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'That kind of girl in this kind of neighbourhood …' The potential and problems of street prostitution research

The researcher can never be a detached observer. In this paper Sirpa Tani explores the dynamic between researcher and research 'field', and the methodological challenges she encountered living in a neighbourhood which became the subject of her own research into street prostitution in Helsinki, Finland. The idea in traditional ethnographic fieldwork that the researcher enters the field, gathers data, and withdraws to report findings in the comfort of academia is challenged by this close proximity to the subject. Tani's surveys of the attitudes and feelings of local women who have been mistakenly approached as sex workers have to be interpreted alongside her own experiences of these situations. How are we to begin to address such transient and elusive activities in the city, using what data, and with what research output in mind? How can the publication of such research avoid falling into the trap of reproducing the negative meanings attached to an area, through media representation, and the complex processes of "othering" underlying the city's spatial configurations?