Playing with fieldwork

Abstract

Field research produces all kinds of knowledge, only some of which makes it into our texts. Rich troves of data are mined over many years, but some materials get stuck, constituted as marginal, imagined as private musings, anecdotes, mere ‘stories’ told over dinner but never part of the formal narrative. During a year of often-arduous field research in rural Sudan, I kept a comic book journal where I secreted my crankiness, recorded my amusements and amazements, and kept myself afloat. Like most journals, it was private, reflective, and therapeutic. It was a way to laugh at what can be so maddening or painful in doing research, all the more so—as will be readily apparent—because I have no idea how to draw, but in years of traveling, making comics had become a way to get away from being away, to spend time inside my head. Over the years I realized that my comics were also ‘fieldnotes,’ and that sharing them could, at the very least, comfort someone else doing field research, but more so that they recorded important ‘findings’ in and of themselves. This ‘graphic essay’ brings these findings in from the margins as it meditates on the politics of knowledge and its representations.