Competitive Hardship: ethnographic guilt and early-career pressure to conduct ‘authentic’ fieldwork

Jennifer Cearns is currently conducting ethnographic research in Miami, USA, and Havana, Cuba, focusing on practices of material and digital exchange, sharing and reciprocity within and between capitalist and socialist settings of Cuban sociality. Her research includes studies of the circulation of material items between Cuban diasporas in networks of exchange, and of the circulation of digital information through Cuba’s El Paquete Semanal distribution network, amongst others.

She is a PhD student at University College London, and a Visiting Scholar at the Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University.