Skip to content

2.2 Listen, See, Interact, and Read

2.2 Listen, See, Interact, and Read

In my ethnographic research, I engaged closely with friends in Palestine, many of whom shared their harrowing experiences of imprisonment in Israeli facilities, including the interrogation techniques and acts of torture they had endured. These deeply personal conversations, developed over years of face-to-face interactions, shared life, and repeated visits, shaped my understanding and ultimately led me to identify the concept of slow erasure as the central analytical frame of this study.

Before the global COVID-19 pandemic, I also visited Addameer, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, where I gained critical insights into the systemic issues surrounding incarceration and human rights violations. My initial plan was to return to Palestine to continue in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and conduct additional interviews to deepen and extend my analysis. However, the pandemic disrupted these plans. Israel’s closure of its borders effectively isolated the Palestinian territories, and limited vaccine access significantly increased health risks for the Palestinian population.

In response, I chose not to shift to online interviews, as I felt the sensitive and emotionally charged nature of the topics required in-person trust-building that digital platforms could not replicate.

Instead, I supplemented the initial ethnographic data I had already gathered with the analysis of secondary materials, published life stories, peer-reviewed research, NGO reports, news articles, and blogs. This adaptation allowed me to maintain ethical integrity while still pursuing the research questions in depth. Importantly, the core of this study remains grounded in ethnographic encounters, while the additional material serves to contextualise and extend the insights gained during my time in the Palestine.

2.2.1 Something about friendship

When I discussed the possibility of pursuing a PhD with my Palestinian friends, their encouragement was unanimous. This led me to consider interviewing them, given my familiarity with their life stories. Although I initially grappled with the ethics of interviewing friends, I came to recognise that every individual’s story holds intrinsic value, regardless of personal connections. The essence lies in the respect and dignity accorded to each participant.

Some of the first-hand voices collected in this work belong to friends I have known long before this research formally began. These friendships developed in a variety of contexts: through mutual friends, shared activism, and repeated visits to Palestine. Over time, we became part of each other’s lives in meaningful ways, sharing meals, homes, stories, struggles, and joy. I am not a detached observer in these relationships; I am a participant in a community that I value deeply. With these friendships comes trust, mutual respect, and a shared emotional investment that fundamentally shapes the ethical and methodological commitments of this research.

Priscyll Anctil Avoine (Anctil Avoine 2022)1 extends the feminist commitment to relational and affective methodologies through her concept of insurgent peace research, where friendship, emotions, and shared vulnerability become central to knowledge production in contexts of conflict and structural violence. In her work, she highlights the methodological and epistemological value of camaradería, a political form of friendship rooted in solidarity, shared struggle, and mutual care. This framework aligns with my own approach to conducting research among friends in Palestine, where the affective dimensions of trust, care, and co-resistance are not peripheral but foundational to the research process. For Avoine, embracing friendship as method resists the depersonalised, hierarchical logics of dominant research paradigms, instead fostering an insurgent form of knowledge that is grounded in intimacy, reciprocity, and ethical accountability (Anctil Avoine 2022)1. This resonates deeply with the ethics of my fieldwork, where relationships with friends were not simply sources of data but collaborations through which the very focus of the research, the concept of slow erasure, emerged organically.

Conducting this research with friends thus requires reflection on the methodological implications of friendship. I align with Norman Denzin (Denzin 1997)2, who argues that research and writing are not about capturing totalising truths but about interpreting localised interactions to deepen our understanding of both others and ourselves. Building on this, Lisa M. Tillmann-Healy (Tillmann-Healy 2003)3 situates friendship as method within feminist qualitative traditions that challenge the myth of value-free inquiry and prioritise ethical, emotionally engaged relationships. Drawing on standpoint theory, particularly Patricia Hill Collins’ (Collins 1998)4 work, Tillmann-Healy highlights how intersecting power structures shape knowledge and calls for an epistemology grounded in care and dialogue. Friendship as method thus demands emotional presence, reciprocity, and sustained relational accountability, qualities that align closely with the ethos of this research.

Tillmann-Healy (Tillmann-Healy 2003)3 provides me with some key aspects of friendship as a research method. First, she advocates for an inquiry that is open, multi-voiced, and emotionally rich. Friendship as a method, she argues, encompasses the practices, pace, contexts, and ethics of genuine relational engagement. Conducting research through the lens of friendship means that while I utilise traditional data collection methods (such as participant observation, systematic note-taking, and both informal and formal interviewing), our primary procedures are those we use to build and sustain friendships: conversation, everyday involvement, compassion, giving, and vulnerability. (Tillmann-Healy 2003)3.

