Part 3 Frontline Research and the Ethics of Engagement

This third section discusses the possibilities and limitations of institutional ethnography–infused advocacy. The authors whose work is featured here might be considered outsiders to activism, while some are trained professionals with experience working within large bureaucracies. The glue that binds them is their close consideration of how to build activist-professional partnerships to make it possible for the researcher-professional to do activist research.

Megan Welsh Carroll’s IE-infused advocacy project “Studying Out: Institutional Ethnographic Fieldwork as Post-incarceration Activism” plunges us into a web of ruling relations that formerly incarcerated women are drawn into during their post-incarceration work. In addition to showing how social scientists can do fieldwork as activism, she reveals how advocates might use fieldwork to pinpoint where institutional changes are warranted. In this way, her research offers prison activist movements a chance to build fieldwork into their ongoing work.

Agnieszka Doll’s “Double Ethics, Double Burden: Professionalism, Activism, and Institutional Ethnography” focuses on the possibilities and challenges of IE-infused advocacy research. She grapples with the complications arising when the activist is also a lawyer occupying the dual position of researcher-professional and advocate during fieldwork in a psychiatric hospital.

In the final chapter, “Objectivity Regimes: Challenges for Activist Research in the Academy,” informed by political activist ethnography, Shannon Walsh explores how activists working in the academy respond to demands for so-called professional objectivity in academic research and to the possibility that assumptions about race, gender, and class privilege may find their way into studies if practitioners rely on academic methodology alone. Walsh raises important questions related to research and ethics, challenging the objectivity regime in academia that divides more than it unifies people in struggle.