Doing Ethnography - by Annelies Moors

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. 

Annelies Moors is an anthropologist and professor emerita at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research of the University of Amsterdam. Most recently she was the PI of the ERC advanced grant ‘Problematising Muslim marriages: ambiguities and contestations’ and held the NIAS fellowship ‘The struggle for the future of ethnography’.

About the NIAS Book Series Studies on Academic Freedom and Epistemic Diversity 

Institutes for Advanced Study hold a special position within academia: by welcoming world-class scholars and fostering disciplinary, epistemological and cultural diversity, these institutes are highly conducive to generating new comparative perspectives and cross-pollinations. The particular combination of advanced scholarship, freedom from institutional constraints and the liberty to venture into new directions, makes them ideal laboratories for reflecting on science and society – and, consequently, for engaging with fundamental questions about academic freedoms, epistemic diversity and the science system

With this series of monographs and edited volumes, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) aims to present insights from the institute’s fellows, alumni and partners that foreground the structural challenges facing scholars, disciplines, knowledge domains and academic institutions as they contend with political, policy-related, economic and societal pressures. In doing so, the series seeks to open or further discussions about where scholars and disciplines currently stand, where we envision them going and what is needed to help them get there.