On the final day of my fieldwork in July 2021, I left a remote Italian court and began the long drive back home. A few minutes into the journey, I found myself crying, feeling a distinct sense of loss. At the time, the reaction surprised me, but I quickly dismissed it to focus on the following steps of my doctoral journey: analysing data, writing, publishing.

In the years to come, I never fully unpacked the reasons behind that reaction. Until now. In this blog post, I reflect on my emotions linked to leaving the field, to argue that courtroom researchers may struggle letting go of access for reasons connected to the sense of closeness to participants, of belonging to the field, and to their research curiosity.

Methodological discussions often emphasise how access to courts presents hurdles at the beginning of a project: obtaining permission, approaching gatekeepers, and securing entry into professional spaces (Uhnoo et al., 2023). The literature further highlights the challenges relating to access as an ongoing process requiring constant negotiation, ethical sensitivity and emotional reflexivity (Bergman Blix & Wettergren, 2015). Access is therefore not a single moment of entry but an ongoing accomplishment, reproduced through repeated presence and everyday interaction. Yet access has a lifecycle. It begins with negotiation, deepens through relational engagement, and concludes with withdrawal. While questions of leaving the field or disengagement have received attention in qualitative research (Iversen, 2009; Smith & Delamont, 2023), they are often less central in discussions of access to courts. In this sense, the termination of access deserves more explicit reflection.

My personal journey as a courtroom ethnographer began in 2019 with a project on the role of emotions in the decisions of Italian judges and prosecutors dealing with criminal cases. Gaining access was smooth and relatively easy, partly because I could rely on a strong network of relationships with local practitioners, having worked as a trainee lawyer and judge’s assistant prior to my PhD. In this sense, I did not enter the field as a ‘stranger’ (Fine & Hallet, 2014) like ethnographers often do. My relationships with practitioners were reinforced by months of ethnographic immersion and while this certainly was beneficial to my investigation, as I was trusted all along the process, it also complicated decisions about when enough data had been collected. For months, I kept taking on new participants and criminal cases, procrastinating the termination of my fieldwork endlessly. I believe this happened for three reasons, which I shall now discuss.

First, I had developed a sense of closeness with judges and prosecutors. As it is often the case with things you feel but struggle to put into words, I am unsure how best to describe the sense of closeness that I felt so deeply at the time, and I can still feel now while reminiscing of those days. It was a feeling of familiarity and intimacy mixed with a sensation of specialness as I was often the only person attending judges’ deliberations or prosecutors’ decision-making sessions. Participants shared vulnerability, fears, doubts, insecurities, a whole constellation of emotions that only I could witness. I therefore felt both privileged and, at times, needed. I never wanted those relationships to end. Prolonged immersion can blur personal vs professional boundaries and ending fieldwork requires enhanced ethical reflection in deciding how and when to leave. While it is well known that ethnographers can get close to participants, complicating the disengagement process especially in research with vulnerable participants (Iversen, 2009), this has been less discussed in relation to courtroom ethnography, probably due to the view of judicial professionals as emotionally reserved elites.

Second, I experienced I strong sense of belonging to the courts and prosecution offices where I collected data. Belonging is both about ‘emotional attachment’ to social locations and the individuals inhabiting it, and about feeling ‘at home’ in such places (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Each visit to the courthouse, each informal exchange, and each return after an absence reaffirmed my place there. By the end of the project, I was not simply someone permitted to observe proceedings, but a person expected to be there. Although I held no formal legal role, legal professionals treated me as part of their “team”, asking for opinions and reassurance. Handling these situations with ethical sensitivity was of primary importance, as I was not there to participate to the legal decision-making process, but just to observe and find patterns. Nevertheless, this involvement was empowering. I believe the sense of empowerment and inclusion, common in prolonged fieldwork, partly explains the difficulty of terminating data collection, as getting out of courts, moving on to the next phase of one project’s entails moving towards the unknown, or being a stranger again the next research setting.

Finally, my third point pertains to what I name research curiosity. During the final stages of my fieldwork, I repeatedly fell over the seduction of “one more case”: perhaps the next hearing would clarify a recurring puzzle? Or the next interview would articulate a dynamic I still struggled to explain? This impulse reflects something methodological: ethnographic research is inherently incomplete. Researchers observe fragments of practice, situated performances, and selective accounts. There is always another conversation, another perspective, another layer of interpretation. Reflexive sociology reminds us that knowledge is shaped by the researcher’s position and by the contingencies of observation (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Ending fieldwork forces acceptance that the field cannot be fully known. The desire for “one more case” becomes a way of postponing that recognition. Leaving therefore requires an intellectual decision as much as an emotional and practical one.

To conclude, if access is continuously negotiated, departure is not merely absence. It is an active phase of access requiring reflection and care. Researchers must decide when sufficient familiarity becomes over-embeddedness and when continued presence serves emotional reassurance and reinforces a sense of belonging and empowerment rather than methodological necessity. The tears on my drive home testify to the emotional weight of leaving the field, which is rarely a clean break. Learning how to gain entry is a central methodological skill, as much as learning how to leave.

References

Bergman Blix, S., & Wettergren, Å. (2015). The emotional labour of gaining and maintaining access to the field. Qualitative Research, 15(6), 688–704.

Fine, A.G., & Hallett, T. (2014). Stranger and stranger: creating theory through ethnographic distance and authority. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 3(2), 188–203.

Iversen, R. R. (2009). “Getting out” in ethnography: A seldom-told story. Qualitative Social Work, 8(1), 9–26.

Smith, R. J., & Delamont, S. (Eds.) (2023). Leaving the field: Methodological insights from ethnographic exits. Manchester University Press.

Uhnoo, S., Bladini, M., & Wettergren, Å. (2023) “Negotiating Access”. In L. Flower & S. Klosterkamp (Eds.), Courtroom ethnography (pp. 33–46). Palgrave Macmillan.

Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), 197–214.