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”.     

Undressing the researcher: feminism, embodiment and sexuality at a queer bathhouse event

In this paper we examine how the researcher's body can be used as a tool for data collection in the process of ethnographic fieldwork. We focus in particular on the tensions inherent in undertaking embodied ethnographic research in the sexualized setting of a queer women's bathhouse event in Toronto, Canada. Our discussion addresses three moments within the research process: preparing our bodies to attend the bathhouse; positioning our bodies within the spaces of the bathhouse; and interacting with our bodies during the event. Through this discussion we argue that the body of the researcher is a contested site of knowledge production.     

Personality: a new positionality?

Over the past two decades there has been much focus across the social sciences and humanities on issues of positionality. However, in this literature the related issue of personality has not been a consideration despite its profound ability to shape both the research process and product. This paper draws on the wide body of literature on positionality as well as the work of psychologists concerned with understanding personality and emotional intelligence. Through discussion of my fieldwork experiences in Indonesia, I will illustrate some of the limitations of how positionality has been discussed and make a case for further attention to be paid to how personality affects the process of field research and, by extension, the production of knowledge.     

Lost in the field: ensuring student learning in the 'threatened' geography fieldtrip

As a result of its importance to the discipline's identity and epistemology, the nature of fieldwork and the fieldtrip itself have recently come under close scrutiny in the education and geographical literature. Moreover, not only is their pedagogical importance being debated, but also their future viability at a time of increasing pressure on institutions to minimise potential risk situations in the field, offer value for money to students as well as following the increasingly common and popular trend of long-haul fieldtrips. This paper therefore critically interrogates the role and use of fieldwork within geographical teaching and learning in the light of its changing and increasingly contested status within the discipline in three parts. First, it outlines and reflects upon the current debate surrounding the threat to the primacy of fieldtrips in geography at a time of ongoing upheaval in higher education. Second, through the empirical example of personal experiences teaching on second-year undergraduate urban geography fieldtrips to San Francisco in December 2007 and 2008, the paper engages with the current discussions of the pedagogical importance of fieldtrips. Third, the paper asks, to what extent teaching in 'the field' might foster the 'experiential' or 'active' learning needed to inspire the kind of 'deep learning' approaches that hold the kind of 'transformative' potential envisaged as a key goal of education more broadly. Through exploring these ideas with reference to recent and relevant experience, the paper aims to critically interrogate the role and value of fieldtrips at a time when their potential demise is being cast as a fundamental assault on geography's founding identity and pedagogical traditions. The paper concludes that despite the threats it faces, the pedagogical significance of fieldwork means that it must remain a fundamental tenet of the geographical educational experience.     

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.     

Disrupting the 'whiteness' of fieldwork in geography

This paper argues that whilst fieldwork continues to make an important contribution to the learning and teaching of geography, analysis of the present-day practice of UK universities taking students on long-distance overseas trips remains apolitical and, by and large, concerned with practicalities. If this practice is analysed by locating it within a postcolonial theoretical framework of 'whiteness' it is then possible to look at the differing standpoint and positionality of those doing the viewing and those being viewed, and to also see the connections between the imperialist history of geographical exploration and present-day overseas field trips, in particular to developing countries. Using personal experience of taking UK undergraduates to visit historic slave trading sites in The Gambia as an example, the paper argues that the potential of field study to contribute to the critical pedagogy of geographical fieldwork within UK institutions of higher education requires stronger political analysis.     

Recapturing quality field experiences and strengthening teaching–research links

Because of unwieldy numbers, and in an attempt to strengthen teaching–research links, the teaching team of 'Field Research Methods' discarded a class fieldtrip in favour of more flexible fieldwork. The new approach continues to use inquiry-based learning but has research problems more closely linked to staff interests. Students are responsible for most aspects of the research process including some logistical planning of fieldwork. Although often anxious at first, students welcomed this approach and appreciated the host of transferable and research skills they developed. Tutors benefited from the enhanced learning outcomes for students and a strengthening of teaching–research links.     

