Researcher Safety? Ethnography in the Interdisciplinary World of Audit Cultures

Introduction

Researcher safety in ethnographic fieldwork is increasingly foregrounded through the discourses and systems of occupational safety and health (OSH), encountered through institutional guidelines and protocols. Such guidance and policy have framed the transdisciplinary travels of ethnography. Working across disciplines, ethnographic researchers are urged—through University lone worker policies, risk assessment forms, or ethical review—to plan for ensuring their safety when undertaking fieldwork. The rise of OSH as framing ethnographic practice is related to the broader institutionalization of research through regulatory frameworks of “anticipatory audit” (Strathern, 2000, p. 295). OSH governance seeks to anticipate and safeguard against future harm to selves, others, and organizations through systematic guidance.

Ironically, for anthropologists it does so through the application of frameworks that are informed by disciplinary behavioral theories that our own critical corpus contests. Discussions emerging in other disciplines, including examples in health care (Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, & Liamputtong, 2008) and social work (Ferguson, 2009, 2010), also contest these frameworks—particularly in the setting of the lone home visit for both practitioners and fieldworkers. They highlight a mismatch between institutional OSH guidance and actual practical risks. To contend with this regulatory context as ethnographers therefore means keeping a foot in the (interdisciplinary) field of safety research, from where we might contest such frames. This is a field where, Lingard, Pink, Harley, and Edirisinghe (2015) outlines, “Hale and Borys (2013) identify two approaches to achieving workplace H&S” (p. 741). The first is an anticipatory “‘top-down’ approach which emphasizes enforcing workers’ compliance with rules. When workers make errors these are attributed to individual behavioural issues, for example, laziness, complacency, or a tendency to take risks” (Hayes & Hopkins, 2014, p. 741). Hale and Borys nevertheless set out an alternative approach to worker safety. Rules are considered “dynamic” and “situated,” and workers “experts whose competence enables them to adapt rules to suit their particular situation” (cited in Lingard et al., 2015, p. 741). This approach is more aligned to ours. It therefore offers a reference point for a critical anthropological contribution, which supports revisionist stances in the interdisciplinary field of OSH literatures.

We do not dispute that “advance preparedness” (Bloor, Fincham, & Sampson, 2007, p. 4), or seeking to foresee potential hazards and establish parameters for appropriate action, can be an effective route toward ensuring researcher safety. This may be especially necessary in contexts where fieldworkers operate at the boundaries between the “safe” and “unsafe.” However, a critical understanding of how transdisciplinary anticipatory logics of OSH encroach on ethnographic practice is needed.

To contribute to this conversation in this article, we first draw on anthropological and critical OSH research to offer alternative methodological and conceptual starting points for approaching researcher safety. We then develop an autoethnographic analysis of our experience undertaking applied ethnographic research across health care, logistics, and construction organizations. This was within a transdisciplinary U.K.-based project which addressed the question of improving workplace OSH. Through a discussion of how Jennie came to “know how” to research (safety) safely in these contexts, we show how she blended anticipatory OSH logics with contingent, personal, and improvisory ways of knowing. Finally, we engage these insights to reflect on the implications of regulatory OSH frameworks for ethnographic research both within and beyond anthropology.

When such frameworks are critiqued through ethnographically informed anthropological theory, our work cannot escape being imbued with a transdisciplinary challenge. We argue that by harnessing the “antagonistic” (Barry et al., 2008) potential of transdisciplinary work, anthropologists have a critical role to play in a revisionist rewriting of OSH frameworks to benefit ethnographers working across disciplines.

OSH and Its Anticipatory Logics

Anthropological analysis of academic “audit cultures” (e.g., Strathern, 2000) shows how anticipatory logics are now part of how academic life is experienced, often through the bureaucratization of academic practice and research governance (e.g., Shore & Wright, 1999, 2015). The codification of research ethics and institutional review boards—often regarded as emblematic of this broader regulatory research environment—have come under particular scrutiny (Lederman, 2007; Macdonald, 2009; Meskell & Pels, 2005). Such accounts express concern about the framing of ethnographic practice through transdisciplinary ethical codes. As Macdonald (2009, p. 81) summarizes, key anthropological concerns focus on codification holding the potential to externalize ethics in bureaucratic process (rather than internal to the discipline and research relationships) and whether pan-disciplinary ethics governance modeled on practices developed in other disciplines (such as the biomedical) can accommodate ethnographic research.

