the sessions in the car than in the formal interviews. This is, of course, partly because many participants consider informal conversations easier than formal interviews. However, because cars have an impact on social interaction (Fraedrich and Lenz, 2016), there are clearly other socio-material aspects related to the situation that contribute to this. The spatial arrangement of the car interior may influence social interaction, that is, the connection and dialogue that will naturally occur. First, the car facilitates social interaction internally if there are several passengers (Laurier et al., 2008; te Brömmelstroet et al., 2017): ‘once you add a passenger, cars become places of talk and places where the expectation, unlike an elevator, is that we will talk’ (Laurier et al., 2008: 7).

In our study, an audio recorder was not used in the car. Recording was intentionally avoided to enhance the socio-material benefits of the car as a research space, that is, the privacy of in-car conversations that it is not shared with others (Matsumura and Sumi, 2014). When in a car, there is never any possibility that someone can eavesdrop. Because many of the car conversations in our study concerned police methods, they are secret. The protection offered by the car setting was thus an advantage, contributing to the participants opening up. A recorder would reduce this feeling of secrecy and would have affected the informality of the process (Rutakumwa et al., 2020). Several of the participants spoke in more detail about police methods in the car as compared to during the formal interviews. Furthermore, in the car, one participant told the first author about what he and his close colleagues would call suspected members of mobile organised crime groups when they talked among themselves and added: ‘I will tell you this in the car, but I will never say it on tape!’. The informant knew that what was said in the car was also being registered as our empirical data, but his remark implies both that what is said on tape may be a more polished version and that the dialogue in the car is seen as less constrained. While the participants gave more comprehensive information during recorded interviews, which are often considered more formal, the non-recorded and informal car conversations contained accounts that were consistent with our observations, indicating validity.

One of the challenges we experience when conducting interviews is our tendency to too quickly fill in awkward silences with a new question, thus not giving the participant an opportunity to reflect further on the question and, perhaps, provide additional information. In contrast, the space for pauses and silent parts of the conversation that the socio-materiality of the car provided is cherished. As suggested by Ross et al. (2009: 619), social interaction that takes place on the move allows for unstrained gaps and pauses. When a conversation comes to a stop in a car, it is less socially awkward than when two people are sitting face-to-face, looking at one another. Research on in-car conversations shows that there may be plenty of pauses; however, they are often short because most time is spent talking (Laurier et al., 2008). When conversations came to a stop, the first author pretended to look at something outside to give the participant room to reflect and provide additional information before she continued talking. The socio-materiality of the car thus allows conversations about serious research topics that might generate pauses or situations in which pauses are needed but without pauses becoming uncomfortable, awkward or embarrassing (Laurier et al., 2008).

Another socio-material advantage of the car, as a research space, is related to the car as a place where the participants stay in place (Laurier et al., 2008), in contrast to office interviews with busy police officers, who must often interrupt interviews because of meetings or because they are called out on duty. In the car, the participants would remain seated; however, the researcher was also with them and could reap the benefits of the internal immobility of a car (Laurier et al., 2008). This provides the luxury of time and space to focus on the conversation.

Ingold (2011) claims that reflections regarding how the weather may influence research are surprisingly rare in ethnography. We suggest that weather and light conditions have important effects on social interaction and the relationship between researcher and researched. Most observations were conducted during January and February, during both the day and the night. At this time of year, the sun rises at approximately 9 (AM) and sets at 4 (PM) in Norway, and it was predominantly dark while we were driving. As suggested by Matsumura and Sumi (2014), in-car conversation may be affected by season, time of the day and weather. In our case, the darkness outside made the in-car conversations less transient, perhaps because the passing-points were less visible and the conversation was kept more strictly on topic. The fact that the car is surrounded by darkness reinforces the sensation of ‘the outside world’ being lost from within the capsule of the car (Slovenko, 2001; te Brömmelstroet et al., 2017), strengthening the feeling of proximity (Laurier et al., 2008) and isolated confidence in the social relationship within the car.

While we have argued for some of the benefits of the car as a research space, the mobility of a car (Laurier et al., 2008) may also lead to certain challenges for the research process. During the fieldwork, both the police officer and the first author knew that they were stuck with one another, often for several hours (the longest shift with one person was approximately eight hours), so both tried to make the best out of it. The participants were used to driving a great deal, and their familiarity with the setting provided a relaxed atmosphere, as well as, for the researcher, a significant level of authenticity.

