What is it about?

The challenges of undertaking ethnographic research in institutional sports settings remain underexplored. Drawing on data from a 3-year ethnographic study of competitive swimming in the United Kingdom (UK), here we explore some of the practical challenges of balancing different elements of the researcher’s role when undertaking ethnographic “insider” research in familiar settings. In particular, we consider the difficulties of balancing the role of a doctoral researcher and the chosen research role of a volunteer coach with a competitive swimming program. Employing the anthropological concept of liminality, we also analyze the challenges of leaving a highly familiar field and entering a state of liminality, where the researcher was caught on the threshold betwixt and between a return to full-time employment in the former “known” role of coach, and a move forward to embrace a new “unknown” role as a full-time member of academic staff.

Featured Image

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Somewhere Between a Stopwatch and a Recording Device: Ethnographic Reflections From the Pool, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, September 2023, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/08912416231200642.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page