This talk introduces *Ethnography’s Ghosts*, edited by Emilie Morwenna Whitaker and Paul Atkinson. Their previous collaborations include *Reflexivity and Social Research* (Palgrave 2022), *Ethnographic Explorations* (Routledge, 2023) and methodological papers.
The conduct of an ethnography involves gathering and curating material representations. Field notes and journals are among the most significant, and most prized, of such traces. They are intermediate texts that mediate between observed events, ethnographic recall, and theoretically-informed reconstructions. We keep them safe: a personal archive rather than a ‘dataset’. Ethnographers can and do return to the field in person. But they can also, in some sense, return to the field by revisiting and re-reading the notes. If we revisit our past field research through memory and the archive, we encounter traces of participants, faded memories of events, perhaps even spectres of our past, younger selves.
