Innovation in the Tropics: An Autoethnography of a Multidisciplinary Field School

Abstract

In today'€™s academic environment, institutions often present students with the opportunity to participate in a field school, allowing students to experience an abridged form of fieldwork and providing a hands-on approach to the application of classroom-oriented theory. While field schools vary in topic and length, many remain firmly bound to a specific discipline. Breaching the exclusivity of a discipline-specific field school to accommodate a variety of academic perspectives is itself innovative in approach, as is encouraging trans-discipline collaboration and facilitating opportunities for cross-discipline discourse. In contrast with that tradition, George Mason University'™s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution'™s field school in Bali, Indonesia, takes an innovative multi-disciplinary approach to the field school experience. Additionally, the field school takes a more action-oriented approach to research in which students produce research materials that are immediately usable to the community under study.  This paper presents an auto-ethnographic account of this novel field school approach.