Not just parenting in the field: Accompanied research and geographies of caring and responsibility

Abstract

Writing in our research companions, with attention to the importance of care in our fieldwork practices, is a political act that challenges the ways geography is believed to be practised, or should be practised. Once sidelined to footnotes and acknowledgements, research companions such as family members and research assistants have increasingly been rendered visible and their contributions considered. Yet, researchers remain reluctant to disclose their accompanied research in scholarly writing. Given this reticence, I contend that, collectively, such accounts are political acts and not warts‐and‐all disclosures of knowledge production. They challenge disciplinary norms over whose and which contributions count, and what constitutes a professional identity. Drawing upon Lynn Staeheli's (1996) insights into the potential for activism by transgressing boundaries of doing private acts in public spaces, and public acts in private spaces, I argue that doing and writing about accompanied fieldwork is fieldwork activism that re‐centres and values a caring geography.