Doctoral Fieldwork Research Articles

Are Bush Fires and Drought ‘Natural Disasters’? The Naturalisation of Politics and Politicisation of Nature in New Caledonia

ABSTRACT Based on long-term doctoral fieldwork on bush fires in New Caledonia, this paper aims to explore the double assumption that bush fires were shaped as a public issue through specific categorisations of human and natural elements, and that this work resulted in negative outcomes as far as the environment is concerned. This paper will address the question of mediation between human agency (colonial history, population distribution and development choices) and the production of ‘bush fires’ as an event category and as a ‘public problem’ calling for a policy solution. More specifically it will address the validity of the definition of bush fires as a ‘disaster’. While this phenomenon is both a discursive creation rooted in colonial imagination and a consciously forgotten strategy used by administrators and settlers to control land and dominate indigenous people, its growing importance today is related to the emergence of environmental concerns. However, one must not forget other issues obscured by the smoke of bush fires, namely a declining cattle farming sector and its lasting environmental impacts on drought (also considered a ‘natural disaster’ in New Caledonia by inhabitants, local administrations and scientists) and biodiversity loss. Addressing this issue leads to more general questions about the manner in which policy-makers, naturalists and environmentalists conceptualise and morally address environmental (natural and man-made) phenomena through time in a colonial/postcolonial setting.

“Home sweet home?” Struggles of intracultural “betweenness” of doctoral fieldwork in my home country of Jamaica

The culture of silence surrounding the nuanced challenges of fieldwork is being broken but there is still a long way to go. In the last two decades or so, an interesting discourse has developed on experiences of “betweenness” in the field. However, a glaring issue is the underrepresentation of the experiences of Global South researchers and doctoral students returning to their homelands to conduct fieldwork. Much has been written about cross‐cultural fieldwork and its associated challenges, yet the “betweenness” experienced during intracultural research on the impacts of large‐scale tourism is scantly studied. This paper begins with an overview of producing knowledge through qualitative means, followed by an account of the insider/outsider debate that informs this paper. It sheds light on the intracultural dimensions of “betweenness,” which are framed within my experience of being an outsider and an insider during my return to my home country, Jamaica, for doctoral fieldwork. The nuanced challenges and negotiations that came with my “betweenness,” concerning phenomena such as “gazing back,” are at the centre of my discussion. My conclusion is that “betweenness” is not limited to those conducting cross‐cultural studies but also affects those conducting intracultural studies. Therefore, researchers returning home for fieldwork should be on their guard for the implications of “betweenness” for the success of the research process.

Sticky Waddling: An Autobiography of Pregnant Embodiment in Toronto’s Crypto-Economy

In this article, I present autobiographical reflections to trace the power relations that stuck to my pregnant body during my doctoral fieldwork. Autobiography exposes the ways I trundled, in figurative and embodied ways, through the research process while navigating fieldwork, pregnancy and work at a cryptocurrency startup in Toronto, Ontario. Analytically, the use of autobiography reveals how generative notions of power, or potestas and potentia, diverge and intersect to produce sticky, waddling subjects: bodies stuck in the constraining flows of potestas, and/or waddling through undercurrents of potentia. Autobiographies of pregnant embodiment reveal the agentic qualities of emotions, highlighting what they do. Situated reflections demonstrate how power, emotions, and (pregnant) bodies become joyful or not. This article extends wider debates among feminist geographers interested in affirmation, emotions, and creative writing methods by demonstrating the analytical possibilities of autobiography to encourage a sustainable ethics under emerging forms of digital capitalism

Troubling coalitions. Some remarks on the (hardly audible) voice of pro-equality men’s groups in gender equality advocacy

This paper sets off to outline some reflections on the subject position occupied by pro-equality men’s groups within overarching discourses of gender equality. Discussion makes reference to the cases of Men Engage Europe and Maschile Plurale, two loosely organized networks of men that support gender equality in different ways at the EU supranational-level and the Italian national-level respectively. Fragments of the voices of these organizations were gathered during two semi-structured interview conducted in the context of my doctoral fieldwork. This paper argues that men supporting gender equality attempt to participate in feminism from the difficult position of ‘unspoken’ subjects. More specifically, I argue that the tension between narrative of inclusion and narratives of ‘sisterhood’ within feminism produce overarching discourses of gender equality in which men’s subject position is unspoken. Based on these premises, I attempt to offer some reflections on what is gained and what is perhaps lost in the process.

