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AbstractThis article examines the East Timor Alert Network's (ETAN) claims‐making strategies regarding support for human rights and self‐determination of East Timor during the Indonesian occupation from 1975–1998. This research seeks to understand how ETAN attempted to persuade Canadians to care about a geographically distant horror. I examine various claims‐making strategies that ETAN used to encourage Canadian audiences to evaluate the problem as an object of public concern, the Timorese as victims deserving of their sympathy, and Canadian government as condemnation‐worthy.

I reflect upon Dr. William Shaffir's influence on my approach to ethnographic research and my study of homeless shelter workers. Dr. Shaffir introduced me to his own brand of the craft of qualitative field work, but also introduced me to important sociologists and ideas in the symbolic in­teractionist tradition. Most central was Everett C. Hughes' notion of "dirty work," which helped shape my research focus. Building from Hughes' concept, but expanding it with Shaffir and Pawluch's (2003) social constructionist approach to occupations, I was better able to conceptualize the process of how workers themselves piece together the meaning of "dirty work." Beyond gaining these conceptual insights, I also reflect on Dr. Shaffir's teaching philosophy of qualitative methods, that is, the impor­tance of learning by doing. I conclude with some thoughts regarding Shaffir's perspective on the wider ethnographic task of describing, in situ, members' understandings and definitions. Following Everett Hughes, I call on interactionists to give more attention to "dirty work" as a generic and transcontextual process.

Qualitative field research can capture the life worlds and definitions of the situation of informants often not reported in quantitative studies. Post hoc reflections of how more seasoned researchers de­fine, assess, and interpret the process of entering the field and the interview dynamic between the researcher's subjectivity and the subjectivity of informants are widespread in the qualitative research literature. However, seldom are the personal stories and reflections of neophyte researchers voiced in published accounts. This article accounts for my experiences in researching the "dirty work" of front­line caseworkers and the importance of practicing empathy while managing a boundary. I emphasize the practical sense-making challenges of managing a delicate balance between under and over rapport in researching homeless shelter caseworkers as an occupational group. My experiences underscore the challenging dynamics of maintaining a professionally oriented research-role, as well as the crucial importance of boundary work and distancing as practical strategies to qualitative interviewing.

Drawing from previously untapped archival data, our research undertakes a crossnational analysis to understand how critical organizations within the global solidarity movement for East Timor in Canada, the United States, and Australia adapted their human-rights claims and rhetorical interventions to their specific national contexts to produce politically and culturally resonant motivational frames aligned with their states' discourses of national identity and foreign policy to support humanitarian intervention in East Timor. We identify crossnational differences in the framing of their political discourse: (1) Canadian groups mobilized a humanitarian-peacekeeping frame, (2) U.S. solidarity groups tapped into a democratic-exceptionalist frame, and (3) Australian activists drew from a remembrance-moral debt frame. We conclude by underscoring the importance of discursive opportunities and national historical contexts for studying the mobilization of human rights and crossnational variations in motivational framing.