Ethnographic Strategies: Reflexivity in Theorizing About Class and Precarity

Abstract

This article explores how reflexive ethnographic practice can generate deeper insights into class, precarity, and legal subjectivity. Drawing on an eighteen-month multi-sited ethnography across courts, law schools, public transportation, and neighborhood coffee shops, I trace how ethnographic strategies, such as extending field sites and shifting researcher positionality and relationships, shape what becomes knowable about legal professionals whose status has declined alongside broader class transformations. Building on standpoint theory, reflexive ethnographic methods, and interactionist perspectives, the article shows how reflexivity—understood as an embodied, iterative, and situational praxis—not only enriches data collection but also becomes a generative site for understanding class as lived contradiction. While recent scholarship has emphasized embodied reflexivity, there remains limited empirical work on how to enact it in sociolegal ethnography. This article contributes ethnographic strategies that transform research encounters and guide our understanding of class and precarity. Ultimately, this study contributes to methodological debates by demonstrating how ethnography can function not only as a mode of data collections but as a site of meaning-making and theorization.