The Sirens' voices? Field practices and dialogue in geography

This paper responds to recent demands for greater discussion between physical and human geographers over common conceptualizations and entities. I argue that one possible way in which to conduct such a dialogue would be through considerations of reconceptualized modes of fieldwork practice across the discipline of geography and cognate disciplines. In consequence, I examine such concepts of fieldwork, encompassing diverse attempts such as an ethnographic politics of location and new visions of geomorphological practice. In so doing, I indicate some of the broader potentialities available to historians and philosophers of field science.     

Gender differences in attitudes to undergraduate fieldwork

Summary Although there has been some research examining the implications of changes in funding in higher education for undergraduate fieldwork, there has been little work looking at the effects that a more diverse student body has upon activities of this nature. This study aims to begin to redress this by researching the attitudes of students to fieldwork, and specifically by highlighting their gender differences.     

Geography fieldwork in a 'risk society'

The recent decline in fieldwork provision in UK schools has partly been attributed to false perceptions of risk among teachers. This paper examines a case study based on geography teachers' perceptions from six state secondary schools in a northern English city. The research shows that owing to the inherent subjectivity of risk perception, these teachers' perceptions of fieldwork risk cannot be dismissed as false. Furthermore, it is argued that owing to the implicit, but powerful, spatialities of teachers' imaginations of fieldwork, these teachers will first need to re-evaluate the role and value of fieldwork before they are willing to re-enter the field.     

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.     

Geography Education Students' Experiences with a Problem-Based Learning Fieldwork Activity

This article reports on a problem-based learning (PBL) fieldwork activity carried out by geography education students on the Mooi River in the North West province of South Africa. The value of doing practical fieldwork using a PBL approach in the training of geography teachers was researched by means of an interpretative multimethods approach. Findings indicated that students experienced this approach positively as a teaching and learning strategy and expanded their view on the complexity of environmental issues. PBL fieldwork should be part of the training program of geography teachers and can add to the growth of ecologically literate citizens.     

The Rocky Mountains And The Southwest: Using Feature Names To Study Two Iconic Subregions In The American West

Geographic regions can be defined in many ways, including via physiography, historical development patterns, language, and culture. After broadly surveying different methods of regionalization and their influences on studies of the American West, this article uses a vernacular‐mapping approach to: first, propose distinctive toponyms that are relatively unique to cultures situated in the American Rocky Mountains and Southwest areas; second, map the spatial distributions of these toponyms across the western American landscape; and, third, compare the resulting distributions to the geographies of western businesses that incorporate regional terms into their corporate names. Notably, while the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest are iconic American regions that have captured the imagination for centuries, their cultural geographies are relatively underexplored in the literature. This article makes a modest contribution to this research gap by using geographic information systems (GIS) to map high concentrations of culturally distinctive feature names. The results reveal that the boundaries of vernacular Southwest and Rocky Mountain regions correspond relatively well with boundaries delineated with physiographic characteristics     

Measuring Community and University Impacts of Critical Civic Geography: Insights from Chicago

Geographers have increasingly adopted community-based learning and research into their teaching and scholarly activities since Bunge and Harvey called for an applied public geography that is both useful and challenges societal inequalities. With few exceptions, however, there has been little discussion of methods for measuring this work. Many published assessments focus on the impacts of projects on students but overlook the impacts on community partners. Impacts on faculty and the larger university community are also often ignored. This article discusses literature on the evaluation of community–university research and service learning from a critical perspective. A discussion of service learning and community-based research (CBR) projects at two Chicago universities, DePaul and Chicago State, is presented. In both cases challenges were encountered to achieve full evaluation of projects, yet both included an evaluation of university and community partners that allowed for assessment of the projects’ value to all partners.     

