Perils of participant observation. As an ethnographer participating in the routine activities of a group of ‘mischievous’ adolescents in and outside a London secondary school, I sometimes found myself in trouble as well as in situations where my presence was exploited to hide their misbehaviour. For instance, latecomers sometimes asked me to take them to the classroom and explain (lie) to the teacher that s/he was late because ‘we’ had been 39The ‘Turkish Cypriot, Turkish and Kurdish achievement week’ was held in June 2013 to celebrate the diverse cultural mores of these communities. A series of events was organised in the school, and parents from these communities were invited to enjoy the music and dance performances of students from these backgrounds. A documentary portraying the musical diversity of Turkey was shown one day; on another, mothers brought in traditional food and a music performance was organised by young people of Turkish and Kurdish descent, most of whom were my participants. dealing with a research-related issue. Some of the Xxxxxxx Youth would also occasionally get permission from their teachers to leave the classroom on the pretext that they would be having an interview with me, and turn up unannounced in the library or the room allocated for me, to listen to music or make chit-chat. Further demands, such as for me to do their homework, to charge their mobile phones and to ask teachers to change their seats, put me in a serious dilemma of either accepting their requests which I knew would strengthen our relationship, or of sticking to the school rules. Depending on the context, I sometimes allowed them to charge their phones and overlooked some of their inappropriate behaviour, but made my stance clear that I had to abide by the regulations of that educational institution. In the introduction to their edited book on ethnographers’ experiences of ‘danger in the field’, Xxx-Xxxxxxx and Xxxxxxxx (2000) point out that exploring social life involves a diverse range of dangers, because researchers enter other people’s social spaces unaware of the potential risks. It is the nature of participant observation that makes it rather likely that the ethnographer will face threatening situations in the journey of understanding the ‘unfamiliar’ (ibid.). In my ethnographic inquiry into the everyday linguistic and popular cultural practices of the Xxxxxxx Youth, the adolescents’ misbehaviour sometimes put me in difficult situations, where my credibility as a researcher became questio...