Front-seat research

While the above discussion concerns how the socio-materiality of the car influences the car as a research space, it does not take into consideration how the researcher’s internal position and the number of other passengers may influence the fieldwork. The car interior can be divided into three areas: the driver’s area, the front passenger’s area and the back-seat area (Meschtscherjakov et al., 2011). The design of the interior of most cars indicates less consideration for the comfort of the back seats than that of the seats in front, such as the limited amount of personalisation and adjustment possibilities for the back seat (Meschtscherjakov et al., 2011). This indicates a hierarchy, which the interaction parties may read into the social situation unfolding in the car. Side-by-side indicates a more horizontal and equal relationship, while front/back indicates a vertical/hierarchal relationship. In the following, we argue that this affects the researcher role as sitting side-by-side ‘levels’ the relationship between the researcher and the researched. Further, we focus on what Van Maanen (1981) termed the front-seat observer, a term which he did not elaborate on. There are obvious differences in the behaviour of front- and back-seat passengers, for instance, in terms of how drivers and passengers go about organising talk and other social interactions (Laurier et al., 2008). Consequently, where the researcher is seated affects the research process.

As a researcher, the first author found it a relief not being under the gaze of her conversation partner during interviews. In the car, the rowed seating arrangements direct the gaze forward, not toward the other person (Ross et al., 2009), so when talking in a car, the portion of time spent face-to-face with direct eye contact is limited. There is much less mutual monitoring of faces during in-car conversation (Laurier et al., 2008), regardless of whether a researcher is in the front or back seat. There is a common focus of attention toward what is outside of the car, hence, a shared focus on objects as they pass by (Matsumura and Sumi, 2014). It is quite possible that the participants also experienced this as a relief and that this contributed to the relaxed feeling during fieldwork.

Lee and Ingold (2006) found that walking side-by-side may be experienced as a particularly companionable form of activity. This may transfer to sitting side-by-side in a car. Side-by-side, people will rarely make direct eye contact, at most inclining their heads only slightly towards one another (Ingold, 2011: 245). Nevertheless, when sitting side-by-side, both parties are in one another’s field of peripheral vision, and the one can keep track of the other’s movements and reactions (Downey, 2007). Furthermore, it only takes a small movement of the head to make eye contact quickly. The driver’s visibility in the peripheral vision was considered particularly beneficial for the first author when sitting in the front seat because she could keep track with the driver’s expressions more than the driver could keep track of hers. She did not have to have focus on the road and traffic, as opposed to the driver. Direct face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is considered far less sociable (Ingold, 2011). Crucially, when moving together, companions share virtually the same visual field, whereas in face-to-face interactions, each can see what is behind the other’s back, opening up the possibility for deceit and subterfuge. When the two parties sit and face one another, rather than moving along together, the parties appear to be engaged in a contest in which views are batted back and forth rather than shared (Ingold, 2011). When in a car, the situation is different for a back-seat researcher because the driver and the front-seat passenger would have to turn their heads and torsos to gain the sense of social interaction.

Sitting in the front seat, rather than in the back seat, allows the researcher to have the same focus of gaze as the police officer because the driver and front-seat passenger often have joint experiences (Laurier et al., 2008), although the professional gaze will differ between the observed police officer and the researcher (Lundgaard, 2019). One issue that appeared particularly interesting from the beginning of the fieldwork was the ‘directed surveillance gaze’, a concept drawing on the much-used term ‘the police gaze’ (Finstad, 2000). The directed surveillance gaze is the professional gaze covert police use to watch, follow, read and assign meaning to the behaviour of the people they are observing. It is a focused and concealed gaze, which may be demanding and require training. It becomes operational when information about a specific object or case is to be obtained (Dahl, 2019a). The directed surveillance gaze is characterized by tacit knowledge, and it is difficult to describe (Dahl, 2019b). Conducting directed surveillance from a car may be challenging because traffic situations vary and things happen quickly (Bjerknes and Johansen, 2009). When such complex situations occur, police officers will concentrate on other things than talking to the front-seat researcher.

Observation is a particularly beneficial method to obtaining information about routine conduct that includes elements of tacit knowledge. Several interviews had been conducted before the first observation, and the concept of the directed surveillance gaze emerged as an aha moment in the first author’s research. An aha moment is a discovery that opens up new possibilities for the research work at hand, an ‘empirical-analytical reference point’ (Tjora, 2019) that connects empirical observations and potential concepts, moving the research beyond what had been known up to that point (Simovska et al., 2017: 115). After this moment, the term ‘directed surveillance gaze’ was used actively in all dialogue with informants.

