Overview
Timely critique of the expanding institutional control over academic research and its impact on ethnographic practice. In recent decades, academic research has come under increasing institutional surveillance and control. Doing Ethnography traces the rise of ethical review procedures, open science mandates, and integrity protocols, examining how these developments shape ethnographic practice. It critically explores key themes such as doing no harm, informed consent, transparency, anonymity, researcher positionality, and the sharing of field notes. The book argues that contemporary academia often enforces universal, bureaucratic forms of regulatory ethics. Rooted in quantitative and (post-)positivist paradigms, these frameworks frequently clash with ethnography’s interpretive, intersubjective, and immersive fieldwork approach. In response, it calls for a situated, context-sensitive ethics of care attuned to the specificities of ethnographic engagement. Ultimately, Doing Ethnography offers both a critical reflection on institutional power and a plea to recognise and sustain the epistemic diversity on which academic freedom depends.
Full Product Details
Author: Annelies Moors (University of Amsterdam)
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Imprint: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9789462705159
ISBN 10: 9462705151
Pages: 184
Publication Date: 03 February 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
This book rescues research ethics, integrity and transparency from the clutches of an alienated and alienating managerialism and puts them at the heart of a relational ethnographic practice. It is a vital companion for all caring researchers. - Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne Doing Ethnography is the book we, ethnographers of the global world, have desperately needed. With remarkable clarity and courage, Annelies Moors tackles the bureaucratic stranglehold that threatens to suffocate ethnographic research. What makes Doing Ethnography essential is Moors' refusal to accept the false choice between ethics and ethnography. Instead, she demonstrates that the standardized protocols, designed for positivist research, often work against the very values they claim to protect. There is an epistemic violence embedded in one-size-fits-all regulations that fail to recognise the relational, processual nature of ethnographic knowledge production. Moors' arguments are both validating and urgent. This book should be required reading for every ethics committee member, research administrator, and scholar wrestling with the growing tensions between doing ethnography and satisfying institutional demands. Moors gives us the vocabulary and the courage to insist on epistemic diversity—not as a luxury, but as a precondition for ethical and rigorous research. - Sertaç Sehlikoglu, University College London Doing Ethnography is a deep engagement with ethnography that inspires us to (re)consider its possibilities and practices in times when our research is increasingly subjected to various kinds of research management that take positivist approaches as normative. The book takes practices of ethnography as a vantage point to discuss burning questions about the production of scholarly knowledge in our times – questions such as academic freedom, research integrity, open science, transparency, neutrality, and the commodification and “projectification” of knowledge. Moors offers a compelling case for more ethics of care, autonomy, and situatedness in research, allowing us to cultivate epistemic diversity and more reliable knowledge production within the scientific field at large. - Sarah Bracke, University of Amsterdam
Author Information
Annelies Moors is an anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Amsterdam. Most recently she was the principal investigator of the ERC advanced grant ‘Muslim Marriages’ and held the NIAS fellowship ‘The Struggle for the Future of Ethnography’.
