On home turf: Interview location and its social meaning

This paper argues that interview location plays a role in constructing reality, serving simultaneously as both cultural product and producer. Thus, the choice of interview location (who chooses and what place is chosen) is not just a technical matter of convenience and comfort. It should be examined within the social context of the study being conducted and analyzed as an integral part of the interpretation of the findings. In the present case study, involving Palestinian female citizens of Israel, the decision of where to hold the interview allowed the participants to negotiate directly or symbolically with societal norms and to express their re/positioning in Israeli society and in their own community and to demand that the interviewers, particularly the Jewish ones, traverse both geographic and social boundaries. The interview not only structured the individual subjectivity of interviewer and participant but also broadened and deepened the concept of knowledge and its sources, and incorporated the subjects' experiential truths as part of a gendered, ethnonational social reality.