Beth Cloughton is a qualitative researcher, currently completing her PhD research in collaboration with a community food service in Glasgow, Scotland. Using ethnography, she has spent over two years volunteering, participating, and learning alongside those who make up the space. During her PhD, Beth has also freelanced with Scotland’s national anti-poverty organisation, Scottish Women’s Budget Group, and Glasgow’s Community Food Network.

Thinking through theory methodologically

“Caring requires that one start from the standpoint of the one needing care or attention. It requires that we meet the other morally, adopt that person’s, or group’s, perspective and look at the world in their terms.”

(Tronto, 1993:19)

In this piece, I offer thoughts on how ethnographers might conceptualise, practice, and relate care in research. Through the phased framework offered originally by Fisher and Tronto (1990), and later developed by Tronto (1993, 1998, 2013), I provide an ethnographic recounting of my own field work starting in 2021, situated in an emergency food provision site (the ‘food hub’) in Glasgow’s east end. With each of the five phases1 and associated ethical dimensions (Tronto, 2013), I relay a specific dimension to the research process. Elucidating affective and personal ethnographic encounters magnifies the abundance of, and ways to, care that are integral for ethnography to be a reciprocal, interdependent experience (Lawless, 2000; The Care Collective, 2020), and ethical considerations that go beyond the academy’s prescription (Warnock et al., 2022). Employing the tactility of food as a focus of research and mode of engaging with an intimate ethic of care, I highlight how ethnographic research can intertwine theoretical query, ethically caring practices, and everyday corporeal need. Food, like care, is enmeshed relationally and is thus lived material that us as ethnographers can also think through and with.

Caring about-Attentiveness

Closed doors; closed shops; closed access. It’s the start of the pandemic, and no longer the start of my research – or so I thought. Despite pausing the PhD to undertake some freelance work with a charity, I was still occupied with thoughts of the community I was to work with, who I had only met in-person once. Upon the waves of lockdowns and open-ups I started to do some donation drop-offs to the large airy centre that the organisation had temporarily moved to, in a bid to continue, in a new manifestation, operations.

Closed gate; closed garden; closed hub – or so I thought. When we were able to start socialising distantly, with masks on and 5 meters marked, the team came to the centre down the road from the hub at Christmas and began organising donations to distribute and breakfast packs to deliver. And this marks the beginning of my research, informally, unofficially, importantly.

As a volunteer, I began to make connections, forming friendships and mutual understandings. It was a strange and turbulent time, knocking on doors, placing the heaving bags on the doorstep, and backing away. Double takes the norm in trying to recognise whether I was the other ‘young lassie’ or simply new. I was new and that was obvious. An English accent is not the most appreciated tonal quality in Glasgow. The whole operation like this was new too, however. I made the decision to volunteer prior to my research officially starting because I recognised that this community partner didn’t stop working to help others, they were attentive to continued and intensified need and worked within legal parameters to try to help – to care.

In thinking of what ‘caring about’ looks like in my ethnographic work, I have relayed it as an ethos towards research as a whole, as something without always clear parameters or roles, but as an ethical approach you take when you want to invest and establish your role as ‘researcher and-‘. Many times, communities in the area my PhD is based had been over-consulted, felt taken from, and without much in return from institutions. I became attentive to how the collaborative partner I was to be connected to for the next three years committed to others, cared about others, that I too had to join in.

Taking care of-Responsibility

I’ve had the fan heater on for too long and too close to my shin skin, but moving would mean disturbing the large feline who has made home on my lap whilst I’ve been myopically concerned with the laptop screen. I’m undertaking training on safeguarding and suicide awareness and intervention basics, sat in the converted attic of my partner’s family house where we have re-retreated to with another Scottish lockdown. The training went beyond what the university required and advised, which I decided to do largely because of being attentive during volunteering to the various potential interactions I may have when I eventually, formally, ‘enter’ the field.

Working within emergency food distribution, and with those who experience food insecurity more generally, prevents people from having comfortable and secure lives. Food insecurity is a political outcome made by those with power. Emergency food services, like the food hub, can only interrupt momentarily the broader structural constraints generated by poverty.

