When We Blew It: Vulnerability, Trying, and Failure in Ethnographic Fieldwork

Abstract:In this essay I consider lessons learned working in collaboration with the people of Pinhook, Missouri and with my former teacher and current research partner, Elaine Lawless, in the years following a terrible human-made disaster. Considering the complexities of positionality in ethnographic research and the specific challenges of our collaboration with the displaced residents of Pinhook, this essay analyses a specific moment of disjuncture between the way key research collaborators came to understand their experience of displacement and recovery, and our understanding of it as researchers and presumed advocates. Accepting the failure inherent in ethnographic research moments such as this one—indeed in the very relationships we engage in with our research collaborators themselves—I offer the beginnings of an approach to that work that embraces failure as an inevitable, necessary, and even productive part of it.