Purpose This study examines how disaster-related fieldworkers can write and engage ethically from within the lived difficulty of “being in a quandary” during post-disaster engagement. Focusing on the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, it explores how emotions can be represented without objectifying them while maintaining a reflexive distance from the normative expectations placed on researchers and aid workers. Design/methodology/approach Adopting an interpretivist paradigm, the study draws on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with disaster volunteers and survivor-supporters in the Noto region. It analyzes two ethnographic moments: (1) truth-telling, compensation, and interview fatigue and (2) the ethics of discarding intimate objects during debris removal. Findings First, survivor-supporters’ narratives function as parrhesia, or risk-laden truth-telling, requiring courage from both speakers and listeners. Second, uncomfortable reflexivity emerges as a productive ethical stance that acknowledges asymmetry without retreating to cynicism or naive optimism. Originality/value The study develops “swirling” as an analytic and ethical practice: an iterative mode of writing that stays with hesitation, exposure and entanglement. This reframes researchers not as detached observers but as accountable, responsive participants in post-disaster contexts.
Tsuchida et al. (Thu,) studied this question.