Under the Microscope: Fieldwork Practice and Cuba's Biotechnology Industry: A Reflexive Affair?

Through a re‐reading of my Ph.D. fieldwork on Cuba's biotechnology industry, I empirically pull apart the relationship between fieldwork practice and knowledge production as experienced in my research. I argue that reflexivity is an insufficiently critiqued concept and, as a result, that its widespread influence in contemporary fieldwork practice works to obscure the influence of “others”, not just on the “doing” of research but on the conceptual development of the methodology itself. I make this argument by focusing on the various strategies I employed to actualise my research methodology, the problems I met with and the subsequent pull of my research in new directions. I cover such issues as gaining access, working in multiple locales across antagonistic polities, what happens when fieldwork goes wrong and the notion of “empirical drift”. I use these issues to examine how I was actively constructing both my field and my research methodology at the same time and through others. I try to show how the fact that fieldwork can be simultaneously a lived experience, a socially constructed performance and an episteme accounts for much of its distinctive qualities as a milieu in which existing knowledge is put to the test, or added to. I argue that these same qualities allow it to be a deeply intertextual process, or a joint work between the researcher and the field. This, I suggest, warrants greater recognition.     

“Doing Good Work”: Feminist Dilemmas of Volunteering in the Field

In this article, I argue that there is a need to examine the feminist ethics of volunteering in the field, specifically as it relates to issues of positionality, power and reciprocity, and participatory methods. Reflecting on dilemmas I experienced as a volunteer with the Girl Scouts of San Diego while conducting research on their annual Girl Scout cookie sale, I debate the relationship between volunteerism and fieldwork more broadly and question the effectiveness of volunteerism within a feminist geographic methodological framework. In light of the dilemmas that arose in the field as a volunteer and researcher, I question whether we can consider volunteering as “good work.”     

Negotiating Expectations in the Field: Gatekeepers, Research Fatigue and Cultural Biases

This paper considers disjunctures between my expectations and experience of doing dissertation fieldwork, which I conducted in Benin between the autumns of 1997 and 1998. The research examined the nature of women's livelihood strategies and their associated outcomes in terms of material well‐being. I now believe that my feminist worldview, and my growing exhaustion as the project progressed, resulted in my minimising the importance of key aspects of fieldwork in an African context. Specifically, I downplayed the importance of negotiating with male “gatekeepers” in gaining access to the women with whom I wanted to work. While most of the time I was able to manage this well enough, one day, in particular, stands out as a time when I handled these negotiations very poorly. This paper compares the experiences of that day with another much more productive and fruitful one to examine how and why expectations and experience can diverge. A consideration of some of the issues that resulted in the “lost day” might prove instructive for other researchers.     

“Building glass refrigerators in the desert”: discourses of urban sustainability and nation building in Qatar

Planners around the Arab Gulf states are increasingly drawing on narratives about “urban sustainability,” despite the fact that the explosive growth of urban centers in the Arabian desert largely defies the logic of sustainability. In this article, I consider how and with what effect these narratives have been deployed by various actors in Doha, Qatar. Eschewing a simple economistic reading, I highlight political geographic context and analyze how actors mobilize and rework these discourses. Drawing on mixed-methods fieldwork in Fall 2013, I illustrate how sustainability narratives are mobilized together with nationalist tropes about modernizing Qatar and building up the country’s international prestige, while preserving local traditions and culture through the built environment. With a focus on recent efforts to green Doha, this analysis sheds light on the disciplining function of nationalist discourses in the production and constitution of what it means to label development practices “green” in contemporary Qatar.     

Women in the Field: Critical Feminist Methodologies and Theoretical Perspectives*

Feminist scholars have traditionally emphasized the importance of incorporating “the everyday” worlds of women into the historically masculinist theoretical and empirical foundations of the social sciences. Such emphases have commonly resulted in smaller-scale research projects and more interactive kinds of research methods and methodologies. Feminist geographers have uniquely contributed to the body of feminist scholarship through drawing out the importance of place in everyday constructions of gender and, more recently, sexuality. Critical field-based research has therefore from the beginning been the mainstay of subdisciplinary research. Like the discipline as a whole, however, little explicit attention has been given in publications or pedagogically to the politics of fieldwork (including how a “field” is defined and the politics involved in choosing and working in a particular “field”) or the politics of representation (which includes considerations of the partiality of knowledge and how and to whom we represent our work, ourselves and others in various kinds of texts). These “Opening Remarks” show how these issues are addressed in the papers that follow and how feminist geography has much to contribute to critical analyses of global and multinational processes, including patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.     

