Inside the field

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the QUALIFIE working group features a talk by Professor Timothy Pachirat (University of Massachusetts Amherst).

Immersive political ethnography offers a distinctive approach to understanding power, institutions, and social dynamics by embedding the researcher within the field. While this method provides unparalleled insights into lived experiences and the mechanisms of political life, it can also raise ethical and methodological challenges. How can early career researchers navigate the complexities of immersion, manage positionality, and balance subjectivity with analytical rigour? For this Qualifie session, we invite Timothy Pachirat, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to critically reflect on operationalising immersive political ethnography. Drawing from his extensive experience, we will discuss the strengths, limitations, and ethical considerations of this method and its potential to transform political and social inquiry.

Speaker:

Timothy Pachirat is a political ethnographer and Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research explores power, surveillance, and ethnographic methods, with a focus on the politics of visibility and labour. He is the author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (2011) and Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power (2017). His work engages storytelling, ethics, and the role of researchers in knowledge production. He has extensive experience teaching ethnographic methods and political inquiry across academic disciplines.

The Zoom link will be provided upon registration.