Rheostatic visibility: On neurodivergent fieldwork, impulsive adaptation, and methodological craft

Ethnographic fieldwork assumes a researcher who can be simultaneously present and analytical, embodied and observant, legible to participants while remaining reflective about that legibility. Drawing on diary entries recorded during three years of ethnographic fieldwork in France, I examine what happens when the researcher’s cognitive particularity does not conform to that assumption. I develop the concept of rheostatic visibility : the continuous, context-sensitive calibration of self-disclosure and identity expression across multiple audiences, including the self. Like a rheostat regulating electrical current beyond the binary certainty of a switch, visibility can become continuously and agentically calibrated in ways that produce methodological consequences. I argue that neurodivergent adaptation to fieldwork conditions can exceed compensation and generate methodological innovation. The multilingual, cryptographic fieldnote system I developed emerged from coping practices that only became legible after receiving an ADHD diagnosis. I conclude by calling for critical examination of the neurotypical assumptions ethnographic methodology presumes.