The streets of Greece go up in flames during the 2011 protests.
The lessons learned, knowledge and invaluable wisdom shared in this rare behind-the-scenes look into social sciences research, are expected to inform and reach others who engage in risky work.
“It was frightening – very scary – and I got lucky,” Dr Apoifis says of his experience in Athens. “And we don’t want people to get lucky in the field. We want them to be as prepared as possible, so they don’t find themselves in these difficult and testing situations.”
Following the Global Financial Crisis, then-Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou accepted stringent austerity measures in 2011 as a condition of the 110bn euro ‘bail-out’ to help repay the country’s debts.
The move resulted in lower wages, an increase in taxes, reduced pensions, and the closure of an estimated 100,000 businesses followed as a result. By 2013, the unemployment rate had skyrocketed to 28 per cent.
Through his research around the anti-government clashes, Dr Apoifis uncovered the locations, names and other sensitive data that, in the hands of some sections of the Greek state, could have compromised the safety of those involved. In the chapter on his work, he discusses how the security of his sources was tantamount.
Dr Apoifis has also documented his fieldwork in Greece in his book Anarchy in Athens: an ethnography of militancy, emotions and violence which examines the politics and dynamics of anti-government activism.
Dr Phillip Wadds: caught off-guard by a standover man in Kings Cross
The iconic Coca Cola sign at the intersection of Darlinghurst Road and William Street marks the gateway into Sydney’s Kings Cross.
“I looked like Casper the sh** scared ghost — the blood had just drained from my face. I knew who the person was,” says Dr Phillip Wadds.
It was almost 6am in Sydney’s Kings Cross when a well-known “standover man” walked in on Dr Wadds conducting an interview.
Spread across the table in front of the criminologist and his interview subject, a Kings Cross nightclub security guard, were his handwritten notes and a voice recorder.
“[The standover man] was obviously alarmed when he came in. I am sure he probably thought I was a cop. He said, ‘What the f*** is going on here?’ And I was thinking, ‘How do I [get myself out of this]?’”
UNSW criminologist Dr Phillip Wadds has walked the line between institutional ethics and ‘real world’ situations.
Luckily, Dr Wadds had built up enough trust with the security guard during the preceding months that he began to “vouch” for him, saying the academic was just “there doing some research on the Cross”.
“It was so intense,” Dr Wadds says. The UNSW academic tried to de-escalate the situation by offering to delete the voice recordings and to destroy his notes.
“But in that moment, my contact was also saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry, he knows this person, he knows that person’. And, of course, I did know those people, but that was then implicating all those people who were involved in my research.”
This raised some “very real ethical concerns” about exposing his contacts to a standover man, Dr Wadds says. But he did not think about it until afterwards because of the rush of adrenaline at the time.
“If he [the security guard] hadn’t vouched for me … well, who knows what would have happened, these are very violent men. So, it was genuinely scary,” Dr Wadds says.
William Street is the main strip in the nightlife district known simply as ‘The Cross’.
In hindsight, Dr Wadds says his mistake was in agreeing to meet the security guard alone.
But he decided against his better judgment in that moment because it had taken him months to strengthen his relationship with the security guard to get him to talk about the Kings Cross nightlife.
Dr Wadds says this is just one example of how institutional ethics can often conflict with the real world of field research.
“I was told by my university ethics committee that I had to do all these interviews in public spaces,” he says. “But I couldn’t sit in the street or in a cafe and interview this guy and he couldn’t be seen to be talking to someone in public with a voice recorder.”
Dr Wadds’ 10-year research into the city’s nightlife culminated in various articles and a recent book titled Policing Nightlife: Security, transgression and Urban Order.
Dr Apoifis and Dr Wadds emphasise the importance of doing fieldwork to amplify the voices of marginalised people as the social sciences are often silenced or sidelined by governments, institutions, and some NGOs.
“We fundamentally do need to hear from different voices that have been deliberately marginalised and excluded from political, social, cultural and economic discourse and conversation,” Dr Apoifis says.
“Because quantitative measures [that involve collecting and analysing data and statistics] don’t capture the nuances of the human experience,” Dr Wadds says.