Far from Being "Home Alone": The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork

Despite persistent images to the contrary, most fieldworkers are accompanied. Yet, there has been limited discussion on the nature of accompanied fieldwork, particularly by geographers. Drawing on our experiences in three countries in the tropics, we discuss the dynamics of being accompanied in “the field” by our children and female co‐researchers. Specifically, we focus on issues of access and rapport; the impacts of their presence on our positionality; and the implications these have for power relations and research outcomes. We demonstrate how being accompanied entangles our personal and professional selves and can result in more egalitarian power relations as we become “observers observed”. We argue that by paying attention to the dynamics of accompanied fieldwork, there is the potential to enhance the conceptual focus of our methodological concerns and to provide a more theoretically sophisticated mode of exploring the ways in which our multiple identities intersect while in “the field”.     

Getting Personal: Reflexivity,Positionality, and Feminist Research*

Feminist and poststructural challenges to objectivist social science demand greater reflection by the researcher with the aim of producing more inclusive methods sensitive to the power relations in fieldwork. Following a discussion of contrasting approaches to these power relations, I present a reflexive examination of a research project on sexual identities. My reflections highlight some of the key ethical questions that face researchers conducting fieldwork, especially with regard to the relationship between the researcher and those being researched. My discussion of these dilemmas reflect the situated and partial nature of our understanding of “others.” I argue that the researcher's positionality and biography directly affect fieldwork and that fieldwork is a dialogical process which is structured by the researcher and the participants.     

GATEKEEPERS AND KEYMASTERS: DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIPS OF ACCESS IN GEOGRAPHICAL FIELDWORK*

ABSTRACT. This article contributes to a recent and growing body of literature exploring the nature of fieldwork in human geography. Specifically, we critically examine the role of gatekeepers in providing access to “the field,” based on existing conceptualizations of gatekeepers in the literature and on our own experiences with gatekeepers. We argue that the concept of gatekeepers has been oversimplified, in that relationships between researchers and gatekeepers are often assumed to be unidirectional—with gatekeepers controlling or providing access by researchers—and predominantly static in form and time. Although we accept the necessity and advantages of working through gatekeepers, our experiences suggest that relationships with them are highly complex and evolve over time, with sometimes unexpected implications for research. In gathering and analyzing data, researchers become gatekeepers themselves, what we are calling “keymasters.” Reconceptualizing the gatekeeper‐researcher relationship will contribute to ongoing efforts to more fully understand field‐workers as undertaking a practice inherently political, personal, and linked to the production of knowledge.     

Marxism, Sarcasm, Ethnography: Geographical Fieldnotes from South India

This paper addresses questions of ethnography in geographic fieldwork through research conducted on globalisation and work in Tiruppur, an industrial boomtown in South India. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in western Tamilnad State became India's centrepiece in the export of garments made of knitted cloth. This industrial boom has been organised through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of Gounders from modest agrarian and working‐class origins. In effect, the whole town works like a decentralised factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant‐worker origins at the helm. My research explores the historical geographic trajectories linking agrarian and industrial work, and the ways in which these histories are used in the present. In these uses of the past in remaking self and place, I interrogate the self‐presentations of Tiruppur's entrepreneurs, as these “self‐made men” hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to “toil”. This paper explores questions of ethnographic method emerging from a political‐economic context in which globalisation has worked by turning “toil” into capital.     

The Potential for Mixed Methods: Results from the Field in Urban South Africa

With the “cultural turn” in geography, scholars have become more focused on the politics of representation, politics of fieldwork, and politics of the research setting. In human geography, this epistemological shift has been accompanied by a methodological move toward intensive methods at the expense of extensive methods. In this article, I suggest that mixed methods that utilize the strengths of both intensive and extensive methods can offset the weaknesses of each method. Moreover, results from the field suggest that the combination of intensive and extensive methods could produce unique insights only possible from a mixed method approach.     

Fieldwork Unbound: Spaces of Association in Postconflict Vietnam

This article traces the ways in which the field emerges and becomes emplaced among three groups of people by presenting an inclusive reading of fieldwork in postconflict Vietnam. It employs a heuristic device called spaces of association to illustrate the different yet interrelated socio-spatial fields that surface when conducting fieldwork in an environment known for violence. In shedding light on the field's ability to extend beyond the territorially defined “field site,” this article speaks to debates surrounding the socio-spatial production of multiple and overlapping fields, describes the audiences engaged with and implicated in research, and contributes to understandings of ethical research engagement with postconflict field sites.     