These primary procedures are reflected in the interviews and talks I had with friends and in the journal notes I took throughout my observations. For example, my interview with Shazain, who you will meet in Chapter Seven, took place at his apartment, where I was staying as a friend. Whenever I live in his apartment, we cook together and clean together. We do grocery shopping together. I know his kids and help prepare them for school tests, give them dictation exercises and correct their homework. We go for walks, for drinks, and for hikes in the stunning Palestinian nature.

Second, Tillmann-Healy (Tillmann-Healy 2003)3 mentions that the tempo of research with friendship as a method should be at the pace of friendship. Here, too, I refer back to sharing a place with my friend Shazain. I knew about his life story during the First Intifada and his arrest and consequential torture while imprisoned, and we had talked about it well before I interviewed him. Despite knowing him and knowing he would not refuse to talk to me about his story for my research, I was initially very hesitant to ask. Actually, it was Shazain who proposed that I interview him. Tillmann-Healy, to me, is correct when she writes that “a project’s issues emerge organically, in the ebb and flow of everyday life: leisurely walks, household projects, activist campaigns, separations, reconciliations, losses, recoveries. The unfolding path of the relationships becomes the path of the project.” (Tillmann-Healy 2003, 735)3. In fact, if it was not for that interview with my friend, I don’t think the focus of my work would have steered me towards the concept of slow erasure and the inclusion of torture.

Third, Tillmann-Healy situates research using friendship as a method in the natural contexts of friendship: “Perhaps the most important aspect of this methodology is that we research with an ethic of friendship, a stance of hope, caring, justice, even love.” (Tillmann-Healy 2003, 735)3 I cannot agree more. To me, my friendships are worth more than this research. My activism around Palestine not only finds its roots in the broader fight against injustice, imperialism and settler-colonialism, and colonialism, but also in the friendship, care and love I share with my Palestinian friends who live there and the Nakba survivors who live here in Finland, where I wrote this work.

2.2.2 Joining in

Participant observation is crucial for this study because it provides direct access to the everyday sites where power is both enforced and contested, spaces that interviews or surveys alone cannot fully penetrate. By embedding myself in the quotidian rhythms of Palestinian life, sharing meals, conversations, celebrations, and routines, I was able to witness first hand how control and resistance unfold in real time. This depth of engagement not only surfaced patterns of slow erasure that might remain invisible in interviews alone but also grounded my analysis in richly textured, relational data. As a foundational qualitative approach in ethnography, participant observation involves immersion in the lives of those being studied: observing their routines, listening to their stories, and participating in shared activities. It allows for a context-rich, relational understanding of how structural power is experienced and navigated in ordinary moments (O'Reilly 2009; Chua et al. 2008)5 6.

Participant observation requires meticulous documentation, usually through the use of a research journal. Ethical considerations, such as informed consent, confidentiality, and respect for participants, are central to the process, ensuring that the research aligns with principles of integrity and mutual respect. By providing rich, in-depth data, participant observation allows researchers to explore complex human behaviours and uncover deeper insights that are often inaccessible through other research methods.

As Barbara B. Kawulich [kawulich2005] articulates, engaging in participant observation allows to verify terms used in interviews, witness events that might be sensitive to discuss, and observe situations described by informants [kawulich2005, 4; see also Marshall and Rossman (1995)]7. Participant observation provided me with a unique vantage point, immersing me in diverse situations that enriched my comprehension of local nuances pertinent to this study. Leveraging my pre-existing connections, I found it relatively straightforward to gain access to official and unofficial events and receive invitations to conferences. However, serendipitous encounters in local settings, often accompanied by the warmth of shared sweets and coffee, were equally enlightening. Karen O’Reilly characterises the participant as someone who immerses themselves in activities, sharing experiences and emotions, while the observer, typically an outsider, adopts a more passive stance, watching and listening (O'Reilly 2009, 151)5. She underscores the initial challenges of participant observation, marked by tensions, misunderstandings, and false starts. As Berg (Berg 2004)8 notes, access is a continuous negotiation, varying across groups, individuals, and contexts.