Reading the World: Integrating Geography in an English Language Learner Literacy Program

Abstract

English language development classes focus on teaching students of other languages how to speak, read, and write English. They must also prepare students to meet the many standards and requirements that are prerequisites to content classes, such as geography, and high school graduation. This discussion focuses on the integration of literacy and geography in a classroom with English language learners. A common English language development model, the “Into, Through, Beyond” model of learning, sets a foundation that integrates components of English language acquisition with language arts and geography standards. In turn, this approach to learning prepares the learners for success in social and academic arenas.     

Positionality and Praxis: Fieldwork Experiences in Rural India

This paper provides a reflexive account of conducting fieldwork as a graduate student in the Sunderban area of West Bengal state, India, in the mid‐1990s. Reflecting on my personal experiences of research in a setting that was simultaneously familiar and foreign, I use frames of positionality to understand the impact of explicit and implied power structures on the research process, the relationships between the researcher and those researched, and the transfer of knowledge. This paper argues that the multiple subject positions and identities of both scholar and subjects as presented in the field vary with setting, and that these positionalities affect access to informants, the tenor and outcomes of encounters, and knowledge production. While self‐reflexivity is endorsed as a strategy for critically informed research, active measures such as openness about the agenda and activities undertaken, self‐disclosure, making conscious accommodations for the research subject's work schedule and time constraints, mutual sharing of information, and explicit recognition of the research subjects' expertise through lived experiences are proposed as strategies for equalising the power balance between scholar and subject.     

Emotionally intelligent research

Key to this paper is not so much the emotions of the researcher that emanate from fieldwork, but those of the researched (and their emotional intelligence). Using a vignette of research on the impact of the 2001 foot and mouth disease outbreak on rural economies in the north of England, the paper explores emotions as clues and ways of seeing. It is broadly influenced by a social constructionist approach that views emotion as created and understood in the context of relationships with others and made meaningful through discourses, language and signifiers. It does not, though, deny the physical sensations that accompany emotion and the ways in which emotions are embodied as individuals interact with others (human and non-human).     

The dilemma of conducting research back in your own country as a returning student – reflections of research fieldwork in Zimbabwe

The research process is more like finding one's way through a complex maze. 'Home is where the heart is', but foreign students face a number of problems upon their return home to do research. This paper chronicles the dilemma of a Zimbabwean student conducting fieldwork for his UK-based doctoral studies in his own country. The dilemmas were critical in that the fieldwork was undertaken during the 'Zimbabwe crisis' and the inherent problems of researching government-related organisations. This has a bearing on any research process and invokes use of the etic/emic dilemma. This paper contributes to the gaps and growing literature on methods and techniques for conducting qualitative research in human geography.     

‘Tropical’ cosmopolitanism? The untoward legacy of the American style in postindependence Ceylon/Sri Lanka

Using Homi Bhabha's discussion of vernacular cosmopolitanism as a starting point this paper attempts to reinterpret its thesis through an architectural reading of postindependence social transformations in Ceylon that coincided with the emergence of a new middle class. Inspired by American examples, suburban domestic architecture that was modest and repetitive and employed systematized construction methods made a break from a long history of labour intensive processes. This created channels through which American influences entered the local industry and were disseminated within it as an alternative ‘tropical’ modernism. This paper studies the location and marginalization of these influences within architectural discourse.     

Enhancing Community-scale Social Resilience: what is the connection between healthy communities and healthy waterways?

Qualitative research undertaken in a regional centre of northern Queensland revealed how community members with an interest in water quality see themselves and others being pro-active in maintaining healthy waterways. Interview analysis revealed that respondents saw social resilience to changing water quality as contingent upon personal perceptions of water quality; the ability of a whole community to respond to changes in water quality; and individual behaviour change. Many participants explained that, in general, individuals would not take responsibility for maintaining healthy waterways unless there were personal consequences for not acting. We relate these data to current literature linking individual attitudes to community pro-environmental behaviour. We conclude that certain conditions usually prevail before a whole community will take up environmentally responsible behaviour. These conditions include a latent level of social capital, collective social learning, agency coordination, sufficient resources, and personal significance.