Solitary Decision-Making and Fieldwork Safety

Gallien, Max

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-46433-2_11

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

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“…Someone who looks like a plainclothes policeman keeps stationing in front of your house, but maybe you are just paranoid. Psychologically, the feeling of constantly having to deal with the watchful gaze of a state that you cannot really pinpoint (it might be watching you, it might not), coupled with the solitary character of academic research (Gallien 2021), can lead researchers to develop feelings of paranoia (Tyszler 2019). Migration research in a post-colonial border therefore unfolds in a racialised setting, where the researcher operates at the convergence of multiple streams of privilege and inequality, where the boundaries between 'deserving' and 'undeserving' people are policed in an in/formal way by the ever-growing security apparatus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Looking into the border. Whiteness, (un)desirable encounters and research containment at the Spanish–Moroccan border

Gazzotti

2023

Libyan Stud

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How is the white researcher perceived by the border apparatus? What does this interaction say about the border itself? Ethnographic research has framed such questions as a debate on ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in fieldwork. This is problematic, as it assumes that a researcher can really be ‘external’ to the social worlds they investigate, as if the field site existed in isolation from transnational processes of racialised extraction. This paper challenges such an assumption by arguing that the white researcher cannot be an ‘outsider’ to the North African border: they approach it as the beneficiaries of a system of colonial and capital extractivism that feeds itself through migration control. I build on Ahmed's work on white phenomenology to analyse how various border workers perceived, made sense of and reacted to my presence as a white European woman at three different sites on the Spanish–Moroccan border. I argue that the white researcher is an expected presence at the border, as the accumulated history of (post)colonial encounters leads them where others have been before. Although whiteness opens doors, only a certain kind of performed whiteness remains welcome in the borderscape. The white researcher who appears not to be aligning with or supporting the premises of migration control is perceived by border workers as a potentially disruptive presence, and contained in different ways.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Looking into the border. Whiteness, (un)desirable encounters and research containment at the Spanish–Moroccan border

Gazzotti

2023

Libyan Stud

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Research ethics and state power: access vs. integrity in the study of armed actors

Bateson,

Cheng

2024

Conflict, Security & Development

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Field Research: A Graduate Student's Guide

Kreft

Irgil

Lee

et al. 2021

International Studies Review

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What is field research? Is it just for qualitative scholars? Must it be done in a foreign country? How much time in the field is “enough”? A lack of disciplinary consensus on what constitutes “field research” or “fieldwork” has left graduate students in political science underinformed and thus underequipped to leverage site-intensive research to address issues of interest and urgency across the subfields. Uneven training in Ph.D. programs has also left early-career researchers underprepared for the logistics of fieldwork, from developing networks and effective sampling strategies to building respondents’ trust, and related issues of funding, physical safety, mental health, research ethics, and crisis response. Based on the experience of five junior scholars, this paper offers answers to questions that graduate students puzzle over, often without the benefit of others’ “lessons learned.” This practical guide engages theory and praxis, in support of an epistemologically and methodologically pluralistic discipline.

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Solitary Decision-Making and Fieldwork Safety

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

Looking into the border. Whiteness, (un)desirable encounters and research containment at the Spanish–Moroccan border

Looking into the border. Whiteness, (un)desirable encounters and research containment at the Spanish–Moroccan border

Research ethics and state power: access vs. integrity in the study of armed actors

Field Research: A Graduate Student's Guide

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