HYDROGRAPHIES*

ABSTRACT. Drawing on the work of the theoretical biologist Humberto Maturana, I offer in this essay a way of conceptualizing the forms of identity that survive the various death pronouncements of our postidentitarian moment. I associate the work of imagining those strange new forms of identity with what Frederic Jameson calls “cognitive mapping,” arguing that these “afteridentities” can emerge from a “hydrographic” charting of the fluid cultural territories of the modern and the postmodern. In conclusion, I indicate how this approach may be of use in contemporary attempts to “map” the diasporic territories of the Black Atlantic.     

Letting failure be: COVID-19, PhD fieldwork and to not (want to) learn from failures

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted researchers to rethink their fieldwork. My doctoral fieldwork plans, which involved conducting ethnographic research amongst Afghan refugees and migrants in New Delhi and Kolkata, were upended because of the recurring waves of the pandemic and the lockdowns/curfews that were imposed in their wake (2020−2022). Locked out of my field, my inability to conduct my research as planned amounted to a failure that could not be redeemed, especially because of time constraints. Using autoethnographic vignettes of my encounters in the lead up to the eventual suspension of in-situ fieldwork, I critically reflect on how I approached and felt towards failures in/of field and how these encounters speak back to the discourse on failure in academia. In doing so, this article advocates for the need to revisit failures simply for what they are, without necessarily demanding and/or (self) expecting that we recast them as stepping stones towards success. By challenging the neo-liberal desire to re-present failures in a productive light, I argue we can make greater room for more supportive discussions around failures without committing ourselves to the task of having to find triumph in (every) adversity.     

Pernicious assimilation: reframing the integration of the urban informal economy in Southern Africa

This paper argues that many of the official attempts to “integrate” the urban informal economy into the mainstream economy are fundamentally flawed. An unpacking of the “integrative” agenda as pursued by planning and other governmental practices reveals that “integration”, as currently practiced, does not herald the mainstreaming of the informal economy. Drawing on research in Zimbabwe and evidence from other countries in Southern Africa, I argue that what we witness is a sinister stripping away of the lifeblood of informality. This malicious form of integration entails crippling Faustian bargains. In the end, this pernicious assimilation insidiously does away with that which makes informality a livelihood haven for the majority of urbanites. I conclude that the duplicitous integration is unworkable and leaves the big questions of inclusion untouched, hence the persistence of the “problem” of informality.     

Fieldwork and Tropicality in French Indochina: Reflections on Pierre Gourou's Les Paysans Du Delta Tonkinois, 1936

This paper examines the fieldwork undertaken by the distinguished French geographer Pierre Gourou (1900–99) in the Tonkin Delta (Red River Delta) of northern Vietnam in the 1920s and 1930s, and his wider configuration of “the tropical world” as a distinct space of knowledge and radical otherness. Gourou's fieldwork endeavours in French Indochina are interpreted in the light of recent work on “tropicality”: the idea that “the tropics” need to be understood as a western cultural construction and colonising discourse that essentialised the hot, wet regions of the world, and exalted the temperate world over its tropical counterpart. The paper focuses on Gourou's monumental 1936 study Les paysans du delta tonkinois, étude de géographie humaine. It is argued that in this study, and his later comparative work on the tropics, Gourou elaborated a distinct geographical variant of tropicality, but one that, ultimately, reinforced the essentialist logic and momentum of this discourse. Particular attention is paid to the geographical ideas, fieldwork techniques and discursive strategies that Gourou used in his 1936 study, and the French colonial context in which he worked. The article shows how Gourou appealed to western reason and science as tools of study, identified overpopulation as the key problem facing the Tonkin Delta, and suggested that colonial practices of modernisation had a limited place and ineffectual role in the rice plains of the region.     

