Research Methods in Critical Security Studies, 2nd Edition

9 Travelling with ethnography

Wanda Vrasti

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108016-11

Introduction

Years ago, when I first became interested in ethnography, a colleague of mine who was flirting with similar ideas confessed he had realized that “[he] was not good enough of a writer to be doing ethnography.” I rejected this notion out of hand as both elitist and defeatist, and went on to write a piece on “The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations” (2008). I was only in the second year of my PhD and incredibly flattered to have made such a precocious intervention in the discipline. In the years that followed I wrote a couple of additional pieces clarifying my original position (2010, 2011). Before I knew it, I became an “ethnography person,” ...