Blog post: Shifting positions? Researcher to consultant to researcher

From September 2024 through May 2025, CIP postdoc Dr Anastasia Badder spent a day-a-week working with the Faith & Belief Forum, a national NGO. The goal was to identify synergies, test scope for research collaborations, and (when possible) observe current interfaith practice “in the wild”.  

A year on and at the dawn of a new collaborative project, Anastasia reflects: 

My work with F&BF has had many interesting outcomes. Maybe most significant is BELIEVE in Climate Action, a new joint project that moves my role from consultant and collaborator to researcher, ethnographer, and anthropologist. 

Researcher to consultant  

To date, my work with F&BF has been one of more or less straightforward consultation: We have worked toward clearly shared goals – enhancing F&BF’s impact by thinking critically about existing programs and seeking grants to support new activities.  My role, to my mind, has been one of collaboration and support.  While I have taken to this work with my anthropologist hat on (see earlier blog posts, linked below), the critiques I have offered have been in the spirit of furthering F&BF’s aims and deepening their thinking about their own work.   

And back again 

Now, I will again inhabit a researcher role, sharing project space with F&BF but not working for them and their ends in the same way. Over 4+ years, I will carry out ethnography, including participant observation and interviews, of a series of local faith-driven climate action projects. I plan to examine the ways in which values bring climate action into being and, specifically, how faith and other alternative values shape collective climate action efforts. 

There are a few likely sticking points, some minor, some potentially significant. First, my existing relationship with F&BF colleagues will shift. Second, I have a very limited amount of time on the project – only about 40 days per year – and will therefore be relying on involved interns to supplement my own observations and interviews. And third, I am meant to be offering “complementary research” and leading project assessment and evaluation.  

And so, I wonder precisely what will be different as I step into this new role: How will our working relations change? Without ample time, what is ethnography? Will I be practicing anthropology or still making anthropology “practical”? 

Changing relations 

In some ways, the relational concerns I am facing are nothing new. 

There is a long history of grappling with the ethics of ethnography and issues like trust, critique, and power dynamics, and I have already explored some of these in my earlier work with F&BF. For instance, I have already established rapport and trust, I hope (O’Reilly 2009). I have already had my own assumptions troubled and been led by the questions and concerns of my now-interlocutors (Astuti 2017; Miller 2017). I have already been personally involved (Coffey 1999) and tried to act as a critical friend (Shah 2017). And along the way I have thought about the implications of any critique I might offer (Latour 2004) and how I represent an organization whose funding status is precarious and whose work has shown positive effects (Neumark 2024).    

But in other ways, these concerns merit another layer of consideration. The issue at hand is less how to build new working relations than how to change those relations and the possible implications of that shift. Where and to whom will my responsibilities now lie? How do I visibilize myself as a researcher of the same work that I was not long ago supporting? More pointedly, how do I – or should I – frame our new relations as those of researcher and (classically) subject, rather than two contributors to F&BF?  

From some of my prior ethnographic research (eg Badder 2022), I am well aware that the ethical stakes of one’s work are heightened by ambiguous researcher positioning. When and where one is interpellated as a researcher can inform what interlocutors wish to share, their expectations for a given exchange, and one’sown obligations.  

Time & ethnography 

Ethnography is meant to be slow, long-term, and deliberative. It takes weeks, months, even years, to build relations, to see things as they are and not only as a handful of people say they are, to observe phenomena as they shift and unfold across seasons. Arguably, to achieve the kind of proximity – the kind of coming close – contemporary ethnography aims for, we need time more than anything else. 

But time on this project is extremely limited, and what little time there is must be spread across not only research, but also administrative, training, and evaluative work. To address this lack of time, I will train project interns to carry out autoethnography and interviews with the participants in their varying sub-projects; in one sense, this will help bridge the gap and but in others it arguably widens that gap – a major concern when the overarching goal is proximity. 

What happens to the ethnographic project when one, if not two, of its key elements are not available? How can I ‘make the most’ of my research time? How can I ensure that my time constraints and resultant temporal dispositions do not overdetermine my research practices? What might be the cost of attempting to ‘streamline’ ethnography (Hammersly 2018)? 

Anthropology in service 

Admittedly, it is my own doing that I am leading the evaluation stream of this project. Facing a looming deadline, budget crunch, and, due to the unpredictable nature of certain parts of the project, I assigned myself this role with limited thought to the implications. 

I also described the ethnographic research as complementary to, and perhaps even a form of, evaluation for the project. But as the reality of this role sets in, I am wondering more and more how ethnography, its outputs, and ethics sit with the types of measurements demanded by project evaluation. I am equally unsure to what extent anthropology is or should be defined by the problem rather than the discipline.  

It has been suggested that anthropology has always had an interdisciplinary impulse (Sillitoe 2007). I see my own work as often reaching across disciplines (eg Badder & Avni 2024) and, in general, I feel that obsession with disciplinary boundaries can be counterproductive. But inter- or transdisciplinary work is not the same as molding anthropology and its usual evidences and processes of knowledge production to suit current emphases on ‘big data’ and quantifiable impact. 

We might even go a step further and ask whether it is possible to offer a “complement” to evaluations rooted in very different lenses for understanding the world.  

Imagining new ways of working  

Each of these questions moves me outside of the usual vision of the long-term, solitary, and critically-distanced researcher. And, as Howald & Jousset (2024) remind us, failing to fit neatly into such provided categories means that you and your work may appear as problems. But I wonder whether this is necessarily the case, or, if it is, whether it might present a productive problem. To this point, I want to offer three thoughts that might help me and F&BF meaningfully move into this project together.  

Interlocutors, co-thinkers

First, I propose that F&BF and I have long been interlocutors – participants in a conversation about faith and climate action – even if the contours of those conversations will now rearrange. Perhaps what bears further thought is therefore the ways we (anthropologists) write our interlocutors and our theory (Weiss 2021). Is there another way to acknowledge the relationship between ourselves and our interlocutors as co-thinkers and theorists? To think about the co-labor of anthropological knowledge production? 

No longer alone

Second, I suggest we would do well to understand ethnography not as a single temporal mode or solitary effort, but as an overall approach one takes to research as such – the kinds of questions one asks, the sensibilities one cultivates, the ethical frames one inhabits. The fact that rich ethnographic work and anthropological analyses continue even though few researchers today have access to unbroken, solo fieldwork suggests that other meaningful modes of engagement exist. 

Günel and Watanabe’s call to recognize the patchwork nature of ethnography by foregrounding “the labor conditions that underpin all anthropological theorizing” offers a useful lens for envisioning my forthcoming work (Günel & Watanabe 2023: 131). Bound by the economic realities of grant seeking, academic precarity, and the university’s ravenous consumption of funds, I will endeavor to stitch together my own observations and interviews, those insights collated by project interns (supported by my training), and whatever might emerge from project evaluation tools. I am heartened, too, that the very nature of ethnography means that we can think of any published work as yet another stage of the research process rather than its final word. 

Rethinking critique

And third, I wonder whether this project presents an opportunity to rethink what it means to do critique, especially of/for/with institutions. What are the tensions between ethnographic and critical approaches to institutional practices, including those rooted in visions of “doing good”? How might I treat seriously F&BF’s perspectives and approaches while maintaining the critical perspective of the “vertical slice” (Nader 1980)? How can we acknowledge the pressures of economic and administrative logics bearing down on institutions like F&BF (not entirely unlike those on a postdoc) while also reflecting on the political conditions that make such institutions possible? Can there be a non-dialectical concept of critique (Raunig 2009)?