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Insider ethnography in professional boxing

  • Alex Psaltis
Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Chapter Peer-review

Abstract

This chapter discusses methodological challenges involved in the practice and production of what is often termed “insider ethnography.” Following in this ethnographic vein, I researched field sites patronized by professional boxers located in and around London, England, over a 5-year period. As an experienced and still active competitive boxer prior to my scholarly endeavor, I assumed that my entrée and presence in the field would be unproblematic. I also presumed that my background experience would afford a somehow more empathetic, culturally nuanced, and thus intuitive position of knowing that would credibly add to existing discourse. Whatever suppositions I may have harbored at that time, however, it is safe to say that as a neophyte researcher I had little appreciation of the procedural and analytic challenges yet to unfold. This chapter outlines the always evolving and perpetually messy fieldwork processes undertaken as I reflexively grappled with issues of over-identification and strangeness necessary to add “insider” analytical rigor to the final representation of culture presented, namely, the ongoing requirement to manage and re-negotiate my boxer/researcher identity as I moved between the disparate social worlds of pugilism and academia, collecting a mixed bag of qualitative data, historiography, scholarly analysis, and writing.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Chapter Peer-review

Host publication Subtitle

Sites, Selves and Social Worlds

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 15-29 (15 pages)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 19/04/2023

Publication status

Published - 19/04/2023

Publisher

Routledge, United States, United Kingdom

ISBN (Print)

9781032230009

ISBN (Electronic)

9781000865349

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/626896
  • Scopus: 85156239484

Host publication title

Crafting Ethnographic Fieldwork

Host publication editors

  • Amir B. Marvasti
  • Jaber F. Gubrium

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