The rise of OSH discourses and systems is similarly part of a wider turn toward “anticipatory audit” within university and research governance (at least within the U.K. context where our research was undertaken). Like the formalization of ethical review through biomedical criteria, OSH may be interpreted as intended to (partly) facilitate the travel of ethnography by covering its application across a wide range of fieldwork and disciplinary contexts. Ethnography becomes detached from anthropological codes, training, and practices to draw instead on procedures and systems informed by other disciplines including behavioral theories. It is perhaps not surprising that OSH (a specific form of anticipatory audit) has accompanied the travels of ethnography given, as Barry and colleagues (2008) argue, that accountability is a guiding logic of contemporary transdisciplinarity.

Early mention of OSH was made by anthropologist Nancy Howell in 1986 (in Sluka, 2012, p. 283). Yet, to our knowledge, the implications of OSH regulatory frameworks and anticipatory audit for researcher safety in ethnographic fieldwork (unlike the ethical review modeled on biomedical criteria introduced above) have not generated sustained debate within anthropology. This is despite nascent conversations about the implications of OSH for practitioner and/or researcher safety emerging in other fields, including health and social work studies. Anthropologists have considered how they have coped with dangerous or violent fieldwork situations. Yet they often do so through ethnographic reflexivity rather than in relation to OSH (e.g., Moreno, 1995). More recently, a growing literature across anthropology (e.g., Samimian-Darash & Rabinow, 2015), human geography (e.g., Adey & Anderson, 2011; B. Anderson, 2010), and safety research (e.g., Hale & Borys, 2013; Powell, Glendinning, Broto, Dewberry, & Walsh, 2014) has begun to engage critically with conceptual categories and empirical realities of “anticipation,” “risk,” and “uncertainty.” Such literatures provide an invigorating critical context through which to engage with questions of researcher OSH.

While we need to have ways of ensuring that people (including researchers) stay safe at work, as a regulatory framework OSH procedures tend to create a logic that cannot acknowledge or harness the creative potential of uncertainty (Pink & Akama, 2015). OSH frameworks (like those of ethics) construct possible harmful scenarios along with preventative procedures for their avoidance. Knox and Harvey (2011) describe, based on their ethnographies of road building projects in Latin America, how OSH is concerned with the “anticipation of harm” in situations of uncertainty (p. 145). The conclusion of OSH logic thus is to suppress uncertainties. It is challenging for OSH to welcome the unknown, precisely because this would not account for the unsafe. Yet, ironically, the quest to obliterate the unknown could create further dangers, because it is theoretically possible that a reflexive awareness of what we do not know could be safer than the ‘truths’ that we think we know. Revisionist OSH approaches which seek not only to predict and plan for risks but to better support researchers managing and responding to hazards as they unfold in and through ethnographic practice are sorely needed.

As Strathern (2000) points out for ethics audits, OSH regulation “pushes the exploratory, indeterminate and unpredictable nature of social relations (between ethnographer and his or her third party) back onto a ‘point of production,’ with the ethnographer as initiator” (p. 295). Like Strathern’s (2000) “ethics in advance, of anticipated negotiations,” we suggest that OSH in advance also “belittles the creative power of social relations” (p. 295). For instance, in their review of literature and professional guidance for qualitative researchers, Bloor et al. (2007) identify physical risk (e.g., injury), emotional risk (e.g., feelings of isolation), and gender risk (e.g., harassment). They suggest that planning and preparation through risk assessment is key to avoiding harm (p. 17). Sluka (2012) also concludes that “to a substantial degree the dangers faced by anthropologists in their fieldwork can be mediated through foresight, planning, and skilful manoeuvre” (p. 284). Such statements echo the logic of prevention and the mitigation of risk that depends on the construction of abstract future certainties introduced above.

