5 The Personal Is Political (and Relational)
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hand up, palm towards my face, and barked “I am not going to let you near my women”. (field diary, March 2014)
After the encounter above, I felt hurt and belittled, not only by Julia’s words but also her hostile bodily gestures, taking the decision quite personally. I was angry that the women in the class had not been able to make up their own minds about whether they wanted to meet me. Annie rang me later that day, having heard what had happened, and apologised profusely. She did not understand Julia’s rationale for stopping me meeting the group and explained ‘it was not the co-ordinator’s place to make such decisions’ (field diary, March 2014). Looking back, the encounter was more complicated than it first appeared, a reminder of the aforementioned quote from Domosh (1997, p. 81) about ‘the complexities of analysing everyday encounters where different forms of power are enacted’. This relates to concerns about speaking for others (England 1994; Hanisch 1970; Held 1993; Moss 2001)—not only by the ESOL co-ordinator but also the centre manager to whom I defaulted permission, and in the ethnographic fieldwork which is ultimately told through my eyes. Power and place are here entangled—between researcher, gatekeeper and participants, staff, volunteer and academic—and in the intersecting dimensions of gender, race and class. Through the body-work of fieldwork, political and social relations can thus be re-examined. Fieldwork is rich with intensely personal encounters with the potential to lead to exclusion and marginalisation, disenfranchising and possession. These can exist alongside belonging, care and connectedness; fieldwork is a relational space (also see Chap. 3).
Politics of Presence Fieldwork is also a space as where social differences, distances, similarities and proximities are tried and tested (Hall 2017), a space of relational politics built on the co-presence of the researcher. Prolonged presence during fieldwork in and on the context of austerity can have the effect of further politicising people’s everyday lives when they might not think they are affected or relevant to the phenomenon being studied. I found
