Becoming Fluent in Fieldwork: (Un)learning What Is Good/Ethical/Responsible Fieldwork

Abstract

This running theme’s introduction rethinks fieldwork as an ongoing process. It explores experiences and conceptions of ‘becoming fluent in fieldwork’: the contextual processes through which we do, learn, and unlearn practices of fieldwork. It sees fieldwork as a collective project. Recognising the entanglement of field sites and travelling with fields to certain other fields, we become multiply entangled, and thus we ask: what do these plural relations demand from us? We turn to the concept and praxis of love as it considers the responsibility, care work and thinking-working together that is needed to respect other people’s realities together with them. We foreground the notion of ‘becoming fluent’ that reflects fieldwork as a work in process, and emphasises the processual aspects of fieldwork: the journey that spans the time before, during and after the fieldwork. This process involves engaging meaningfully with relations, relationality and collaboration, ‘ongoingness’ and ethics in motion.

Bourdieu the ethnographer: Grounding the habitus of the ‘far-right’ voter

“…Relationality in knowledge production is not an issue, which can be resolved through one specific approach alone. Narrative analysis, in centring the embodied and the affective, has also done significant work in highlighting the relational and ethical aspects of doing fieldwork, showing how discomfort, dissonance and unease can itself be informative (see especially Åhäll, 2019; Chisholm and Ketola, 2020; Closs Stephens, 2022; Poopuu and Van den Berg, 2021). Central in these accounts is an understanding that many entanglements and interactions with others remain opaque to us, or beyond our grasp (Klein Schaarsberg, 2021; Kurowska, 2020; Pin-Fat, 2019).…”

Quick immersions and the study of Middle East politics

“…Immersion, however, revealed a country where life flowed relatively smoothly, without incident during my fieldwork. Being immersed allows the context and the experience of everyday life there to enable a valuable form of unlearning, whereby stereotypes and biases are replaced by knowledge and embodied learning (Poopuu and Van den Berg, 2021). How the process of unlearning applied to my initial research question is explored below.…”