Many moments during my research felt more participatory than observational, as I had a room in a friend’s apartment and, as such, lived alongside Palestinians, sharing daily routines such as helping kids with homework, cooking, conversations, and moments of leisure. In all honesty, every single moment of the days I spent in Palestine during this research was participatory, observational, or a combination of both. Hence, the act of journaling was instrumental in capturing immediate impressions that might otherwise fade with time.

2.2.3 Listening to life stories

“As a researcher, I sought to have people tell me about their lives from their perspectives rather than impose my preconceived interests and categories upon them. So I listened” – (Charmaz 1991, 275)9.

The stories I use in my work are both primary and secondary. Qualitative semi-structured and in-depth unstructured interviews are among the most favoured methods in qualitative research. They offer a lens into individuals’ attitudes, experiences, and beliefs, providing insights into their socially constructed worlds. One of the primary advantages of qualitative interviews is their ability to deepen our understanding of specific experiences or issues (Silverman 2017)10. Furthermore, these narratives can generate vital epistemologies about experiences at the intersection of identities, enriching our understanding of historical patterns of inequality (Björkdahl and Selimovic 2021)11.

During my research trips prior to the pandemic, in addition to the vast quantity of dmaterial assembled during participant observation, I conducted interviews with individuals and NGOs. While I recorded interviews with participants’ consent, I relied on note-taking in cases where permission for recording the interview was not granted. I conducted five in-depth interviews with individuals and NGO representatives, selecting participants based on their lived experiences or work related to violence or resistance. Prospective interviewees were briefed on the research objectives to enable them to make an informed decision about participation. At the beginning of each interview, I reiterated the research aims and provided some background about myself. I ensured verbal consent at the start and reaffirmed it periodically throughout our interactions.

As Barbara S. Heyl aptly states:

"Researchers have established respectful, ongoing relationships with their interviewees, including enough rapport for there to be a genuine exchange of views and enough time and openness in the interviews for the interviewees to explore purposefully with the researcher the meanings they place on events in their words" (Heyl 2007, 369)12.

The interviews I conducted for this research were all open-ended. I asked participants to share their stories, including their origins, many belonged to internally displaced people, and how settler-colonialism had personally affected them and their families. I also explored their methods of resisting settler-colonial mechanisms. Active listening was crucial, and I only asked follow-up questions during natural pauses in their narratives. These follow-ups were tied to intriguing points they raised or topics warranting further exploration.

The participants for this study were exclusively based in the West Bank. I did not conduct interviews in Gaza due to the stringent controls imposed by Israel on its crossings. Obtaining a permit to enter Gaza would have been challenging, and even when granted, there remains the uncertainty of prolonged, unplanned stays due to unpredictable border closures. As I will outline in Chapter Three, significant disparities exist between the West Bank and Gaza. At a macro level, these include differences in their stances towards Israel and contrasting Palestinian governance structures, with Hamas dominating Gaza and Fatah the West Bank. At meso and micro levels, differences emerge in socio-economic, political, and religious contexts, access to resources, and movement restrictions.

East Jerusalem, where I did observation, represents yet another unique context, distinct from the West Bank and Gaza due to its specific power dynamics and its immediate proximity to Israel’s centres of power. These geographical and political distinctions influenced the logistics of the interview process, occasionally causing delays or cancellations due to roadblocks or closures.

2.2.4 Reading stories, reports, and the news

As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, I had to increase my reliance on secondary data due to the change of topic and the onset of the pandemic, which made returning to Palestine impossible. The secondary data sources I employed include life stories I found in books and peer-reviewed articles collected and published by other scholars. Other sources consist of findings and publications from various organisations, both governmental and non-governmental, as well as news outlets. These include statistics, reports, and news articles from both local and international media. However, daily events in Palestine, especially those that do not align with dominant geopolitical interests, rarely make it into mainstream international news cycles unless they involve large-scale Israeli military actions, or indeed blatant genocide (referred to as “The Israel-Gaza War” by the media). Smaller yet deeply significant incidents, such as the routine detention and torture of children, go un(der)reported. In response, I turned to alternative and locally embedded sources such as online news platforms, Telegram channels, and reports produced by organisations including Al-Haq, Addameer, and Defence for Children International. For instance, I draw on secondary sources such as reports produced by Palestinian organisations, including Addameer (the Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association) and Defence for Children International – Palestine.

