A Moral Vision of Postcritical Ethnography: Reflexive Sensitivities That (In)Form Ethnographic Political-Moral Agency

The original moment of postcritical ethnography not only artfully joined critical theory with interpretative ethnography but served as a methodological corrective toward the positional and political in qualitative research. Postcritical ethnography constructs research as moral activity (Noblit et al., Postcritical ethnography: reinscribing critique. Hampton Press, New York, 2004), morally accountable to the world that it writes and catalytic to ethical political action. This intent begs for ever evolving reflexive sensitivities directed at the political and activist choices of ethnographers in the complex intersecting spaces of research and lived experience. This chapter engages this challenge of researcher moral-political action through a postcritical ethnography of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement of protest (2007–2018) and the author’s reflexive process that resulted in direct action leading to arrest in a movement action. The chapter begins with a contextual analysis of arrest within the movement and the conflicting positional locations of the author that both contested and encouraged direct action. The narration of emerging reflexivity through moral phronesis which included reflexivity-in-histories (pursuing the contextual meaning of politic in the social histories of an ethnographic research space) and a reflexivity-in-texts (aligning researcher moral-political activity with the texts constructed in ethnography) offers some positional pathways for ethnographic political action.