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S. M. Hall
government and over £1 billion of social benefit income is being made annually as a result of welfare reforms’ (Etherington and Jones 2017, p. 5). Like other conurbations in England, Greater Manchester is characterised by areas of extreme poverty as well as extreme wealth, sometimes in very close proximity. Greater Manchester was also selected by the UK government as the trial location for Universal Credit—an overhaul in how social security and benefit payments are distributed to citizens, intertwined with prevailing conservative politics of austerity and in particular severe cuts to welfare (Hall 2017). At the same time, I was acutely aware that certain parts of Greater Manchester had been saturated by social researchers in recent years, something that became clear to me from conversations with local communities and activists well before my research began. I wanted to balance my desire to go somewhere ‘ordinary’, somewhere that was as typical of Greater Manchester as I could find, while at the same time remaining realistic and grounded in the knowledge that the point of ethnographic research is not to generalise. It is not to develop all-encompassing, oversimplified, widely applicable findings, but to understand intricacies, nuances and depths. Ethnographic research is also difficult to carry out. It requires dedication, concentration, and emotional, mental and physical energy. There is also a certain power and privilege to doing this type of fieldwork—the resources and time to become immersed in a far-away community, which are not available to all scholars. Doing research close to where I lived and worked, on my doorstep in Greater Manchester, certainly meant that I was able to complete the ethnography to its fullest potential with the financial resources available to me, while also attending to my own personal and relational care responsibilities. The spatial dynamics of such research does mean that the everyday spaces of researchers and respondents can intersect. Sometimes I bumped into participants on the bus or when I was out shopping. Researching one’s culture means that the researcher is in some ways already immersed in the field (Reed- Danahay 2009). The research took place in the town of ‘Argleton’, Greater Manchester, from September 2013 to October 2015. I apply a pseudonym to the town here, as I do for all participants from the research, to preserve the
