On Witnessing: Honoring Emotion and Connection in Ethnography

Drawing on the experience of doing ethnography in a school for students in grades 6-8 in the rural US South, I offer a view on ethnography as a form of witnessing which honors the complexity, vulnerability, and humanity of all involved. Building on Reuben Miller’s call for a “sociology of being together” that has us pay attention to the “specificities” of our pain, fear, grief, hope, and joy as we “walk aside and attend to the experiences of others” (Miller 2020:291), witnessing is a frame that attends to the active and relational dimensions of ethnography and the insights we gain from physical, mental, and emotional togetherness. I discuss examples of richness that are gained from attending to one’s emotional experience and being emotionally vulnerable in fieldwork, such as building trust and rapport with youth and adults and deeper insight into the experience of being surveilled. At the same time, I reflect on how ethnographers often employ both emotional presence and emotion management in fieldwork and benefits and costs of each. I conclude by discussing how emotion can help researchers avoid one-dimensional portrayals and incomplete theorization in research, while witnessing each other also (as James Baldwin noted) helps us "stretch into whoever we really are" - as both scholars and people.