Refugees in the IT Sector: Young Syrians’ Economic Subjectivities and Familial Lives in Jordan

This article explores refugee economic subjectivity in the context of restrictive asylum policies and disrupted transnational family lives. Drawing on fieldwork with young Syrian refugees pursuing IT training in Jordan, I focus on the “coding boot camp,” an emerging educational format in the field of refugee professional training. I thus explore how Syrian youths approach humanitarian policies in which, in the absence of full social and economic rights for refugees, the question of livelihoods is addressed through the paradigms of self‐reliance, creativity, and innovation. Reframing the refugee from a “protected” to a “productive” subject, and offering individual solutions to a structural economic impasse, these policies produce tensions between individual responsibilities and more‐than‐individual relations and identifications—with families, religious identities, and national communities—that remain unresolved. The findings contribute to geographical scholarship on economic subjectivity, familial relations, and the migrant and refugee condition, while shedding light on some of the effects of the encounter between technology‐centred, neoliberal approaches to humanitarianism and restrictive migration regimes in responses to the Syrian displacement.     

Cities within cities: intra-urban comparison of infrastructure in Mumbai,Delhi and Cape Town

Comparison is now taken as vital to the constitution of knowledge about cities and urbanism. However, debate on comparative urbanism has been far more attentive to the merits of comparisons between cities than it has been to the potential and challenges of comparisons within cities—to what we call “Intra-Urban Comparison” (IUC). We argue that a focus on the diverse forms of urbanism located within cities may generate critical knowledge for both intra- and inter-urban comparative projects. IUCs highlight the diversity inherent in the category “city,” revealing dimensions of the urban that are central to how cities work and are experienced. We mobilise fieldwork within three cities: Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town, and consider both how these cities have been historically understood as different urban worlds within a city, and discuss key findings from IUCs we have conducted on infrastructures. We find that IUCs can enhance comparative work both within and between cities: reconceptualising urban politics; attending to the varied and contradictory trajectories of urban life; and bringing visibility to the diverse routes through which progressive change can occur.     

Research Associates and the Production of Knowledge in the Field

This article introduces an important, but overlooked, actor—the research associate—into methodological discussions about the production of knowledge. We use the term research associate (rather than assistant) to encompass the individuals on whom researchers rely while conducting fieldwork. We seek to avoid the unidirectional hierarchy and power dynamics between researchers and associates, which place the researcher as expert and knowledge producer while obscuring the diversity of roles conducted by field associates. Therefore, throughout this article we examine and destabilize power dynamics and hierarchies and widen the range of what is considered research assistance in the coproduction of knowledge. We also highlight the ways in which geopolitics are written into encounters with ourselves and research associates, encounters that render and reveal the complexities of vulnerability and bodily risk in fieldwork. The goals of this article are threefold: to (1) introduce the influential role of research associates during the production and dissemination of knowledge, (2) situate the work of research associates in both fieldwork and methodological literature, and (3) problematize the invisibility of research associates in academic publications and discuss possible alternatives to how authorship is credited.     

Doing art and doing cultural geography: The fieldwork/field walking project1

With accompanying examples of initial visual experimentation from the fieldwork/field walking PhD project, the paper outlines some of the challenges of being an artist and using systems of understanding from science, the new ethnography, and cultural geography as a framework for making contemporary art. The PhD project is in its preliminary stages and is designed to explore the area of walking and fieldwork in art, and as art. Some of the challenges are the ambiguous role of the artist as scientist, ethnographer and researcher, the role of reflexivity in art practice; and the pitfalls of 'academic art'. While cultural geographers have used artworks as texts to explain places, this project endeavours to work with issues of place, landscapes, power, identity and representation in the art, to feed back into this dialogue. The bulk of the project will take place in the Kimberley region of Western Australia where the concepts of wilderness and wildness are most relevant. The research question posed by the fieldwork/field walking project is: within the discourse between art and science what is the connection between fieldwork and walking in the field?     

NEOTRADITIONALISM IN THE SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE: CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION IN VANCOUVER,CANADA

During the 1990s, urban geographers have become fascinated with what are termed “neotraditional landscapes,” yet have ignored the broader cultural contexts of neotraditionalism. In this paper, I use a more encompassing and culturally based conception of neotraditionalism to demonstrate a salience of neotraditionalism in the suburban landscape beyond strict neotraditional developments. My argument is that neotraditionalist beliefs are transforming “ordinary” suburban landscapes in subtle but distinctive ways beyond the presence of neotraditional developments. This different reading of suburban neotraditionalism is filtered through qualitative material collected during in-depth interviews in two suburban neighborhoods in Vancouver, Canada. Though the research is suggestive rather than definitive, I suggest that it has important implications for rethinking geographies of suburban exclusion.