Beyond the insider/outsider debate in ‘at-home’ ethnographies: Diffractive methodology and the onto-epistemic entanglement of knowledge production

In this article, we discuss the practice of conducting research in one’s own field, in this case, from a position as a researcher with a nursing background doing field work in a hospital and in one’s own organization, an orthopedic surgical department. We show how an 'insider' researcher position paves the way for analytical insights about sleep as an institutional phenomenon in the orthopedic surgical infrastructure and how the acute and scheduled/planned patient trajectories differentiate but build on the same logic, creating the same dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Through a situated and sociomaterial perspective, we analyze different clinical interactions in which we follow the hospital bed as an example of a central relational element that cocreates sleep as an institutional phenomenon. Inspired by Karen Barad, we demonstrate how to move diffractively when doing and analyzing fieldwork and argue how moving diffractively as a researcher doing field work ‘at home’ is productive and challenges the concept and demand of ‘distance’ as the phenomenological exercise in fieldwork.