Author ORCID Identifier

Margaret Boittin: 0000-0002-5196-7102

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

3-11-2024

Source Publication

Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society. Ed. Lynette J. Chua and Mark Fathi Massoud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 84–102. Print. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society.

Keywords

Law and society; fieldwork; qualitative methods; research methods; positionality; identity; marginalization

Abstract

The chapter explains how being out of place can paradoxically put one back in place – or exactly where one needs to be to achieve their research goals and values. The author, Margaret Boittin, is a lawyer and US-trained political scientist who works in a Canadian law faculty. She explains how being out of place is relative. She may not be out of place in North America as “a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes,” but she was obviously out of place when she was studying sex workers in China. Embracing this outsider status also became the source of her strength during fieldwork and later in the academy. Boittin concludes with a reminder about the exhaustion of being out of place but also with gratitude to the many respondents – sex workers, their clients, and police – who felt comfortable with her precisely because she was an outsider.

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