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Events
Between a rock and a hard place: Managing (c)overt ethnographic methods
- Venue: Hybrid: DMBB2.13 and on Teams
- Start: Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT
- End: Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:00:00 GMT
Adam Badger, a Lecturer in Economic Geography here at Newcastle, will be presenting ‘Between a rock and a hard place: Managing (c)overt ethnographic methods’.
This talk will explore the experiences of conducting covert and overt ethnographic methods in London’s gig economy. Covert methods get a fair bit of - sometimes very well deserved - critique, but I don’t believe we should be throwing the methodological baby out with the bad praxis bathwater. Indeed, some of the arguments we see for/against covert methods are reductive, crude, and devoid of meaningful attention paid to the realities of doing the work. This presentation will take a very overt aim at nuancing the arguments of those who over-simply the differences into binary relations. Perhaps there is more of the covert in overt methods than we’d care to acknowledge; and vice-versa. Along the way, discussion will cover the ethical decision-making approach I developed and applied in conducting this work, as well as broader thinking around the nature of the types of knowledges made and how - in Haraway’s terms - we can remain answerable for what we learn to see.
Please register here: https://forms.office.com/e/XwfHVQ5ZNu
