The Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone podcast brings author and professor Karen O’Reilly into challenging conversations with students, academics and practitioners around the world. Together, they explore how the toolkit approach - a curated collection of expert skills, knowledge, procedures, tools and information - can help navigate the complex terrain of contemporary qualitative research methods. 

My long-time friend and colleague, Dr Karen Lumsden, joins me today. Karen is a sociologist, criminologist and qualitative research trainer and consultant. Her research expertise includes the sociology of policing, emotional labour, death work and bereavement, victims' experiences, cybercrime and qualitative methods including narratives, autoethnography, ethnography and reflexivity.

Karen is the perfect guest to discuss Chapter 6, Being Ethnographic. We begin with a self-indulgent chat about how we both started out on our own ethnographic research journeys—me in the Costa del Sol, Karen in Aberdeen with boy racers and local communities. Karen’s research was flexible and responsive, using multi-modal and online approaches long before they were widely recognized as distinctive methodologies. 

We cover rapport and trust, emphasizing how ethnographers often assist our participants in ways that might not be directly related to our research. We also touch on AI and discuss the various emerging approaches to ethnography, sharing concerns that the core quality of ethnography might be at risk. Finally, we start to think about how decolonizing ethnography might make us rethink its principles, revisit its flexibility and reaffirm its commitments. Listen if you want to hear what we think remains central to ethnography despite its evolving methods and creative expansions.

Special thanks to Bahar Celik Muller, Senior Marketing Executive and Martha Gleeson, Digital Marketing Executive, for their support, advice and expertise.

Find out more about the book: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/qualitative-research-methods-for-everyone

Intro music: Good Times Are Coming by Bohdan Kuzmin from Pixabay.

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