Sensing the other: the catch of the surrendering self

In trying to make sense of my experiences of doing research on young home(less) people in Sydney, I have become increasingly frustrated with methodological work in which I can find little acknowledgment of the intense complicity of relations of self and other. In this paper, I revisit the ìwriting cultureî debates in an attempt to identify or ìquiltî (Saukko, 2000) a methodological approach which draws on the embodied actuality of ethnography and also questions the assumed selfhood and authority invested and guarded in the concept of the ìself-reflexiveî researcher. I question the boundaries of self and other as they are upheld in much qualitative writing and consider the impact on methodology of taking poststructural epistemology and ontology seriously. In terms of my work with home(less) young people, this means a consideration of how relations with young people were negotiated through both partially locating and ìforgettingî myself. Through Wolffís notion of ìsurrender and catchî I bring together practical aspects of being with young people and a theoretical/methodological approach which both uses and undoes the body/self in the moment of the field. In understanding the body/self as the ìfieldî through which my negotiations with young home(less) people took place, I dis-locate the notion of a clearly separated, researched ìotherî; I explore the consequences of this approach both in terms of the way in which research is conducted and imagined or represented.