Taking care of those I interacted with meant thinking about how I can be responsible before, during, and after field interactions. This, for me, looked like partaking in additional training around safeguarding, which was unfortunately used, as well as having different methods to contact me afterwards if those interviewed wanted to withdraw or share anything else. Intimate disclosures can require intervention (Camacho, 2016; Mannay, 2018). Some interactions demanded formal training, such as being responsible for requesting a welfare home visit for a participant who felt unable to advocate for herself. Undergoing mental health and suicide intervention training supported me to care-fully (Williams, 2017) assess

the severity of a mental health disclosure and act when needed, as well as in the researcher’s duty to stop an interview for care to remain paramount.

Care giving-Competence

Taking care of another person, who is sharing intimate life stories also meant I thought about how to give care. Materially, this looked like a ‘care pack’ (which I have talked about more here). The pack consisted of documents ranging from the mandatory consent forms and participant information sheet, but also a curated set of freephone numbers for local support and advisory services in Glasgow based on needs identified during field work. It also had a £15 gift voucher (so not to interrupt social security payments), my contact details, and a thank you note alongside snacks and beverages purchased during interviews.

Lately, me and the team have been developing a broader database off the back of the care pack freephone document, to share widely with all those who interact with the organisation and to integrate support.

Additionally, as a researcher, it’s within the boundaries of the positionality to retreat from the field site at some point (Bell, 2019). However, part of giving care and honouring the intimacies developed and shared, I have sandwiched my PhD journey with the bread of volunteering. This started prior to data generation, where I was a distributer of emergency food during the pandemic. And, as my PhD draws to a close, I remain “the veg girl” on alternate Fridays. I purposefully curated my role as a researcher to give care beyond the period of writing field notes, as a commitment to the space and its people (Lewis & Russell, 2011). To give care in the form of food sorting, promoting convivial moments and sharing skills with food hub users takes the intimacy of food procurement and consumption and deploys its qualities in affective and materially important ways.

Care receiving-Responsiveness

Unlike typical recounts of field experiences, care receiving forces the oft-removed researcher to be incorporated. I received an abundance of care whilst conducting research: emotional interviews remedied with the local garage’s neon orange slushy in a coordinator’s car and extended hugs; when I was away I received messages of love; food hub users brought me veggie lasagne bake, jollof rice, prawn pasta and tomato plants; my sink was fixed, my bike was fixed, my coat was fixed; I am the owner of steel toe cap boots and a full waterproof outfit; and my cat plays with toys bought from other volunteers.

The affective states of ethnography simply reflect the complexity of everyday life’s associated moods. I’ve felt anxious (Todd, 2020), I’ve felt like a fool, I’ve ached and I’ve cried, I’ve laughed more. The intimacy afforded by ethnography can embroil researchers in several complex, sometimes contradicting roles at once – friend, researcher, guardian, confidante, official (Camacho, 2016; Reyes, 2020). Ethnography is a vulnerable and embodied experience. Receiving care illuminated the reciprocity between many involved in field work, beyond the academy (Bell, 2019). Highlighting the reception of care is to make the point of the power held by participants in ethnography, of having capacity to intimately and

affectively go along the research trajectory (Todd, 2020). Care receiving and its responsiveness makes linear, fixed academic boundaries fizz and reform.

Caring with-Solidarity and Trust

The fifth phase of ‘caring with’, is an explicitly political phase associated to the ethical dimensions of solidarity and trust. These now guide my current ‘writing up’ stage in the thesis. The representation of the stories shared has impact on the community I work alongside, the discipline I am in, but also broader potential political ramifications.

Stories told of people who experience food insecurity, and poverty more generally, can often lack compassion and humanity, blaming the adjacent ‘other’ and attributing insecurity to personal choice – not the continued and intensified rolling back of welfare and dashing of living conditions. To tell the stories of the food hub, and the organisation more broadly, must be sensitive to the socio-political conditions I am writing them up in, and is a matter, like all social research, of pulling through one of many stories ethically. Instead of simply talking of despair, deprivation, or poverty per se, the findings instead amplify the active, transformational, agentic and possibilities of those I spoke with.

Conclusion

To end, I’ve plaited methodological concern, theoretical exposition, and ethical praxis to highlight how ethnography can manifest abundant forms of site-specific care. I aim to have made messy the process of ethnographic research and with that magnify the various shades of researcher positionality, ways of relating ‘in the field’, foreseeing ways to care, and how the researcher themselves is embedded in the web of caring and will be cared for by others. As I write this final paragraph, I’m wearing slippers a volunteer gave to me and my partner and later seeing a friend made at the field site for a walk.

1 The five phases are Caring About; Taking Care of; Care Giving; Care Receiving; and Caring With.

References

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