Cultural Sensitivity: Doing Ethnography in a Multicultural Environment

Developing cultural sensitivity remains a challenging task for socio-legal scholars conducting research in a foreign culture. Most of us want to believe ourselves to be open-minded individuals. However, different people understand the world in such variant ways that it is sometimes hard to reconsider our deeply held views to truly understand the perspective of others. Our theoretical perspective may not be nuanced enough. Our research practice may create barriers to accessing our participants. When the fieldwork site is a multicultural environment where different cultural perspectives meet, this presents an even bigger challenge. Cultural stereotypes — those existing in our minds and brought to the site, and those in the site but brought to our minds — are pervasive that our engagement in cross-cultural interactions demands continuous reflection on our research approach. This blog post is based on an article published in Qualitative Research Journal: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/QRJ-07-2020-0074/full/html