Portholes of Ethnography: The Methodological Learning from ‘Being There’ at a Distance

Abstract

Ethnography is, in essence, an approach to social research reliant on ‘being there’ and ethnographic approaches to the social world have been widely taken up in sociological research. In this research note, we share our UK-based experiences of ethnographic fieldwork with professional practitioners during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when ‘staying at home’ was the antithesis of ‘being there’. In doing so, we highlight opportunities the pandemic presented to re-evaluate familiar qualitative methods, to develop new, remote ethnographic research strategies and to examine the limitations of conducting ethnography from a distance. We consider how far we stretch ‘ethnography’ in a socially distanced context, using what we call ‘portholes of ethnography’, and we outline how our learning informs the ways in which we can adapt research approaches – driven by relationality – in times of crises.