Dementia: When music is the only way in - An emergency intervention: Innovative Practice.

Music cannot only provide comfort and reduce agitation associated with dementia, but can also generate connections between all who are present. This article describes an 'emergency' music intervention conducted by the author during doctoral fieldwork, which illustrates how music was used as a medium for connection and comfort with a highly agitated person with advanced dementia. This experience provides strong support for increasing the training of musicians towards providing music for people living with dementia - particularly when other nonpharmaceutical methods are not proving effective.

ANTHONY LEEDS: BEYOND BRAZIL

Abstract Anthony Leeds is best known for his work in Brazil. His doctoral fieldwork was conducted in Bahia, and he published extensively on his work in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. This article focuses instead on his work outside Brazil. An energetic fieldworker, the article follows his research in Venezuela, in Lima, in Texas hill villages, on Chukchi reindeer herders and pig breeding in Melanesia, and on Portuguese labour migration, as well as his theoretical contributions to understanding the linkages between the rural and the urban. Based on the accounts of Leeds’s former students and colleagues at the universities of Texas and Boston and on the consultation of the collection kept at the National Anthropological Archives, we present the phases in which Anthony Leeds’s professional career can be divided and the main studies that he worked on until his death in 1989.

Note-taking and Notability: How to Succeed at Legal Doctoral Fieldwork

Abstract Fieldwork is the bridge between academia and practice. Often, this bridge is not crossed due to lack of guidance, time and practical experience. Academics are left on their own to guess what would work best. In facilitating this, this article assesses the methods used in a case study of doctoral fieldwork at the European Parliament within the civil service. Findings include identifying optimum methods to plan, develop and execute doctoral fieldwork. This research is structured in four parts, which covers a literature review on fieldwork in the social sciences, the case study, the methodologies used, and a problem-solving section giving tips to succeed at fieldwork. Findings include a selection of methodologies which include participant observation and note-taking. These methodologies assist in improving skills such as time management, working under high pressure and delivering quality reports with attention to detail, which are fundamental for a successful academic career. The experience covered in this article will assist academics in designing their fieldworks at all levels of their careers. The methods described are transferrable to fieldworks across legal, political and policy-making institutions.

The Challenging and Empowering Elements of Doctoral Data Collection

Data collection was the most challenging aspect of my doctoral journey as an African immigrant student due to a highly unpredictable research environment. This article reports on my doctoral fieldwork experiences in one Canadian province’s public secondary schools. The purpose of the article is to highlight data collection challenges and supports in qualitative research. Several barriers to doctoral fieldwork are evidenced in the article, whose successful navigation was enabled by an empowering spiritual experience and supportive and engaging supervision. Doctoral data collection narratives may not appeal to every reader, but their academic and therapeutic significance should not be underestimated.

The Robin: A Monologue of Aging With Chronic Diseases

In this article, I argue that ethnodramatic monologue is a valuable method for producing knowledge complementary to current research on living with chronic diseases. Inspired by discussions on ethnographic representations, I present the monologue of an older woman with chronic diseases. The monologue has been performed for a live audience, and several future performances are also booked; however, this article is an experiment on the textual presentation of a theatrical monologue. The protagonist’s voice is based on three interlocutors from my doctoral anthropological fieldwork, which was conducted among older people with chronic diseases in rural Denmark. Drawing on earlier training as a method actor, I consolidated notes, interviews, and observations to create a piece of art displaying my research. This article thus blends social sciences and the arts, building on the tradition of ethnographic theater.

