The good, the bad and the ugly of comparative ethnographies: a junior ethnographer’s autoethnography

Purpose To examine what comparative ethnography does to method, ethics and researcher identity when undertaken by a junior scholar navigating multilingual, multi-site fieldwork and to propose transferable tactics for managing immersion, analysis and ethics in comparative designs. Design/methodology/approach Analytic autoethnography drawing on several years of simultaneous participant observation across two French migration-support associations, organised through a triadic heuristic that categorises experiential insights into generative opportunities, logistical and emotional burdens and ethical conundrums. Findings Comparative ethnography yields unique analytical leverage (e.g. generative data breadth, comparative insight and personal growth) but introduces significant logistical, emotional and ethical costs, including questioned commitment, cognitive overload, inter-site leakage and observer–participant entanglement. These burdens fall disproportionately on junior and multilingual researchers navigating complex positionalities. Research limitations/implications The study implies that methodological training for ethnographers should attend more seriously to the compounded demands of comparative designs, particularly for early-career scholars. Practical implications Offers implementable tactics for junior ethnographers to maximise the generative opportunities of comparative fieldwork while managing its logistical, cognitive and ethical demands across simultaneous field sites. Social implications Contributes to broader conversations about early-career researcher precarity in qualitative social science, and about the conditions under which rigorous ethnographic research can be conducted responsibly. Originality/value One of the first junior-scholar autoethnographies to theorise how comparative ethnography reconfigures method, ethics and researcher identity in practice, grounded in deep, simultaneous engagement across two closely matched organisational sites.