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This chapter is a collaborative piece about doing collaborative ethnography. It primarily draws on the authors' ethnography over many years in establishing and developing the field of collaborative ethnography through their published work. The chapter introduces collaborative ethnography as a methodology, but also describes the encounter that led to writing this book. In the Rotherham project, collaborative ethnography became a way of closing the distance between those who write about people and those who are written about. It made explicit the discussions and debates that happen when we learn together, but it also went further. As such, this chapter is a multi-voiced piece of writing, which begins with a discussion about the nature of research itself, and then moves on to describe the research encounter.

This chapter suggests that this volume's insights on collaborative ethnography could have even more impact if it were generated in collaboration with policy contributors, and it is notable that the local authority has worked in partnership with the ‘Imagine’ project in Rotherham. This points to other opportunities to bring together communities, local policy makers, and academics in generating knowledge for future policy making. If community-based collaborative research is to make its full impact, then it would need to develop beyond a small number of case study areas and be strategically planned, resourced, and structured. The chapter also considers how — and what type of — academic research is prioritised, and how research careers are incentivised to include more collaborative, community-based knowledge production.

This chapter prepares the reader for a more unusual reading experience in the following chapters, as influenced by developments in experimental ethnography and community literacy. It describes this volume as something like the experimental texts that began to emerge in ethnographic and related literatures in the 1960s and 1970s, and burst onto the scene in the 1980s. This text also fits within the very broad range of disruptive, multi-vocal, and hybrid texts that have emerged out of community literacy. However, the chapter asserts that an ‘intercultural conversation’ may be the best way to think about this book. Its collaborators hail from different histories, universities, ethnicities, professions, disciplines, neighbourhoods, classes, religions, and context. Although all share an experience of Rotherham, those experiences are very particular, and can be both similar and different.

This chapter opens with an exchange in a community meeting about the Rodney King riots, which raises questions about the nature of these meetings, the role of police in civil disorder, and the nature of police-community relations. The authors trace the origins of community policing as key liberal reform premised on the maintenance of legitimacy. They outline the “eyes and ears” function civilians are expected to play in meetings and explain how neighborhood disputes can limit the mobilizing potential of community partnerships. The authors also discuss the setting where this study takes place and outline their methods. This chapter ends with an outline of the rest of the book.