Coming Clean at the Hyphen: Ethics and Dialogue at a Local Community Center

Abstract

Following key theorists and researchers in critical ethnography, the author argues that the increasingly acknowledged “dialogic emergence of culture” makes people responsible for the ways they as unique individuals inhabit one another’s worlds, opening a space to see fieldwork as a political praxis that individuals engage in particular ways and with real effects. Toward a clearer and more nuanced understanding of these issues and tensions, the author examines how his identity at his research site, a community center where he worked for 4 years, changed over time and the attendant problems and possibilities this posed for his work. In particular, the author explores how moving into a staff position forced him to rearticulate his original research project and practice, as well as the insight it provided on the differential social forces working on the lives of Black versus White young people and the responsibility of social actors therein.