Blending in or Being Co-Opted: Reflecting on an Internship-Cum-Field Work at a New Town Government in China

Abstract

Existing literature details many complexities of researcher–participant relationships in field work. It nonetheless evades a possibility that the researcher could be co-opted and lose his or her researcher self in specific field situations. Reflecting on an internship experience with a Chinese new town government, I present and problematize such a possibility. Two questions are explored: (1) In what contexts and in what ways was the researcher co-opted? (2) What have been the implications of the co-option to the researcher’s research practices? By answering these questions, this article makes three contributions. First, it presents a new complexity to researcher–participant relationships in the field. Second, in explaining the emergence of such a complexity, it develops a conceptual framework of resubjectivation that considers the intersection of the researcher’s biography and the agency of the field site. Third, the article unravels how being co-opted in the field had profound impacts on research, posing complex methodological and ethical challenges.