Ethnographic sketching: fieldwork encounters in a Dutch Asylum Seekers’ Residence Centre

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This paper discusses the ethical use and methodological value of ethnographic sketching in the process of framing fieldwork encounters. Drawing on Clemens’s sketches, made in the restricted context of a Dutch Asylum Seekers’ Residence Centre, we demonstrate how sketching enabled us to analyse fleeting, contingent and ethically sensitive encounters. Sketching was part of a situated ethical approach that reduced the risk of exposing asylum seekers involved, and allowed reflection on what it means to be present as a covert participant observer in a border-space marked by uncertainty and unequal power relations. Made from human eye level, his sketches of these encounters focus on face-to-face interactions with asylum seekers involved. The sketches show bodily positions and expressions adjusted to the encompassing institutional setting of the Centre. Based on his own spatial perspectives, Clemens reconstructed asylum seekers’ reverse perspectives in order to grasp what they may have seen and felt, and to reflect on his own embodied presence in these encounters. Insights gained in the process of sketching proved to be ethically challenging and transformative.