Nightnography: We Are Not Night Creatures

CHAPTER TWO focuses on the experimental nature of nightnography, a method which focuses not only on the labouring bodies of workers, but also of the nightnographer. Nightnography, is a portmanteau of ‘night’ and ‘ethnography’, which I adapted from diurnal anthropology to research the bodily experiences of nightworkers who are otherwise hard to reach by daytime anthropologists. In doing so, I also subvert the dominant diurnal focus in anthropology and centre on the body of the anthropologist researching at night. This ‘situated’ approach is based on what I saw and felt in and through my body as I was exposed to hard labour to understand the deep, underthe- skin nature of migrant worker precarity. Thick observations and mental and body notes transcribed in notebooks following each night shift, make the corpus of the conversations, interviews and visual recordings used in this chapter and throughout the book. The audio-visual tools offer new possibilities for the inclusiveness of this group of migrant nightworkers. I am thankful to the co-workers who allowed me to enter their lives and put their real experiences onto the reel. Whilst I ensured to report stories and conversations as close to their actuality as possible, I made sure to change names and places so that I could protect the identity and confidentiality of those involved.