Unions as “managers of precariousness”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to argue that: in a context of global labour market competition and in the absence of new strategic repertoires, class trade unions are progressively becoming “managers of precariousness”. Thus, the paper challenges the compromise logic as the unique solution to corporate threats to relocation, since it undermines trade union power resources, mainly discursively and organisationally, and hinders trade union capacity to transform the balance of forces to their favour later, when the hegemonic discourse can more easily be challenged in periods of crisis.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws upon the doctoral fieldwork the author undertook in the city and province of Barcelona during Spring–Summer 2015. More than 30 semi-structured interviews to various union delegates and regional metal officials have been accompanied by an exhaustive review of primary and secondary documentation. In so doing, this paper gives a rich and nuanced account on the different “world-views” and strategies that union delegates pursue when bargaining against transnational corporations.FindingsThis paper shows how the conservative position that Spanish trade unions adopted to the 2008 financial crisis in the automotive industry is path-dependent to dynamics established during the 1990s when lean production techniques were implemented in exchange for higher salaries. It draws upon the collective bargaining history of the Nissan–Zona–Franca assembly factory in the outskirts of Barcelona to, crucially, explain how signing micro-corporatist pacts and portraying them as the unique solution to corporate threats to relocation undermines trade union power resources, and has two important drawbacks: that micro-corporatist pacts only postpone the recurring threat to relocation to the future by eroding, not improving, the conditions of the workforce, accepting corporate discourse erodes the solidarity among workers, and it also allows yellow unions to displace class unions.Originality/valueThis paper enriches and updates the literature on micro-corporatism, collective bargaining in transnational corporations, and the erosion of trade union power resources which dates back to the 1990s and early 2000s. Whilst the negative aspects that competitiveness pacts have on workers’ salaries and conditions have been widely reported, this paper provides a rich and updated explanation of how such pacts have negative repercussions on the discursive and organisational power resources that unions have at the workplace level. In that sense, the originality of this paper rests on engaging into a substantiated historical analysis on how trade unions change throughout time as a result, at least partially, of their own strategic choices. Moreover, this paper clearly shows that concessionary positions towards collective bargaining are self-undermining.

Rambling with(in) the Wairarapa: Revisioning arcadia through affective creativity

Rambling with human and non‐human beings with(in) the Wairarapa for my doctoral fieldwork was both affecting and creative. This paper recounts that period and contends that, on reflection, an affective creativity helped me to address my central thesis argument, which is broadly about revisioning arcadia. From a New Zealand perspective, arcadia is usually framed as a picturesque rural paradise, often illustrated with peaceful grazing stock, lush green grass and snow‐tipped mountains. However, even though this view of arcadia appears simple, the visions and ideologies of New Zealand arcadianism are actually complicated narratives that are underpinned by hyper‐masculinity and white human‐centrism. Thus, my fieldwork intended to interrogate these ideas by carrying out research alongside ten Pākehā women who lived on the land in the Wairarapa. Theoretically infused with the more‐than‐human feminism of Val Plumwood, the notions of affect and the reflections of Donna Haraway, I designed an interview process that emphasised embodiment, sensuality and meaning by using a blend of sit‐down interviewing, ethnographic ventures, and photography. Driven by the philosophical tenets of feminism and more‐than‐human perspectives, I found that producing the idea of affective creativity intersected these theoretical strands rather fruitfully. This journey has not been without its problems though and I have needed to draw on multiple creative avenues outside of Geography so as to respect the more‐than‐human presences and participants’ voices within this project. Thus, this paper contributes to the field of Geography by contending that the use of affective creativity is an interesting way of expressing and intersecting more‐than‐human and feminist geographies.

