Beyond the insider/outsider debate in at-home ethnographies: Diffractive methodology and the onto-epistemic entanglement of knowledge production

In this article, we discuss the practice of conducting research in one's own field, in this case, from a position as a researcher with a nursing background doing fieldwork in a hospital and in one's own organization, an orthopedic surgical department. We show how an insider researcher position paves the way for analytical insights about sleep as an institutional phenomenon in the orthopedic surgical infrastructure and how acute and elective patient trajectories differ but build on the same logic, creating the same dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Through a situated and sociomaterial perspective, we analyze different clinical interactions in which we follow the hospital bed as an example of a central relational element that co-creates sleep as an institutional phenomenon. Inspired by Karen Barad, we demonstrate how to move diffractively when doing and analyzing fieldwork and argue how moving diffractively as a researcher doing fieldwork at home is productive and challenges the concept and demand of distance as the phenomenological exercise in fieldwork.

Automated summary

This article discusses the practice of conducting research in one's own field, using a researcher with a nursing background conducting fieldwork in a hospital and their own organization as an example. It shows how being an insider researcher can provide analytical insights into sleep as an institutional phenomenon, and how different patient trajectories in the orthopedic surgical department share similar dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.