ALT The fieldwork confessional is an ambiguous but ubiquitous kind of exchange in ethnographic research, marked off by moments like: “I shouldn’t say this, but…” “You didn’t hear this from me.” “Don’t put this in your book.” In these moments, our interlocutors fold us into close relations that place conditions on the ethnographic project. These exchanges are unsettling, in that they compel us to know precisely what they say we shouldn’t, opening onto whispers of violence done and violence lived, of intimacy, hate, doubt, and covert information. And they unsettle, forcefully disrupting various models of the ethnographer as witness, truth-teller, accomplice, and confidant. In this roundtable, we consider how ethnographers are to respond to these disruptions, both in the field and on the page. How should we hold information offered in the register of partial secret? Who does and does not get to be its audience?

ALT Building on a panel at the 2021 Annual Meetings, and an ongoing creative writing collaboration, this roundtable forms part of a broader effort to develop the confessional as a window into what it means to do ethnography today—and what it could. In the interest of growing that conversation, following 60 minutes of discussion by the panelists, the roundtable will move into a collective writing exercise that invites audience members to consider the confessional dynamics that enfold their own projects.