What is cocoa sustainability? Mapping stakeholders’ socio-economic, environmental, and commercial constellations of priorities

Given growing concerns regarding the chocolate sector’s long-term future, more private-sector, public-sector, and civil-society stakeholders have become involved in initiatives seeking to make cocoa more ‘sustainable’. However, the commercial, socio-economic, and environmental priorities they associate with the omnipresent, yet polysemic term diverge considerably: while transforming the crop into a more viable livelihood for growers is essential for some, others prioritize the crop’s links to global environmental challenges through agroforestry. A third dimension encompasses commercial concerns related to securing supply. The article explores how tensions and synergies manifest in these divergent understandings of what cocoa sustainability is and is to entail, which diverse civil-society, public-sector, and private-sector stakeholders bring to the table. It argues that priorities associated with ‘cocoa sustainability’ diverge, yielding synergies, tensions, and trade-offs. This article draws on the author’s in-depth doctoral fieldwork in cocoa sustainability initiatives incorporating environmental measures, which encompassed semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, documentary analysis, and participant observation in Latin America and Europe. It proposes the ‘constellations of priorities’ model as an instrument to capture how the priorities driving cocoa stakeholders variously dovetail, intersect, and collide. Particularly against the backdrop of the sector’s brewing crisis, the paper suggests that stakeholders systematically assess their and other actors’ socio-economic, environmental, and commercial priorities as part of the equitable engagement required to transform the sector and attain genuine cocoa sustainability.

Análisis de algunas estrategias icónicas en la conmemoración de la efeméride del “30 de noviembre” en escuelas de Misiones, Argentina

Los actos patrios escolares proponen distintos modos de poner en escena las memorias (sociales, públicas). En el presente artículo nos proponemos reflexionar y analizar distintos mecanismos semióticos que operan dentro de este formato como un complejo mnemo-semiótico y comunicativo entendido como dispositivo ritual performativo. Proponemos un análisis desde algunas estrategias icónicas en la puesta en escena de actos escolares que conmemoran la efeméride del 30 de noviembre “Día de la Bandera de Misiones” y “Día del Prócer Misionero Andrés Guacurarí y Artigas” en escuelas primarias públicas de la provincia de Misiones, Argentina. En este sentido, analizamos tres canciones observadas durante nuestra instancia de trabajo de campo doctoral (2013-2015). Ofrecemos algunas herramientas teórico-metodológicas para la reflexión y el análisis de mecanismos de memoria que proponen imaginar determinados sentidos y significaciones sobre las identidades histórico-políticas que se encuentran en constante producción y construcción en la provincia de Misiones.

Understanding, embracing and reflecting upon the messiness of doctoral fieldwork

This Forum issue discusses the centrality of the fieldwork in doctoral research. The inevitability of researchers’ influence and of their values apparent during and after their fieldwork calls for a high degree of reflexivity. Since the standard methodology textbooks do not sufficiently guide on addressing such challenges, doctoral researchers go through stressful phases, at times revising various decisions they made before starting fieldwork. By drawing upon four case studies from varied contexts, this forum highlights some of these challenges including: going beyond signing the consent form and building rapport to elicit student voices; the ethical implications of White privilege of researchers turning consent into an obligatory contract with participants; unanticipated delays in the fieldwork opening up new possibilities; and tensions resulting from negotiating between insider and outsider identities while researching in two hostile contexts.

Power, Legitimacy, and Urgency of Community-Based Tourism Stakeholders in Northeastern Thailand

This paper examines the dynamics of Community-Based Tourism (CBT) stakeholder salience namely; power, legitimacy and urgency. Data is drawn from a doctoral research fieldwork, undertaken from 2013-2016 in two long running CBT villages in Northeastern Thailand which are Ban Prasat; an archaeological site in Nakhon Ratchasima province, and the ethnic Phu Tai cultural village of Ban Khok Kong in Kalasin province. Instruments include secondary data, participatory and non-participatory observations, and in-depth interviews using semi-structured questions with 53 key informants selected from 5 pre-defined stakeholder groups. Content analysis is employed using a modified stakeholder salience framework. The paper is structured into four main parts; an introduction to the theoretical foundations of the research, the examination of “legitimate” stakeholder groups and their dynamic relations, the discussion of stakeholder salience’s fundamental concepts of “who and what really matters”, and the limitations of applying a stakeholder approach in the CBT context. Findings unfold subtle but complex layers of process dynamics and stakeholder relationship. Women and the elderly are the backbone of a CBT process. Stakeholders play various roles based on group member skills. Roles and responsibilities are contingent, inclusive, and non-hierarchical. Functional differentiation serves as a management parameter and determines stakeholder urgency. Though CBT is managed through a participatory decision making process, the leaders are the most powerful stakeholder groups controlling tourism resources and regulations. CBT stakes are collective benefits. Normative legitimacy is found to be the most critical aspect. Interest overlap and the dynamic range of the stakeholder interrelations found in both CBT communities are too contingent and transitory for a unified thought on CBT management. Stakeholder interrelations transit as the setting evolves and the stakeholders themselves make decisions or change their opinions. This subjective element highlights moral essentiality and leadership dependence. Legitimacy is inevitably another form of power.

Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies by Shiho Satsuka

Reviewed by: Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies by Shiho Satsuka Okpyo Moon (bio) Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies. By Shiho Satsuka. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2015. xii, 263 pages. $89.95, cloth; $24.95, paper. According to author Shiho Satsuka, Nature in Translation aims at exploring the following questions: What is the appeal of magnificent nature to Japanese travelers? How has the vast scale of nature in Canada served as a site for young Japanese to transform their subjectivities at this historical moment? What do their experiences tell us about the subjectivity of flexible workers who were pushed into transnational labor markets? How are the guides’ experiences shaped by the larger historical context of cultural encounters in asymmetrical global power relations? (p. 2) As can be surmised from this list of research objectives summarized by the author herself, this book is more about young Japanese tour guides and their lives, experiences, and perceptions than about Japanese tourism to the Canadian Rockies per se. Nor does it seek to analyze how different understandings of “nature” are translated by the guides and conveyed to tourists from Japan, affecting the ways the latter appreciate and consume the destination. Satsuka does show by a few examples how the role of the guides may influence the Japanese tourists’ understanding of Canadian nature, but her main focus throughout is on the experiences of the guides rather than those of the tourists. I must say, therefore, that Nature in Translation slightly sidestepped the original expectation I had about the book’s content when I was first given the title for review. Largely on the basis of doctoral fieldwork conducted at a Japanese tour guiding company operating in Banff National Park in western Canada in 2000–2001 and through her own experience as a guide, Satsuka offers a detailed description and analysis of the life trajectories of a dozen or so Japanese tour guides, of what motivated them to move to Canada and to choose to become tour guides, and of how their lives have been transformed by their work experience in the tourism business in the Canadian Rockies. [End Page 214] As background for this specific type of transnational labor migration, Satsuka discusses in chapter 1 the deteriorating and increasingly precarious conditions of the Japanese economy and job market during the postbubble period that have disillusioned and driven some young people to “escape” Japan and its deep-rooted corporate culture, family obligations, and gender expectations in search of more freedom. Satsuka then goes on in chapter 2 to explore the characteristic features of the cosmopolitan aspirations of those young people in which Canada with its vast nature is imagined as a space of freedom. Canada was chosen because, in Japan, the dominant image of the West that had been represented by the United States during the postwar years is being gradually replaced by an alternative model of Canada or west European countries that are supposed to be less competitive, less materialistic, and therefore more humane. In this connection, the chapter specifically examines the influence of a well-known television entertainer, Ōhashi Kyosen, in redirecting “Japanese fascination with overseas travel from American culture to Canadian nature” (p. 35). Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to detailed description and analysis of the meaning of tour guides’ experiences including their transformation through the guide-training program. It is true that many guide trainees are placed in situations of being commodified in their new role as a guide despite the fact that they feel they have escaped the commercialized society and workplace of Japan. Satsuka argues, however, that they interpret the commodification of self in their new work roles as an opportunity to develop a unique individuality rather than as an expression of the alienation or decay of an authentic self. The Canadian natural landscape plays a significant part in this conflation of commodification and performative construction of individual subjectivity. This theme of subjectivity construction in the workplace is further elaborated in chapter 4 by focusing on female outdoor guides and their negotiation of gender and family, which challenges the normative family system and gender relations that are considered “natural.” In chapters...

