On Casing a Study versus Studying a Case

To rethink comparison, it is useful to begin with a more basic question: What are these things we compare when we do comparative research? Researchers are typically taught to think of a field site as a case (noun) that they will go out and study (verb). Cases are defined by virtue of the fact that they fall within a conceptually defined class: they exist “out there,” in a sense, before we even arrive. Valuable as it may be, this “realist” approach has often felt foreign to ethnographers and other practitioners of interpretive research. In the immersive work characteristic of interpretive research, we often enter research sites for practical and political reasons – or because of considerations related to language, cultural familiarity, funding, or something else. Even if we choose a site for primarily analytic purposes, we typically pursue research in ways that prioritize discovery and embrace changes in research interests, goals, and questions. For these and other reasons, we often wind up with an emerging study (noun) that we need to case (verb). As we develop accounts of experience-near concepts, relations, processes and practices, we repeatedly encounter the challenge of how to place them in dialogue with the experience-distant conceptual frameworks of our field.