‘<i>The city is not for us</i>’: Ethics, everyday sexism, and negotiating unwanted encounters during fieldwork

Abstract This paper is an autoethnographic account of situated ethics and risk during fieldwork. Specifically, it discusses experiences of gendered street harassment while conducting walking interviews with women in Manchester, UK. These are shared as a series of vignettes, each illustrating a different incident. It utilises Vera‐Gray's (2016) conception of ‘men's stranger intrusions’ to understand what happened because each encounter irrevocably changed the trajectory of the research conversations it disrupted. Navigating through these incidents, this work reconsiders the ethics of empirical research in a UK city and what constitutes an acceptable risk. It discusses the impact of everyday sexism and street harassment on both the researcher and their work. Making these stories visible matters, because it centres the restrictions women may feel and strategies they develop to enable their continued participation in public life despite gendered threats. Thinking through possible implications for future research, it concludes with some practical recommendations to mitigate potential harms. Mitigations do not negate the need for wider structural changes to eliminate the threat of gender‐based violence, nor do they signal resignation that we must minimise ourselves, or that perpetrators must not take responsibility for violence against women. These suggestions for practical actions researchers can take are based on lived experience and shared in a spirit of care, resistance, solidarity, and rage.