These organisations hold a trusted position within Palestinian society because of their longstanding work in documenting human rights violations, supporting prisoners and their families, and advocating internationally. Their reports provide detailed and systematically collected accounts of imprisonment, torture, and violations of children’s rights, while also reflecting the priorities and epistemic authority of local actors. I therefore use them not simply as supplementary material, but as situated knowledge that is embedded in Palestinian struggles and addressed to multiple audiences, including local communities, international human rights bodies, and global civil society. My selection of these sources follows from their credibility within Palestine and their role in amplifying voices that are often silenced in international discourse. These sources do more than fill an informational gap, they constitute a form of counter-knowledge that resists dominant media framings and offers an archive of lived Palestinian realities.

In this sense, the use of these sources is not only pragmatic but also political and epistemological. It aligns with the decolonial and feminist methodologies outlined earlier in this chapter, which call for disrupting hegemonic narratives and amplifying marginalised voices (Lewis and Mills 2003; Wibben et al. 2018)13 14. By engaging with context-informed and counter-hegemonic knowledge production, I aim to challenge the erasures inherent in global media discourse and support alternative epistemologies grounded in local experience and resistance.

Media outlets approach the coverage of Palestine differently, with some reporting sporadically, while others, such as Wafa, The Guardian, and Al-Jazeera, sometimes offer more in-depth analysis. NGOs exposing violence, human rights abuses, and other events often become targets of Israeli actions. In one such move, six NGOs were blacklisted by Israel in 2021 and branded as terrorist organisations (El-Kurd 2021)15. For Defence for Children International, this followed an early morning raid on their Ramallah office in July 2021 (Defense for Children Palestine 2021)16. Reports produced by NGOs in Palestine or the Palestinian Authority provide a rich source of information on the ongoing difficulties faced by Palestinians in their daily lives. These reports cover a range of subjects, from violence against women to torture, movement restrictions, and the impact on health, education, and much more.

2.2.5 Analysing what has been gathered

Following each interview—most of which were conducted in Arabic—I worked with a research assistant who also served as interpreter. Interpretation is not a neutral act; interpreters inevitably work as intermediaries between the researcher and the person telling their story, shaping meaning through choices in translation and framing. These dynamics involve power relations that must be acknowledged, particularly in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research contexts. My assistant produced English transcripts by translating the recordings as she transcribed them, a process that allowed me to engage directly with the content while striving to preserve participants’ original phrasing and tone as closely as possible. Upon receiving these files, I initiated a tagging process to identify and code significant words or phrases. The analysis began with a meticulous examination of the language used by participants, as these expressions can reveal relevant themes. This systematic textual exploration aligns with the concept of “in vivo” coding, as outlined by Anselm L. Strauss and Juliet M. Corbin (Strauss and Corbin 1998)17.

In vivo coding involves analysing qualitative data using the exact words or phrases spoken by participants during interviews, focus groups, or other forms of data collection. The term “in vivo,” Latin for “in life,” highlights the focus on participants’ real-life expressions. The primary aim of in vivo coding is to remain faithful to the participants’ voices, ensuring the analysis is rooted in their actual words. This approach helps capture the essence of their meanings and perspectives, minimising the researcher’s interpretative bias. By employing this method, significant thematic structures were effectively extracted from the textual data.

Adopting an interpretivist apprach within a broader critical framework allows me both to honour participants’ own sense‐making and to interrogate the power relations that shape, and are shaped by, their interpretations. Interpretivism places individuals’ interpretations, perceptions, and lived understandings at the centre of the research process (Mason 2002, 56)18, which complements the goals of critical methodology in uncovering how power, identity, and resistance are constructed and experienced. Rather than viewing participants as passive data sources, this approach values their situated knowledge, echoing Norman Blaikie’s (Blaikie 2000)19 distinction between the ‘insider view’, grounded in lived experience, and the ‘outsider view’ of external analysis. In this way, interpretivism becomes a lens through which critical and decolonial epistemologies can be grounded in the realities of those most affected by settler-colonial violence.

