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2.1 Ethnography as Methodology

2.1 Ethnography as methodology

My interest in this research topic emerged through earlier personal relationships and travels in Palestine. I began developing it formally in 2016, and undertook several ethnographic research trips over a period of 3 years. These included six months in 2016, three months in 2018, and two months in 2019. During these periods, I conducted participant observation and interviews with friends, people I encountered, and NGO workers, participating in community events, sharing everyday life, and documenting observations through research journaling. Interviews were conducted primarily in Arabic with the assistance of a Palestinian friend skilled in interpretation. Settings ranged from homes to public spaces, depending on participant comfort.

Initially, I planned to continue and deepen this work through additional visits to Palestine and follow-up interviews with a wider range of participants, including NGO workers and community organizers. However, the global COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent border closures made it impossible to return to Palestine. These restrictions directly affected my ability to conduct further in-person interviews. Given the sensitivity of the research topic, which involves experiences of violence, imprisonment, and resistance, I considered remote interviews neither ethically appropriate nor capable of providing the same depth of engagement as in-person fieldwork. As a result, I relied more heavily on the extensive research journal I kept during earlier fieldwork, as well as on a broader set of secondary and publicly available sources, including books, NGO reports, online publications, and documented life stories. This adaptation allowed me to preserve the ethical and relational integrity of the project while expanding the contextual scope of the analysis. The prominence of the research journal in this thesis therefore reflects both a methodological necessity and a deliberate ethical stance, as it captures Palestinian voices and lived experiences that emerged organically outside the framework of formal interviews.

Ethnography employs a range of methods involving direct and sustained contact with human agents in the context of their daily lives, observing what happens, listening to what is said, and asking questions. It produces richly detailed accounts that honour the complexity of human experience, recognise the importance of theory, consider the researcher’s own role, and view humans as both objects and subjects of research. (O'Reilly 2009)1.

The extended periods of immersion in Palestine enabled me to witness firsthand how structural violence and resistance play out in the rhythms of everyday life. For example, my participation in prisoner release celebrations, family gatherings, and informal conversations gave me access to stories and observations that would not have surfaced through more extractive or distanced research methods. I recorded these experiences through journaling, informal dialogue, and close reflection, practices that informed both the substance and direction of this research. The research journal became not only a reflexive tool but also an ethical and methodological space where Palestinian voices could be documented outside the framework of formal interviews. It captured fragments of conversations, gestures, emotions, and silences—forms of expression often lost in transcribed dialogue. In this way, the journal extends the ethnographic archive, allowing the presence of participants and the affective texture of encounters to shape the research narrative.

As a methodology, ethnography demands careful consideration of ethical principles and critical reflexivity to navigate the challenges inherent in studying human lives (see the final section of this chapter). Instead of viewing knowledge through the traditional lens of objectivism versus subjectivism, critical methodology champions envisioning potential realities rather than just accepting the current state of affairs. It also delves into the debatable nature of existence. Robin Roslender emphasises that the age-old debate between the existence of a “real world ‘out there’” (2016, 6) and the constructionist viewpoint is reimagined in critical ontology, that is, an approach concerned with the nature of being and reality, which questions how realities are shaped by power, history, and social context. Rather than choosing sides, she observes that these two views often lead to contentious outcomes. It is these very outcomes that critical social science aims to uncover and share, offering a form of liberating knowledge (Roslender 2016)2.

To answer the question of “how does settler-colonialism affect Indigenous identity, agency, and episteme, particularly in long-term and structural ways?” and “in what ways do Indigenous peoples resist settler-colonial strategies that constrain mobility, the weaponisation of care, imprisonment, and torture as methods of destroying identity, agency, and episteme?”, I rely on a mix methods approach, which I discuss below.

References

  1. O'Reilly, Karen. 2009. Key Concepts in Ethnography. SAGE Publications. SAGE Publications. ↩

  2. Roslender, Robin. 2016. Pioneers of Critical Accounting. Edited by Jim Haslam and Prem Sikka. Pioneers of Critical Accounting A Celebration of the Life of Tony Lowe. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54212-0. ↩