Yet the critical literatures cited above, and our fieldwork experiences, indicate that following the regulated anticipatory logics of OSH is not the only way of enacting safety in research environments that have qualitatively or statistically been characterized as “dangerous.” In recent scholarship, likewise, an explosion of risk management to respond to futures which (ultimately) can never entirely be known in advance is increasingly being queried through calls for a new “politics of uncertainty” (Power, 2004). Anthropologists here (Powell et al., 2014; Samimian-Darash & Rabinow, 2015) argue for shifting analytical and applied focus from controlling risk to managing uncertainty (Samimian-Darash & Rabinow, 2015, p. 5). Where this connects with the field of OSH management research is in relation to the desire to develop what Hale and Borys (2013), who are critical of top-down OSH regulation, call “model 2” engagement with regulated OSH. A Model 2 approach acknowledges the productive role that the practically informed, creative adaptation of safety rules can play in the ongoing monitoring and design of effective OSH. When read together these literatures from different disciplines (anthropology and safety research) problematize risk management as a dominant form of anticipatory audit for engaging with uncertainty. They argue for the need to recognize, account for, and harness the creative potential of not knowing, and the experiential, emotional, technical, and systematic learning that arises through encountering uncertainty. This, we argue, is where an anthropological and ethnographically informed perspective can make a useful interdisciplinary intervention in safety research. We return to this below by discussing the potentials and pitfalls of OSH for ethnographic research. First, we account for how such a perspective can be generated through an autoethnographic approach to safety in ethnographic practice.

Reflecting on Autoethnography: Learning and Knowing Safety

The term autoethnography is used in multiple ways including distinctions made between “evocative or emotional” and “analytical” autoethnography (L. Anderson, 2006). It is beyond the scope of this article to describe in detail these different approaches, but rather we emphasize that “self observation” (Hayano, 1979) typifies autoethnography as a process and product of drawing on personal experiences, emotions, thoughts, and feelings to better understand those of others. It has been argued that what characterizes different forms of autoethnography is “the emphasis placed on the study of others, the researcher’s self and interaction with others, traditional analysis, and the interview context, as well as on power relationships” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). By drawing on the ways that Jennie’s perceptual and practical approach to her safety were changed through (and deeply embedded in) the fieldwork process, our research may also thus be considered a reflexive ethnography. Some consider this to be a specific type of autoethnography (Ellis et al., 2011).

One approach that illustrates this reflexive emphasis is to understand autoethnography as “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis et al., 2011). While we seek to analyze Jennie’s personal experience, our approach is also deeply informed through our shared research interactions. Indeed, choosing to co-author this article communicates how our reflexive autoethnographic approach was a collaborative endeavor undertaken as part of a bigger team project. Self-reflexivity might seem paradoxical to such an approach. Yet “collaborative (CAE) autoethnography” (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013) is a methodology that is gaining momentum. CAE seeks to counter (what some have argued is a trap of) an inward focus typical of more narrative and evocative forms of autoethnography (Chang et al., 2013). CAE directs analysis of self-inquiry toward broader cultural understanding and shared meaning-making. In our work, ongoing critical dialogue between the authors (and other team members) enabled us to apply to our analysis insights gained from other research, disciplinary, literature, and professional contexts. In doing so, questions were asked about Jennie’s reflections that revealed nuance about the contexts under study that she would not necessarily have recognized alone. For example, a crucial turning point in our fieldwork arrived when Sarah encouraged Jennie to try to identify “quiet safety” (Pink & Morgan, 2013), or the taken-for-granted and easily overlooked techniques that she suspected (from her research elsewhere) workers would likely share to help her take care in unfamiliar workplaces. We also looked to our reading of anthropological theories of learning and knowing to further develop our collaborative autoethnographic approach.

Ethnography has been understood as a “learning phenomenon” (Evans, 2012, p. 98). Anthropological scholarship on apprenticeship (Grasseni, 2009; Harris, 2007; Marchand, 2010) enables us to conceptualize learning as an ongoing practical activity situated in specific material, social, temporal, affective, and sensory environments. By understanding ethnographic apprenticeship as “both a mode of learning and a field method” (Marchand, 2010), we have used autoethnographic reflection on learning as a “method” for understanding how OSH is made to happen in particular workplace settings and how ethnographic apprenticeship becomes a “mode of learning” that is itself generative of researcher safety vis-à-vis the acquisition of practical and perceptual skills. Such an approach involves seeing anthropology as, Ingold (2011a) puts it, “not a study of at all, but a study with” people, whereby “Immersed with them in an environment of joint activity, they learn to see things (or hear them, or touch them) in the ways their teachers and companions do” (p. 238). From this perspective, apprenticeship can be seen as a process of learning through which individuals develop a perceptual awareness of environmental properties and the possibilities for action that these afford (Ingold, 2011b, p. 37). By emphasizing that knowing is an incremental and contextually contingent process, this definition of apprenticeship resonates with the creative and responsive dimensions of ethnographic research that (we have argued) problematize OSH anticipatory logics. Acquiring this know-how is a process of what Ingold (2011b) calls “enskilment” whereby learning is not the transmission of discrete pieces of information, but an ongoing practical, bodily, and multisensory encounter with the world through which practitioners become skilled in perceiving (paying attention) and responding (attuning their practical actions) to its emergent qualities (p. 37, see also p. 416). Self-reflection—or taking what one has learned to move forward while reflecting on earlier experience (Ingold, 2013, p. 3)—is crucial to studying with and learning from others. We now take this up through our discussion of Jennie’s autoethnographic apprenticeship in safety. We highlight four specific aspects of researcher safety: learning, knowing, doing, and improvising.