Feeling My Way From the University Into the Wilderness and Back Again

This narrative essay unfolds in two parts. Part 1—Feeling My Way into Embodied Research—reflects on my doctoral fieldwork, which involved living for a year in complete solitude in the remote wilderness of southern Chile. The life events that shaped this experience, including childhood, education, early career, and graduate studies, laid the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual groundwork for the project. A key challenge was to develop a methodology appropriate to the unusual context of my study. My methodology was grounded in mindful observation layered with analytic introspection, loosely based on autoethnography. Part 2 Feeling My Way into Embodied Writing—recounts the process of transforming my 900 page wilderness journal into a doctoral dissertation that was both academically rigorous and accessible to audiences. I abandoned the traditional academic approach of using a conceptual framework to organize the work in favour of a first person narrative, punctuated with analytic essays. Rather than write a dissertation about solitude, I let the voices of solitude speak directly to readers and evoke for them the actual experience as I had lived it.

A stage of one’s own: gendered spaces in Palestinian performance

This article discusses one attempt by Palestinian women theatre-makers to unsettle the high value Palestinian society places on the patriarchal roles of wife and mother. It results from doctoral fieldwork carried out from April to July 2014. During this time, I attended a performance of Al-Harah Theatre’s Shakespeare’s Sisters in Bethlehem, and conducted interviews with artistic director Raeda Ghazaleh. Shakespeare’s Sisters began as a research project on Palestinian attitudes towards single, divorced and widowed women aged over thirty followed by a series of workshops with women from Beit Jala in the West Bank. The research and workshops provided the inspiration for the script, which was written in conversation with the actors. The play opened in Jordan in December 2013, and toured across the West Bank from January to May 2014. In total, twenty-one performances took place. In this article, I argue that Shakespeare’s Sisters functions at two discursive levels. First, it presents the Palestinian homeplace as a radical counter-space capable of dis-ordering the centre-periphery dialectic structured by Palestinian patriarchy and Israeli colonialism. Second, it practices a form of border thinking that allows it to draw upon Palestinian and European epistemic practices to articulate its call for women's liberation.

Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (The Mahbub Ul Haq Memorial Lecture)

Ladies and gentlemen, and friends, Asslam o alaeekum! It is really a joy and an honour to be here at the PIDE Conference and also to be able to speak in the lecture that carries the name of Mahbub Ul Haq. I was honoured to do the doctoral fieldwork affiliated with the Human Development Centre (HDC) in Islamabad. I did my D.Phil fieldwork in 1996 and 1997 and of course then participated in the activities of the HDC at that time. It was really the vision of Mahbub Ul Haq, his eloquence, passion and commitment to the work, which gives one a sense of gravity and a sense of potential importance of gathering communities of people to debate issues about which we perhaps do not agree but which are so important to the society. I hold that memory very much in the mind. What I would to do today is to speak a little bit about multidimensional poverty not as an end in itself but, as we have heard in all of the presentations in this Conference, as the reason to address poverty, inequality, or inclusive growth to use the tools of our trade as agents of change. I begin with the quote from John Dreze and Amartya Sen that positive change have often occurred and yielded some liberation when the remedy of ailments has been sought actively and with vigour. I think one of the distinguishing features of the academic conferences it that we get space and time to really try to crystallise some of the issues that lies at the heart of these topics.

(RE)-ENGAJAMENTO COM TEORIAS FEMINISTAS DO CONHECIMENTO ATRAVÉS E ENTRE (DES)LOCAMENTOS SOCIAIS

Este artigo explora as tensões e deslocamentos ligados a minha pesquisa de campo de doutorado em El Salvador. Reflito sobre minhas experiências como uma psicóloga comunitária em processo de formação (ou - emergente), engajada com teorias feministas para subsidiar minha praxis e apontar novas direções para a pesquisa na área da justiça social, fundada na ética , através da observação de práticas de conhecimento inclusivas.http://dx.doi.org/10.14572/nuances.v26i2.4038