Book Launch: Doing Ethnography – Institutional Surveillance and the Struggle for Epistemic Diversity.

You are invited to an afternoon discussion on 11 February among (and with) Annelies Moors, Nadia Bouras, Sarah Bracke and Jeroen Geurts. This event brings together scholars and research leaders to reflect on how contemporary systems of research management shape academic work—for better and for worse. The discussion will challenge familiar divides such as sciences versus humanities, quantitative versus qualitative research, and ethnography versus other fields, and will explore what becomes possible when we move beyond them. Central to the conversation is a shared question: what might a more inclusive, reflexive, and fair approach to research management look like?

The discussion takes inspiration from a new book by Annelies Moors Doing Ethnography – Institutional Surveillance and the Struggle for Epistemic Diversity. In this book Moors examines how increasing regulation in academia—from ethics reviews and open science mandates to integrity protocols—affects ethnographic research in practice. The book addresses core concerns such as informed consent, doing no harm, transparency, anonymity, researcher positionality, and the politics of sharing data and field notes.

Doing Ethnography makes a compelling case that today’s one-size-fits-all approaches to research ethics, often rooted in quantitative and (post-)positivist traditions, do not always fit the realities of ethnographic fieldwork. Instead, it argues for a context-sensitive ethics of care that recognises relationships, power, and situated knowledge. The book—and this discussion—offer a timely invitation to rethink institutional norms and to reaffirm the value of epistemic diversity as a condition for academic freedom.