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.     

Witches, children and Kiva-the-research-dog: striking problems encountered in the field

This paper examines how power, privilege and vulnerability can surface in unexpected ways during fieldwork. Drawing from my experiences working with indigenous women and children who beg and sell on the streets of Ecuador, I suggest that researchers do not always hold as much power as we might assume. By positioning myself within stories about witches and children, I discuss how multiple research identities can shift power dynamics in unsettling and unexpected ways. In this paper, I also reflect upon a particularly unorthodox research method: using my dog as a research assistant. My dog inadvertently became instrumental in providing access to children's life stories; however, her presence also highlighted some of the dramatic incongruities between their life experiences and my own.     

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.     

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.     

Playing the Field: Questions of Fieldwork in Geography

Many questions-practical, strategic, political, ethical, personal-are raised by conducting field research. Some of these seem, or are constituted as, separate from the “research itself,” yet are integral to it. In this paper I attempt to cut through the breach that divides the doing of fieldwork and the fieldwork itself by addressing what constitutes the “field,” what constitutes a field researcher, and what constitutes data under contemporary conditions of globalization. Drawing on my work in New York City and Sudan, I argue that by interrogating the multiple positionings of intellectuals and the means by which knowledge is produced and exchanged, field researchers and those with whom they work can find common ground to construct a politics of engagement that does not compartmentalize social actors along solitary axes.     

Embodiment and sexuality in cross-cultural research

In this paper, I reflect on the impact that my embodiment and the sexed subject positions that I took up at various moments in the field had on my research on cross-cultural sexual encounters between Thai men and tourist women. I explore the negotiation of sexed subjectivity and positionality and the implications that these negotiations had for research ethics in the project. The issue of research ethics is bound up in the conceptualisation of power relationships between researcher and researched. Here I argue that power is not necessarily already distributed between researcher and researched; rather, that power can shift in different contexts.     

Traces: Philosophy,Interpretation, and Method in Postqualitative Human Geography

This article attempts a double reflection: a methodological interrogation of myself and an autointerrogation of my methodology. Following Ernst Bloch, I structure this reflection around the idea of traces, which are brief, narrative, aphoristic speculations on a particular theme. In this article, I (re)produce my own narrative traces, engaging with and representing several moments of strangeness in my methodological praxis as they are recorded in field notes from prior fieldwork with urban secession movements in black and white communities of Atlanta. Building from Bloch’s hermeneutic, I treat these moments as traces to be pursued, rather than simple social artifacts of the relational, intersubjective activity of research. Finally, I demonstrate how a geographer might develop that which crystallizes in the interpretation of the trace (i.e., through the intentional reconsideration of the uncanny and recurrent moments of everyday experience) toward the methodological worlding of philosophy as a vibrant, reflexive, human praxis. Key Words: Bloch, interpretation, method, postqualitative analysis, praxis.     

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.     

Systematic Inquiry into Barriers to Researcher Access: Evidence from a Homeless Shelter*

Geographers using qualitative methods face numerous challenges, including barriers to access to the research setting that emerge through the interactions among the researcher's identity, participants, and the research setting itself. However, few geographers have systematically traced, within a single research setting, (1) how barriers originate, (2) how they subsequently complicate the research enterprise, and (3) how they may potentially be overcome. Upon defining various generic barriers to access, I focus on the origins of, encounters with, and potential strategies to overcome two barriers (factions and spatiotemporal limits) during my research experiences at the Palms Mission, an emergency shelter in Central Los Angeles. Ultimately, understanding the negotiation of these barriers informs the broader research process.     

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.     

Steppin' in it: postcoloniality in northern Pakistan

This paper examines the transcultural relations between researchers and research subjects in a postcolonial research setting. I draw from my experience doing dissertation research in northern Pakistan to discuss how my research subjects' effectively constructed me as a sahib, or what I saw as a colonial subject position. I examine the ways that my research subjects and I co-constructed, although unequally, my position and location as a researcher. The asymmetries of power relations in research are exacerbated by postcolonial relations in this contact zone. The contribution of those I researched is significant towards understanding our locations as postcolonial subjects in this research setting, and the location from which I produced the research. While it was difficult to do research as anyone other than a sahib during my research, the stories I tell and metaphors I employ in this paper attempt to destabilize my location as a colonial sahib, an authority. The scatological references that run throughout this paper are an attempt to write against the inherently colonial epistemologies that underpin geographic research more generally.     

