Unconcealment: What Happens When We Tell Stories

Storytelling is central to human understanding and knowledge. Through listening, reflecting, and retelling a story, new discoveries can be made and an unconcealment, of something that would otherwise remain hidden, occurs. This article uses my experience of undertaking life story research with male ex-prisoners to explore a number of issues raised by Jewkes in her article on doing prison research differently. I suggest that concerns about research contamination impact how we do research and how we respond to the emotional experience of doing ethnographic research in criminology. The first potentially restricts modes of analysis, such as intertextual readings of interviews, while the second may prevent a more humanistic relationship between researcher and participant developing. Contamination, rather than something that we connect with polluting, spoiling, or dirtying, should be embraced as offering the potential for revealing new knowledge and ways of doing research differently.