Framing the View

Abstract

This chapter considers a principal challenge of courtroom ethnography—the task of deciding how to frame your view. It confronts some of the key methodological questions encountered by courtroom ethnographers at the start and throughout their research journey, and suggests some lines along which we might delineate and organise ethnographic inquiry to make it more manageable. This chapter draws on issues faced in the course of two ethnographic studies of immigration courts undertaken by the author, and reflects on how, in framing our ethnographic view, choices are inflected by our personal and scholarly lifeworlds. In sketching out a non-linear, iterative process of frame selection, navigation, and capture, the chapter calls for courtroom ethnography that embraces complexity and surprise alongside ethical and methodological clarity.