“Walking on Steel”: An Autoethnography of OSH

During 2012 and 2013, Jennie spent 6 weeks at a Health Service Trust with a community-based team; 5 weeks at a retail warehouse-depot with customer deliveries workers; and 5 weeks across two different construction sites. This fieldwork was part of a bigger research project undertaken with a team of interdisciplinary colleagues. It focused on the applied question of how to improve workplace OSH by generating better understanding of how OSH knowledge is engaged by workers. Informed by the anthropological theories of knowing we outlined above, and responding to working in an interdisciplinary and applied context, our short-term fieldwork used interventional methodologies designed to provide different analytical, conceptual, and methodological entry points to those of more conventional longer-term engagements with other peoples’ lives. Specifically, in addition to more traditional interview and observational techniques, we used walking, reenactment, and apprenticeship methods to create “intensive encounters” (Pink & Morgan, 2013) with participants. These were intended to understand their perspectives through shared discussion, reflection, and collaboration rather than simply through observation. Reflecting on Jennie’s experiences during and after the fieldwork was fundamental to our understandings of her own and others’ performances of OSH in these contexts. This included an ongoing almost daily dialogue with Sarah, and our colleague Sociologist Andrew Dainty, as well as deep autoethnographic reflection. In this context, this meant a shift in sustained attention from others to our own safety.

From Autoethnography to Researcher Safety: The Potential of a Critical Approach

The four aspects of researcher safety (learning, knowing, doing, and improvising) focused on above bring together formal and informal ways of navigating safety in places of work. These are characteristic of both our fieldwork and our research participants’ experiences in health care, logistics, and the construction industry. Our autoethnographic analysis has enabled us to reflect on the researcher safety by explicitly turning our research questions about how people “know how” to work in healthy and safe ways back onto our own ethnographic practice. Such autoethnographic reflection was also fundamental to Jennie’s safety in these fieldwork sites—in that her safety was inextricable from that of the research participants and environments that she moved in and through.

This understanding of the inextricability of the ethnographer’s experience from that of the people and processes that she is investigating connects to wider anthropological debate concerning how ethnographic knowing is produced, and the form that it takes. In our fieldwork, knowing was a collaborative, incremental, and creative process as Jennie came to do OSH through her practical, embodied, affective, and sensorial interactions and improvisations. The understandings of our own and others’ OSH that emerged from these autoethnographic reflection are a form of knowledge that is emergent and continually being (re)formulated in response to the contingencies of specific fieldwork contexts; or what Ingold (2011a) calls “storied knowledge.” We do not imply that this is specific to autoethnographic approaches, but rather that it is heightened through reflexive approaches and especially (as this article illustrates) knowing through apprenticeship. This is because, as Ingold (2011a) proposes, people (including, we would add, ethnographers working across disciplines) know through practice or “an ongoing engagement, in perception and action, with the constituents of their environment” (p. 159).