Further, we argue that front-seat research, to a larger extent than back-seat research, requires that the researcher give something of herself. It cannot be expected, when two people ride in a car that only one opens up and answers questions during an entire working day. Consequently, the researcher must also open up and accept a more (inter)active role. A front-seat researcher may then make use of the ‘normal’ expectations of a passenger who must respond and adjust to the driver’s mood and energy level (Laurier et al., 2008). In addition, front-seat research requires not only that the researcher opens up but also participates in (policing) activities. The next section focuses on what happens to the car, as a research space, when the researcher ‘calls shotgun’.

Riding shotgun: What do you have to give to get?

In this section, we argue that when a researcher takes front-seat research a step further, it may be termed ‘riding shotgun’. Originally, riding shotgun was used to describe the guard who sat beside a driver, ready to use his shotgun to ward off bandits. However, today, to ride shotgun means to sit in the front passenger seat of a car. Further, the phrase is used to mean giving actual or figurative support or aid to someone in a situation; hence, with riding shotgun comes some responsibilities. When riding shotgun in a car, the person sitting in the front passenger seat is expected to help navigate, provide the driver with snacks and/or be in charge of the music.

Front-seat research and riding shotgun are, of course, not mutually exclusive concepts; however, we argue that in the concept of riding shotgun, there is even more interaction between the researcher and the researched than in front-seat research. In this section, we explore this. Riding shotgun requires a role of ‘interactive observation’ (Tjora, 2019), which implies an even more responsive and potentially active role. When taking on an interactive (open) observation role, as the first author has done, asking questions along the way may provide much useful information. Such questions may be seen as single questions or spontaneous conversations, for example, ‘why did you do it like that?’ (Tjora, 2019: 64). The interviews provided leads for the observation, and the observation provided probes for the interviews. In this project, the interview guide was continually revised and improved, and questions from the field were incorporated into the more formal interview guide. Because some of the questions that were asked in the car were repeated in the more formal interviews, it was possible to relate the questions to what had been said in the car. Furthermore, it provided the possibility to relate questions to common experiences.

Riding shotgun provides the possibility of coming closer to the participant not only physically but also mentally. Despite willingness on the part of the police to participate in the research, there were different attitudes on the part of the participants about having a researcher in the car. When one of the participants was asked what he thought about it, he responded, honestly, that he was initially resistant but had been instructed to participate by his leader. Paradoxically, this participant became the one who opened up the most. At the end of the ride, he said, ‘This was a really nice trip, and I’m sorry for the ketchup effect’. By ketchup effect, he meant that we had met for the first time 10 h earlier (we spent 2 h in the station office and eight hours in the car) and that he was surprised he had told his entire life story and all his opinions about everything between heaven and earth, seemingly unfiltered, an example of the confidence and closeness created in the surroundings of a car cabin. As Castells (1996) has suggested, an enclosed space during travel increases social interaction depth inside the vehicle. The ketchup effect illustrates that the car is a space where intense feelings are generated, which Sheller (2004) calls ‘auto-emotions’. We argue that the ketchup effect is more likely to occur when the researcher is riding shotgun rather than conducting front- or back-seat observation. The proximity enabled by sitting in the front seat is crucial; however, we argue that to enable the ketchup effect, only two people should be in the car. Two people in the car allows a different kind of intimacy than when there are three or more people in the car and the researcher is relegated to the rear seat. To enable the ketchup effect, it is further necessary for the researcher to limit the unnaturalness of the situation by being an active collaborator in the work conducted by the driver and being willing to self-disclose. Such self-disclosure may have several beneficial effects on the relationship between the researcher and the researched. The content of self-disclosure may vary according to the situation and the research subjects. As with the relationship between nurses and patients, self-disclosure has the potential to transform the researcher–researched relationship, making it more open, honest, close, reciprocal and equal (Unhjem et al., 2018).

In police research, there are legal restrictions that limit what a researcher can do (Bacon and Sanders, 2016), as well as how interactive a researcher role may be. However, in her fieldwork, the first author was not a pure observer without any other tasks but was, rather, involved in various forms of interaction in terms of both conversation and assistance. This involvement in policing tasks illustrates the difference between being a front-seat observer and a researcher riding shotgun. One example of assistance would be keeping an eye on a door while the operational intelligence officer conducts electronical searches. Such participation took place from the first ride with the police officers conducting directed surveillance, as exemplified in the following field note:

We have tailed a car to a house a bit withdrawn from the road. The surveillance team needs the house number to be able to conduct a database search on the house. I am looking out of the window to see if the car is moving. All of the sudden, the officer next to me says, over the police radio to the rest of the team, ‘We will have the number in no time. The excellent agent Johanne will provide us with it.’ He leans over, opens my door, smiles at me and says, ‘Now, remember what I taught you. You always need a cover story!’ I walk into the snowy night and feel cold on the inside and the outside while I try to make up a cover story for walking down a dark road in the middle of the night in a town I have never been to before.

