Harassed in the field: Gender, race, nation, and the construction of ethnographic knowledge

Abstract

Sexual harassment and sexualization are common experiences for women researchers as they conduct fieldwork. Yet, these topics are rarely mentioned in books and classes on qualitative methods. This article, based on interviews with qualitative researchers (47 women and nine men) from the North American academy, criticizes the silence around sexual harassment in the field. We argue that this silence is an indicator of a larger problem: the elimination of embodied experiences in qualitative research. This disciplinary silence around sexual harassment has costs for both researchers themselves as well as the construction of ethnographic knowledge. We propose that qualitative researchers think critically about how their fieldwork and data are shaped by gender, race, sexuality, and nationality, calling for the inclusion of embodied experiences in a way that recognizes these as mutually constitutive of the production of knowledge.