Institutional Surveillance and the Struggle for Epistemic Diversity

Join us online for a special lecture by Annelies Moors on her book Doing Ethnography: Institutional Surveillance and the Struggle for Epistemic Diversity. The lecture will be followed by a discussion on institutional ethics review processes and their impact on disciplinary diversity in the university. Register for an online ticket.

Doing Ethnography: Institutional Surveillance and the Struggle for Epistemic Diversity (Leuven: Leuven University Press) is a critical account of the expanding institutional control over academic research and its impact on ethnographic practice.

In recent decades, academic research has come under increasing institutional surveillance and control. Doing Ethnography traces the rise of ethical review procedures, open science mandates, and integrity protocols, examining how these developments shape ethnographic practice. It critically explores key themes such as doing no harm, informed consent, transparency, anonymity, researcher positionality, and the sharing of field notes.

The book argues that contemporary academia often enforces universal, bureaucratic forms of regulatory ethics. Rooted in quantitative and (post-)positivist paradigms, these frameworks frequently clash with ethnography’s interpretive, intersubjective, and immersive fieldwork approach. In response, it calls for a situated, context-sensitive ethics of care attuned to the specificities of ethnographic engagement. Ultimately, Doing Ethnography offers both a critical reflection on institutional power and a plea to recognise and sustain the epistemic diversity on which academic freedom depends. 

Annelies Moors is an anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Amsterdam. She studied Arabic in Syria, and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Palestine and the Netherlands. Her main focus has been on the entanglements of nation, class, gender and religion, marriage and reproduction, materiality and affect, and visuality and embodiment.

Most recently she held an ERC advanced grant on Problematising Muslim marriages and was a fellow at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies). Her last edited book is Muslim marriage and non-marriage: where religion and politics meet intimate life (co-edited with Julie McBrien, Leuven University Press, 2023). Her book Doing ethnography: from research oversight to epistemic pluralism was published in February 2026. She is currently working on court cases of women returnees from IS-areas in Syria and actively engaging in debates about academic freedom. Overview of publications.