Navigating the nexus of subjectivity and trust in researcher/participant relationships

Abstract

We describe our decision points to disclose parts of our personal selves while building trust with vulnerable populations in schools during ethnographic studies. Finding how our subjective identities were similar to and different than those of our participants helped us to better understand the participants' lives. We argue in this article that the introspection created by negotiating subjectivities in our contrasting examples of intersectionality taught us more about structural inequality in schools than we learned via ethnographic data collection methods alone.