Social science has made homeless people an intense object of research. Researchers have been attracted by the vulnerability of those living in the margins and have used their life stories to make many critiques of capitalism and colonialism. The economy of knowledge production in academe desires and commodifies stories of pain and demands the ethnography of resistance (Tuck & Yang, 2014; Urla & Helepololei, 2014). Tuck and Yang (2014) theorize the refusal to do such research as an attempt to place limits on the colonization of knowledge of self/Others.
This paper draws on my ongoing ethnographic work conducted since 2019 in London (U.K.) that documents homeless individuals' interconnected networks and engagement in street businesses and livelihood strategies. At one point in my fieldwork, one participant shared his fatigue about being constantly approached by researchers and their loss of hope in having researchers change their situations. Another said to me that he had told me everything that he thought he could, and he could not help me more. Their fatigue of being over-studied by academic labor caused me emotional harm because, as a researcher, my intent was not to wear out the "subaltern others". I refused to further "colonize" the participants' stories although some of them were supportive of my research, so I stopped my fieldwork temporarily during Winter 2020 to reflect on the aesthetics of research interests in vulnerability in language studies and contemplate the next step of my study. I told my participants about my feeling and decision to halt the data collection. Interestingly, some of them voluntarily kept in touch with me for a long time and, instead of saying that they were used/harmed/colonized, they thanked me for making them feel "useful".
This paper aims to reflect upon the fatigue of being researched and the "harm" that ethnographic research can do to both researchers and participants - what does it mean for us researchers to navigate this fatigue and what does it mean to do research in places where people are sick of what we do? More importantly, what do we do with this "fatigue"? How do we address it? What does it mean for our research? The argument I put forward is that we need to take a second look at what we mean by "harm"; there must be a balance between researchers and participants and such a balance needs to be sought by researchers throughout the research process with their participants.
References
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-words: Refusing research. Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, 223, 248.
Urla, J., & Helepololei, J. (2014). The ethnography of resistance then and now: On thickness and activist engagement in the twenty-first century. History and Anthropology, 25(4), 431-451.