As Bacon and Sanders (2016) suggested, it was quite obvious that the police officer would send the researcher out partly to gauge her response and joke around. Even though others have had similar experiences (Bacon and Sanders, 2016; Loftus, 2010), the first author felt unprepared for this. In real life, it is not always easy to maintain the ethics of not mixing roles (Finstad, 2000), and research is, to a large degree, about dealing with the unforeseen (Tjora, 2019). Therefore, the first author dealt with this unprepared incident by doing as she was told. We argue that it is less likely that a back-seat researcher would be given such task, as suggested by Thrift (2004), who argues that auto mobility has produced its own embodied practice of driving and ‘passengering’. The social expectations of a front-seat passenger are very different from those of a back-seat passenger. Therefore, the first author continued to assist the police officers in various ways, even when she did not feel prepared to do so, intentionally taking her researcher role a step further, from being a front-seat observer to riding shotgun. This illustrates the importance of the researcher role being interactive and improvisational. Like Bacon and Sanders (2016: 164), the first author found the potentially dangerous aspects of doing fieldwork with the police thrilling and found that ‘coming from an academic background, where the risk of a paper cut is as bad as it gets, the thrill of the chase and the chance of a violent alteration were a welcome break from vegetating in front of a computer screen.’ However, the assistance continued not only because it was found to be thrilling but because it helped limit the unnaturally passive observational role. An interactive researcher role often includes a natural attitude, including helping with small practical things or participating in informal chats, that is, behaving like any normal human being would (Tjora, 2019: 60). We argue that this interactive researcher role is enhanced when fieldwork is conducted in a car, especially when the researcher is in the front seat. Drivers impulsively call on passengers for help in executing certain challenging manoeuvres (Laurier, 2005), regardless of the passenger being a researcher. Furthermore, assisting with various small tasks opened up the possibility of an embodied experience of surveillance work, providing a deeper insight into this particular kind of police work (Field-Springer, 2019).

Conducting assistance challenges the researcher role, blurring the line between observation and participation, that is, between front-seat research and riding shotgun. This suggests ethical restrictions that are somewhat unclear but must be maintained by the researcher. It is important to have a conscious but flexible approach to research ethics that recognises the complexity of the field (Norris, 1993). Sitting in the car with the officers conducting directed surveillance, the first author could utilise the observer’s movement strategically and move along with the observed. We suggest that riding shotgun has allowed not only ‘ride-along’ but ‘work-along’ observation (Kusenbach, 2003: 466–476), or, more specifically, a mild variety of ‘surveil-along’, as another form of ‘dynamic observation’ (Tjora, 2019). When riding shotgun, the front-seat passenger is expected to support the driver in their primary task, as well as balance this with being a ‘potential source of distraction’ (Meschtscherjakov et al., 2011: 106). If the police were looking for a white Volvo, the first author would tell the driver if she saw it. This implies that she has taken on the interactive shotgun role. The first author has not only been observing the police conducted surveillance but also ‘surveilling-along’. Some would claim that this is influencing the field to be studied too greatly; however, when riding shotgun, the researcher will, in practice, as a natural attitude, assist the driver. Furthermore, riding shotgun is based on a hypothesis of reciprocity; if you give, you get (Mauss, 2002). The researched gives the researcher a gift in the form of information. The act of giving creates a social bond, with an obligation to reciprocate on the part of the recipient (Mauss, 2002). Accordingly, after spending a great deal of time together in the intimacy of the car, it becomes only natural that the researcher also opens up, provides personal information and assists with various tasks. Furthermore, it must be assumed that having a researcher present is occasionally seen as a bit of a hassle because the socio-materiality of the car for the officer requires different situational ethics and researcher roles. It is easier to decline to help officers when conducting back-seat research, both due to the social expectations of the person riding shotgun and the social/physical distance to the person in the back seat. This illustrates the embodied interaction in the car.