“OUR HOME IS DROWNING”: IÑUPIAT STORYTELLING AND CLIMATE CHANGE IN POINT HOPE,ALASKA*

ABSTRACT. Contemporary storytelling among the IÑupiat of Point Hope, Alaska, is a means of coping with the unpredictable future that climate change poses. Arctic climate change impacts IÑupiat lifeways on a cultural level by threatening their homeland, their sense of place, and their respect for the bowhead whale that is the basis of their cultural identity. What I found during my fieldwork was that traditional storytelling processed environmental changes as a way of maintaining a connection to a disappearing place. In this article I describe how environmental change is culturally manifest through tales of the supernatural, particularly spirit beings or ghosts. The types of IÑupiat stories and modes of telling them reveal people's uncertainty about the future. Examining how people perceive the loss of their homeland, I argue that IÑupiat storytelling both reveals and is a response to a changing physical and spiritual landscape.     

It's good to talk: performing and recording the telephone interview

This paper explores the transition of talk to text in the process of performing and recording semi-structured interviews over the telephone. In particular, it considers the ways respondents and the materials enjoined in the process of interviewing exceed their role in the research process. Drawing on my experience of conducting telephone interviews in the UK, I position the interview as an uncertain encounter: one framed by earlier narrations as much as the aims and objectives of the research project; and an orientation towards 'talk' as much as the reduction of performance to text. Far from losing track of these uncertainties I argue that tape-recorders are well equipped to document these in/audible realms.     

Conflating Privilege and Vulnerability: A Reflexive Analysis of Emotions and Positionality in Postgraduate Fieldwork

Grounded in a self-reflexive, intersectional analysis of positionality, we examine emotions in fieldwork through the autobiographical accounts that we gathered during our postgraduate ethnographic research in the Global South. We show how we, two female early-career geographers, emotionally coped with instances that put us in a vulnerable position due to loneliness, commitment to the field, insistent questioning, violence, and violent threats. We argue that a culture of silence surrounding fieldwork difficulties and their emotional consequences tend to permeate our discipline. We contend that geography departments ought to provide mentorship that takes into account doctoral candidates' different positionalities, conflated vulnerability and privilege, and embodied intersectional axes. This renewed awareness will help not only to reveal possible risks and challenges connected with fieldwork but also ultimately to enrich the overall academic discussions within our discipline.     

“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.”     

The Value of Autoethnography for Field Research in Transcultural Settings*

Mary Louise Pratt uses the term autoethnography to refer to those instances in which members of colonized groups strive to represent themselves to their colonizers in ways that engage with colonizers' terms while also remaining faithful to their own self‐understandings. This paper extends Pratt's conceptualization of autoethnography and describes how it may be used to inform field research in transcultural settings in the formerly colonized world. Drawing from research in a village in northern Pakistan, we argue that approaching fieldwork with an “autoethnographic sensibility” can yield important epistemological, methodological, and political insights into our research practices. The paper concludes by suggesting that these insights extend beyond a postcolonial, or even cross‐cultural, research context, to inform more general debates in human geography about how to achieve a critical and reflexive research practice.     

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”.     

The Role of a PhD Field Exam in Preparing Graduate Students for Academic Careers*

The Department of Geography at Arizona State University implemented a field exam as part of its PhD program requirements. This field exam requires students to develop an independent field‐based research project based on a general question in the student's specialty area. A survey of current and former PhD students and faculty members document how the field exam assists students in developing skills necessary for continuing graduate research and for preparing them for the rigors of academic employment. The outcomes of the exam include both long‐term, process‐related benefits and more immediate tangible rewards. For some students, the preliminary fieldwork and results redirect student interests and form the basis for their eventual dissertation. The field exam is adaptable to a diversity of geography research methods, subject areas, and graduate degree programs, while remaining grounded in the discipline's vibrant, widely respected fieldwork tradition.     

Thinking with images in non-representational cities: vignettes from Berlin

Thinking about and with images has long been central to the practice of geographical fieldwork. This paper considers how the participation of images in urban-based fieldwork might be understood in the wake of non-representational theories. Drawing upon our experience of co-teaching an urban-based field course in Berlin, we discuss three ways in which such theories allow us to make more of the participation of images in the thinking-spaces of urban fieldwork. Specifically, we consider how images afford opportunities for attending to everyday ecologies of materials and things; for thinking through the rhythms of urban environments; and for producing affective archives. In concluding we suggest that thinking with images in urban fieldwork can be understood as part of the elaboration of ecologies of non-representational ethico-aesthetic practices.