Understanding knowledge as “storied” contrasts with theories of learning and knowing embedded in the certainty-seeking logics of institutional risk management—a manifestation of “anticipatory audit” (Strathern, 2000) that increasingly frames contemporary work practices including academic research. Indeed, for researcher safety, a storied knowledge perspective challenges these dominant forms of generalized and abstracted OSH. As we have accounted for in our introduction, there have been some steps toward revising this agenda. For instance, Bloor and colleagues (2007) have suggested that “inside” and “outside” perspectives on hazard might differ and that research governance and risk assessments should therefore use “on-the-ground experience, rather than reliance on generalised expectations” (p. 8). However, a storied knowledge perspective rooted in anthropological theory takes us further. It suggests that there is a need not only to integrate sensitivity to local research settings into safety protocols and procedures but also to acknowledge and use the creative potential of the uncertain and unexpected to design new approaches to safety and its management. The implication of such understandings is that uncertainty cannot be avoided through tighter and increased regulation. Indeed (as hinted at earlier), it may actually work to be counterproductive and potentially create harm. Instead, in the context of researcher safety, we argue for the cultivation of an anthropologically theorized reflexive awareness of what we do not know and of how we might ongoingly and creatively respond through our research practice to such uncertainty. It is beyond the scope of this article to set out precisely what these new approaches would entail. Yet we suggest a key challenge for research governance and project design is to better support researchers to manage—and respond to emerging challenges and risks—in ways that are directed toward rather than away from safety. This is because we recognize that although we focus in this article on how autoethnographic apprenticeship was used to achieve safety, techniques like mimicry might equally be a form of risk-taking directed to less-safe ends like “short cuts” or “work arounds.” By responding to this challenge, it is our hope that anthropologists may play a formative role in a generating a revisionary applied scholarship calling for a reform of OSH frameworks that would benefit ethnographers working within as well as outside of the discipline.

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored the issue of researcher safety through an autoethnographic reflection on fieldwork practice undertaken as part of an OSH research project. We revealed mundane but still complex activities, decisions, and experiences that regulated OSH (typically) does not acknowledge, yet which were integral to achieving researcher safety in our research contexts. In doing so, we highlighted a disjuncture between how researcher safety is practiced through anthropologically informed ethnographic fieldwork and how ethnography is increasingly framed through institutionalized OSH discourses accompanying its transdisciplinary travels. Logics of “anticipation” and “preparedness” are perceived as underpinning a vast spectrum of contemporary institutional and social contexts from disaster management (Adey & Anderson, 2011) to heritage conservation (Harrison, 2013). This is especially true of the neoliberal University that many ethnographers work in and in which OSH (we hold) is symptomatic of the rise of “audit cultures” and associated technobureaucratic manifestation of new forms of governance and power (cf. Shore & Wright, 2000, p. 57).

There is however a growing questioning of the dominance of such anticipatory modes of engaging with uncertainty, and the neoliberal institutional forms they are associated with (Shore & Wright, 2015). As our autoethnographic analysis shows, personal and less explicit ways of knowing (including “feeling” and “sensing” safety through contingent and sometimes improvisory embodied, affective, and sensory engagements) are fundamental for researcher (and other workers’) safety. This argument might not appear particularly novel to anthropologists. However, when it is taken into the interdisciplinary field of OSH literatures, it provides a novel rejoinder to top-down frameworks and can contribute to contemporary revisionary applied scholarship in the OSH field. Read in the context of this Special Issue, insights generated from our autoethnographic reflections offer new routes to understanding researcher safety that may prompt critical transdisciplinary discussion.

As institutional commitments to OSH frameworks (unmoored from specific disciplinary practices and understandings) increasingly frame ethnographic fieldwork, there is a need for further sustained debate on the issue of researcher safety. We are not suggesting that all ethnographers learn to be safe in the same way but that an anthropological understanding of learning and knowing as processual, multisensory, and contingently situated show how anticipatory and adaptive ways of engaging with uncertainty tend, in practice, to be relational (rather than oppositional) to each other, for researchers as well as for workers in other fields. Consequently, there is a double implication for ethnographic practice in audit culture. Anthropologically informed ethnography offers a critical perspective and voice through which to study such forms of governance. Moreover, by contributing to applied research projects in the fields where such frameworks are developed, it also holds potential to participate in debates in the disciplines that inform the making of anticipatory cultures like that of OSH. To reemphasize a point already made, we are not suggesting OSH guidance and policy be abandoned. Rather, we acknowledge the potential for alternative ways of knowing to be integrated (and not assumed to be oppositional) into researcher safety design. In fields beyond anthropology, there have been similar calls for contextual and reflexive learning to inform OSH approaches to practitioner and researcher safety, for example, through the greater recording and sharing of experience through debriefing and associated techniques like the “emotional listening” Ferguson (2009) argues for. To participate in these debates holds rich scope to inform the creative redesign of OSH guidance. It is our hope anthropology can ultimately do so in ways that may benefit—and successfully ensure the safety of—ethnographic fieldworkers working within and beyond the discipline.