The Vulnerable Performer: Vulnerability as a Methodological Practice for Embodied Knowledge in Extreme Context Ethnography

Abstract

While ethnographers recognize vulnerability as revelatory, we have yet to understand how it generates embodied knowledge. This paper reconceptualizes vulnerability as the open exposure to affect and be affected by the world and others. Rather than treating vulnerability as a methodological risk or by‐product of immersion, I argue that it constitutes a way of knowing: a practice for accessing the unspoken, visceral and embodied aspects of social life. I introduce the figure of the vulnerable performer: a researcher who does not merely observe but enacts field practices under conditions of open exposure. Through this figure, I theorize how such exposure produces carnal knowledge – practical, sensuous, affectively grounded knowing. Drawing on a two‐year enactive ethnography in a hospice, I identify three dimensions through which vulnerable performance generates carnal knowledge – sensorial openness, visceral reactions and the intersubjective experience of time and space – showing how each renders organizing perceptible. Yet, the same exposure that enables such knowledge also carries ethical and methodological costs that cannot be treated as secondary to its gains. I therefore clarify when vulnerable performance is warranted, what it can reveal about the bodily and ethical dynamics of organizational life, and under what conditions such exposure can remain ethically sustainable.