The encounters with participants were shaped by ongoing dialogues and shared reflections, allowing participants’ narratives to illuminate the social worlds they inhabit. For instance, the meanings they assigned to their experiences of violence were not simply recorded but interpreted in collaboration, respecting the richness of their perspectives. This relational approach reflects Blaikie’s emphasis on the everyday reality as constituted by social actors’ meanings and interpretations:

Interpretivists are concerned with understanding the social world people have produced and which they reproduce through their continuing activities. This everyday reality consists of the meanings and interpretations given by the social actors to their actions, other people’s actions, social situations, and natural and humanly created objects. In short, in order to negotiate their way around their world and make sense of it, social actors have to interpret their activities together, and it is these meanings, embedded in language, that constitute their social reality. (Blaikie 2000, 115)19

To navigate these narratives, I drew on Harry F. Wolcott’s (Wolcott 1994)20 division of analysis into description, analysis, and interpretation. These three steps offered a structured yet flexible framework for making sense of participants’ accounts. Description focused on capturing their stories as they are shared, preserving the authenticity of their voices. Analysis involved identifying patterns, connections, and underlying themes within their narratives. Interpretation extended this work by situating these findings within broader sociocultural and theoretical contexts, creating a dialogue between the participants’ lived experiences and the research’s conceptual aims. In applying Wolcott’s three stages, description, analysis, and interpretation, I carefully documented participants’ narratives and observations in detailed descriptive accounts, preserving the texture of their language and context. During the analysis phase, I coded these materials to identify recurring themes, such as imprisonment, mobility restrictions, and the erosion of identity. In the interpretive stage, I connected these patterns to broader theoretical frameworks, such as settler-colonialism and what I conceptualise as slow erasure, a gradual, often invisible process through which Palestinian agency, identity, and knowledge are undermined. Rather than assuming this process as a given, I use it as a lens to interpret the meanings participants assign to their lived experiences under occupation. Given the emphasis of this research on violence, ethical considerations are inevitably central. The subsequent sections will detail the ethical concerns that informed this study, specifically addressing the prevailing circumstances. The primary objective is to adopt an approach that prioritises care and safety while rigorously protecting the participants.

References

  1. Anctil Avoine, Priscyll. 2022. "Insurgent Peace Research: Affects, Friendship and Feminism as Methods." Conflict, Security\ & Development 22 (5): 435--55. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2022.2122699. ↩↩

  2. Denzin, Norman K. 1997. Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Sage. ↩

  3. Tillmann-Healy, Lisa M. 2003. "Friendship as Method." Qualitative Inquiry 9 (5): 729--49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800403254894. ↩↩↩↩↩↩

  4. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. "It's All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation." Hypatia 13 (3): 62--82. ↩

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

  6. Chua, Liana, Casey High, and Timm Lau, eds. 2008. How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ↩

  7. Marshall, Catherine, and Gretchen B Rossman. 1995. Designing Qualitative Research. Sage. ↩

  8. Berg, Bruce L. 2004. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences. Fifth Edition. Pearson. ↩

  9. Charmaz, Kathy. 1991. Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time. Rutgers University Press. Rutgers University Press. ↩

  10. Silverman, David. 2017. Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook. Fifth edition. SAGE Publications. SAGE Publications. ↩

  11. Björkdahl, Annika, and Johanna Mannergren Selimovic. 2021. Methodologies for Feminist Peace Research. Edited by Tarja Väyrynen, Élise Féron, Catia Cecilia Confortini, and Swati Parashar. Routledge. ↩

  12. Heyl, Barbara Sherman. 2007. Ethnographic Interviewing. Edited by Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, Lyn Lofland, and Amanda Coffey. Handbook of Ethnography. SAGE Publications. ↩

  13. Lewis, Reina, and Sara Mills, eds. 2003. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. 0th ed. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203825235. ↩

  14. Wibben, Annick T R, Catia Cecilia Confortini, Sanam Roohi, Sarai B Aharoni, Leena Vastapuu, and Tiina Vaittinen. 2018. Collective Discussion: Piecing-Up Feminist Peace Research. 13 (1): 86--107. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly034. ↩

  15. El-Kurd, Mohammed. 2021. "The New Campaign to Smear Palestinian Human Rights Defenders as Terrorists." The Nation. ↩

  16. Defense for Children Palestine. 2021. Israeli Forces Raid DCIP Office, Confiscate Computers and Client Files. Https://www.dci-palestine.org/israeli\ _forces\ _raid\ _dcip\ _office\ _confiscate\ _computers\ _and\ _client\ _files. ↩

  17. Strauss, Anselm L, and Juliet M Corbin. 1998. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Sage Publications. ↩

  18. Mason, Jennifer. 2002. Qualitative Researching. Second Edition. SAGE Publications. ↩

  19. Blaikie, Norman. 2000. Designing Social Research. Polity Press. ↩↩

  20. Wolcott, Harry F. 1994. Transforming Qualitative Data: Description, Analysis, and Interpretation. SAGE. Sage. ↩