Trespassing in (Un)Familiar Territory: Knowing ‘the Other’ in Ethnographic Research

Abstract

Contrary to the belief that concrete ethical procedures and risk assessments can be easily established and followed in the field, this article suggests that our responsibility to ‘Others’ is a complex task that sometimes requires an individual-based moral responsibility towards ‘an-Other’. It will be argued, following the important work of Jacques Derrida, that it is possible for researchers to be moral while being immoral and responsible while being irresponsible. Using an example from my own fieldwork that looked at the phenomenon of urban exploration (The term urban exploration, also referred to as ‘urbex’, ‘recreational trespass’, ‘place hacking’ and ‘urban infiltration’, is used to describe the activity of exploring human-made structures and environments, particularly those that are abandoned or hidden from public view), which entailed ‘exploring’ alongside fellow urbexers as evidence, the article will go on to unpack the idea that when researching certain social spaces, in this instance heterotopic social spaces, our dependence on generalised ethics must be sacrificed to understand the ways of thinking of ‘Others’ which would otherwise go unnoticed or ignored. In other words, what will be suggested is that to understand forms of leisure that may seem ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’, binary opposites, such as good and evil, must be ‘deconstructed’ so there are no good and evil characters. Instead, there are only characters and their varied collectively individual interpretations of existence. After all, present modernity is becoming much more fluid, idiosyncratic and ambiguous, so it should be expected that differance is at the heart of twenty-first century leisure and that exploring it will reveal much more about our increasingly fragmented world.