PG: Can I ask you something.… Why are you doing this?

YA: What? Interviewing you?

PG: No, not just that. Why are you doing this stuff about cars and that?… What's the point?

YA: That is a good question. (PG, 18, male, 29 May 2017)

This chapter outlines the practice of ethnography before moving into some features of insider research. To begin with, however, it is worth situating ethnography within the sphere of public sociology, and the practice of qualitative social research more generally.

Public sociology through ethnography

The purview of social science has grown and reflects the nature of a world in flux, whether its focus is on global and local re-formations through migration, or on the extent to which political movements – marginal and mainstream – influence policy and social relations. At less ostensibly dramatic levels, there is also research that operates at the ground level. Gane and Back, for example, situate sociology with politics, ‘craft’, morality and professionalism. One driver within their discussion is the need to shift the balance so that research becomes accessible and public, and can therefore reach out, influence and impact in real, lived ways. Similarly, Burawoy writes about a public sociology that ought to enable change through loops between researchers and their publics through inclusive and politically formed research orientations.

The capacity to produce more innovative and ‘mainstream’ sociological work sits against the shape of funding structures with their priorities and agendas. For some, universities face compulsions toward the commercialisation of knowledge. The spirit of public sociology, therefore, disrupts this drift into translating research into commercial equations. Research that underpins activist, partisan, critical and other forms of public sociology seems out of touch and, in its simplicity and quaintness, is no longer encouraged, even though that form of endeavour is consistent with what we expect universities to be: hopeful, interesting and curious. Here, ethnography is becoming a vital way of resisting, or at the very least accounting for, those forces that undermine intellectual and academic integrity; not only because it may create impact and change, whether in mindset, policy or cultural practice, but also because it can shed light on new, distinctive or taken-for-granted aspects of social and cultural life.