Close Encounters with a Third Leg: Using Fieldwork Experiences of Sexual Harassment As Research Data.

Participant observation is a core component of ethnographic research. Doing participant observation means being a participant to what you observe, and the participation can take on a very visceral and bodily stance. One example in case is encountering sexual harassment. This paper argues that experiences of sexual harassment during fieldwork should be considered as potentially relevant data and analyzed as such. Though sexual harassment in the field is suspected to be a common experience, its occurrence is not a consolidated ‘tale from the field’ (Hanson and Richards, 2017). At the same, sexual harassment experienced during ethnographic fieldwork plays an important role in power dynamics both in the research field and in the academic domain. This paper engages (a) with the role that encounters with sexual harassment (can) have in data collection and analysis, and (b) what sharing experiences of sexual harassment in the academic domain entails. It pulls examples from the author’s own experiences in ethnographic research on the role law plays in social interactions in diverse public space. The aim is twofold; to contribute to a still too limited body of literature on sexual harassment experienced by researchers in the field and to pose a challenge to the assumption that sexual harassment during fieldwork is not a veritable source of data and not a profitable ground for analysis.