Furthermore, ‘surveilling-along’ made it possible to benefit from both observation and interviewing because it made visible how officers interpret and use the physical and social arenas when conducting directed surveillance. It allowed access to the officer’s perceptions, understanding, emotions and interpretations of situations as they arose while conducting directed surveillance (cf. Kusenbach, 2003: 466–476). As suggested by Fassin (2013) and Lundgaard (2019), placing oneself in the same situation as the observed actor, the first author would attempt to think like the police officers she studied. This close and interactive observational role contributes to understanding participants’ actions, considerations and practices. Walk-along interviews are often touted as enabling researchers to gain an understanding of people’s embodied relationship with place (May and Lewis, 2019), but they also enable an understanding of people’s embodied relationship to space. Surveilling-along in a shotgun researcher role also helped in gaining a deeper understanding of the use of space in surveillance practice, for example, the bodily experience of maintaining the appropriate distance from an object under surveillance (Dahl and Svanæs, 2020). As Balkmar (2012) pointed out in a study on the relationship between men and cars, by going into the car and driving far too fast, he became bodily aware of what the participant had talked about during the interview. Conducting police work is beyond the role of the researcher; however, as pointed out by Mac Giollabhuí et al. (2016), sometimes, ‘the organizing principle of surveillance – the imperative to maintain the secrecy of an operation – had a marked impact on our ethnographic experience, which eroded significantly our status as non-participant observers’. This is similar to our experiences during fieldwork, in which an acceptable ethical line was difficult to draw. One example from the first author was as follows:

We are in the car outside an apartment building. The officers need to know which floor the two people we have tailed stay in, and discuss over the radio how to do it without making the suspects suspicious. The officer with whom I ride says, ‘We can send Johanne in. She won’t look suspicious because she doesn’t look like a cop!’

With a couple of extra kilos and thick glasses, the police officer is certainly correct that the first author does not look like a typical Norwegian police officer ¹ and that it is easier for her to chameleonize. Chameleonizing is when a person is observing someone and wants to blend in with their surroundings by adapting their appearance and behaviour to resemble the people in the vicinity (Dahl, 2019a). As a consequence, if the potentially suspicious suspects who were under surveillance had seen only the first author, there would not be a risk of the operation being blown. Bacon and Sanders (2016: 166) had similar experiences: ‘A physical appearance like mine made me something of an asset during covert operations because I was able to make the detectives look less conspicuous’.

Riding shotgun might require a slightly more flexible perspective on research ethics as participating and giving assistance to those observed is a way to adopt a legitimate observer role in the setting of a car, where it feels unnatural to have a researcher merely hanging around to study what is happening (Tjora, 2019). This may be experienced as awkward for the professionals being observed, as well as for the researcher. Also, in organisational ethnographies, researchers may feel that they take up an ‘awful lot of room ‘socially’ and may feel uncomfortably visible and intrusive (Tjora, 2019: 62). By calling shotgun and interacting like any other ‘normal’ front-seat passenger, that is, surveilling-along, the first author attempted to slide naturally into the situations that were to be observed (cf. Tjora, 2019). In that sense, there are similarities between being a researcher and being a police officer conducting directed surveillance; both want to slide into a situation naturally. In order not to attract too much attention, both must chameleonize. Obviously, the difference is that a police officer conducting directed surveillance is doing this secretly, while the researcher’s presence and mission are known by the observed police officers.

The relevance of car-situated research

In this article, we have studied the car as a research space from a socio-material perspective. The car’s particular materiality, together with the fact that the car is in motion, shapes the interactions that take place within it. We argue that this affects the researcher role and that the spatial position in the car further affects the researcher role. Therefore, we have further explored how the researcher’s spatial position in a car may influence the researcher role. We have presented the concept of being a researcher riding shotgun. We claim that, when riding shotgun, the researcher role is, to a larger degree, affected by reciprocity: a more interactive role in relation to the driver emerges as a natural attitude. Further, we argue that riding shotgun increases the researcher’s chances of obtaining valid data due to the mutual trust that the intimacy of the car capsule provides for two people.

With this article, we wish to increase awareness about conducting research in the car as a field in order to make researchers as prepared and conscious as possible. We have illustrated the importance of taking embodied and spatial issues into consideration when conducting ethnographic research, specifically research in cars. The very confined arrangement of the car interior, as well as how it affords potential research positions, points towards an increased sensitivity to the material-spacious potentialities of car-based research. While the police car has been the empirical starting point of this article, the benefits of the car, as a research space, are not limited to the police car. They may also be applicable to other professional groups on the move, such as other emergency workers, service personnel, transporters or journalists. Our experiences point to the wider exploration of experimental research settings, which may provide a vast array of interactive researcher roles and an increased awareness of the very detailed positioning of the ethnographer. When fieldwork requires close physical proximity between the researcher and the researched, acceptable levels of social interaction and participation need to emerge to maintain productive and ethically sound field relations. On the one hand, this may require a willingness to improvise, but on the other hand, this often follows from the natural attitude of being a human being. It follows from our analysis that an expanded reflection on researcher roles needs to be added in the literature on ethnography.