Fieldwork Sites Research Articles

Deep mapping in geography education: learning about a distant place and people in a summer school as a ‘committed outlier’

ABSTRACT This article discusses Deep Mapping in Geography teaching and learning by drawing on a case study of a summer school organised during the COVID-19 pandemic. Deep Mapping was used to foster deep learning among the students and teach them about a distant place and people. The exercise tasked the students to work on the creation of layered maps representing the fieldwork site, the city of Vancouver, Canada. Critical student reflections about the Deep Mapping process are used to address some of the benefits and challenges. The Deep Mapping exercise stimulated the students to critically engage with the diverse summer school materials, move beyond a superficial view of the city, maps and mapping, and reflect on their positionality. The method is promising in light of making deep engagement with other places more accessible to those who might not have or be inclined to access such international educational experience and also offers another opportunity for blended learning. In conclusion, we argue that Deep Mapping offers a timely and highly engaging approach to learn about a place and people from another part of the world – be it on location or at a distance.

Fieldwork Locations: Where Sociocultural Anthropologists Conduct Research

Historians of anthropology have observed how the locations where sociocultural anthropologists conduct fieldwork have influenced their methods and theories. This paper provides information about (1) where sociocultural anthropologists publishing in selected well-known journals in recent years have been conducting fieldwork; and (2) how contemporary fieldwork locations resemble and differ from those in the past. The geographical distribution of fieldwork sites by world region prior to the mid-1950s differs considerably from that of more recent years. However, since 1960 the only significant changes have been increases in the proportions of field sites in Europe and the Middle East. In comparison with their populations, fieldwork sites in both the past and present greatly overrepresent some regions and countries and underrepresent other regions and countries. The result is a sampling problem that hinders attempts to make cross-cultural generalizations.

GP remote consultations with marginalised patients and the importance of place during care: a qualitative study of the role of place in GP consultations.

Since COVID-19 there been an increase in the use of remote consultations in General Practice in the UK. This leads to the displacement of the consultation outside of the physical GP practice, and its 'emplacement' elsewhere, with underexplored consequences for inequities of healthcare in marginalised groups. This paper examines the place-making demands that remote consultations make on patients, and the ways that these affect their experiences of care, with a focus on the impact on patients from marginalised groups. Ethnography and interview study (n=15) undertaken at three sites in London: a foodbank, a community development organisation, and a drop-in advice centre for migrants. Additionally, GPs (n=5) working at practices in London Digital Health Hub staff (n=4) and staff at fieldwork sites (n=3) were interviewed. Ethnographic observation (n=84 hours) and semi-structured interviews (n=27). Interviews were conducted in-person and over the phone and data were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. The core themes emerging from the data included challenges securing privacy during remote consultations, and the loss of formal healthcare spaces as important places of care. These findings were closely tied to resource access, leading to inequities in experiences of care. Remote GP consultations are not "place-less" encounters, and inequities in access to suitable spaces may lead to inequities in experiences of care. Attention should be given to ensuring that patients without appropriate spaces for remote consultations are offered in-person care, or consultation times made more specific to allow for organisation of private space.

Co‐producing ethics guidelines together with people with learning disabilities

AbstractBackgroundWe are a research team of clinical, academic and advocacy‐based researchers with and without learning disabilities, working on the Humanising Healthcare (for people with learning disabilities) project. The project is dedicated to finding and sharing healthcare practices that enhance the lives of people with learning disabilities. As part of our ethics applications to access National Health Service study sites for fieldwork, we worked together to write guiding principles for co‐producing research ethics with researchers with learning disabilities. In this paper, we introduce these Participatory Ethics Good Practice Guidelines and reflect on our collaboration.MethodsWe reflect on developing the Participatory Ethics Good Practice Guidelines. These guidelines were developed during online co‐production meetings with our full research team, including advocacy‐based organisation researchers, clinical researchers and university researchers. We considered consent, understanding research, and understanding research methods during the development of these Guidelines.FindingsWe present ten guidelines for co‐producing research with people with learning disabilities.ConclusionsOur findings may be helpful to researchers with learning disabilities, university and clinical researchers, funders, and those who work in research governance (e.g., ethics committees and university research departments).

Ageing and the Transportal Home

Taking a comparative approach to two field sites – Shanghai in China and Dublin in Ireland – this paper explores the relationship between ageing, home, and the impact of the smartphone on domestic space. Although Shanghai and Dublin are extremely diverse contexts, both have seen rapid social shifts in recent decades, and domestic life seems to reflect these changes. Here, we outline how older people reconfigure their lives through the manipulation of their homes, variously upsizing, downsizing, and rightsizing – but also through sifting through their possessions, decluttering, and adopting or adapting to new domestic spaces in different ways. However, whereas these material practices may be found in cities worldwide, we examine the smartphone in domestic environments and consider how the digital expands, create, blurs, or traverses conventional views of the home in each field site. A central concept here is the ‘transportal home’ (Miller et al. 2021). Weaving perspectives from material and digital approaches in anthropology, we explore and expand the notion of the transportal home, as outlined in the comparative book, The Global Smartphone (Miller et al., 2021) and reiterated in brief here. We adopt this concept but take it further by asking how the transportal home differs in both fieldwork sites. This leads us to question the role of the transportal home in Shanghai and Dublin in terms of mediating, blurring, or traversing domestic boundaries, or expanding or shrinking social and architectural environments. Through these practices, conventional notions of home itself are challenged.

Open data and quantitative techniques for anthropology of road traffic

What kind of questions about human mobility can computational analysis help answer? How to translate the findings into anthropology? We analyzed a publicly available data set of road traffic counters in Slovenia to answer these questions. The data revealed information on how a population drives, how it travels for tourism, which locations it prefers, what it does during the week and the weekend, and how its habits change during the year. We conducted the empirical analysis in two parts. First, we defined traffic profile deviations and designed computational methods to find them in a large data set. As shown in the paper, traffic counters hint at potential causes and effects in driving practices that we interpreted anthropologically. Second, we used hierarchical clustering to find groups of similar traffic counters as described by their daily profiles. Clustering revealed the main features of road traffic in Slovenia. Using the two quantitative approaches, we outlined the general properties of road traffic in the country and identified and explained the outliers. We show that quantitative data analysis only partially answers anthropological questions, but it can be a valuable tool for preliminary research. We conclude that open data are a useful component in an anthropological analysis and that quantitative discovery of small local events can help us pinpoint future fieldwork sites.

Selection of Study Sites and Participants for Research into Nepal’s Federal Health System

Abstract Introduction: This article offers insights into the process of selecting representative study sites and participants in a longitudinal study in Nepal. As part of the research design process, the selection of representative areas in a large-scale study requires both intellectual and practical considerations. Methods: We briefly introduce our study into the impact of federalization on Nepal’s health system before outlining the criteria considered for the identification of fieldwork sites and the most appropriate study participants for the qualitative interviews and participatory components of this research. Findings: The selected areas are presented with an overview of the areas selected and their justification. The study sites and participants should consider a broader coverage with diverse participants’ backgrounds. Several factors can influence the identification and recruitment of the right participants, including the use of appropriate gatekeepers, gaining access to recruit participants, logistical challenges, and participant follow-up. Conclusion: We conclude that longitudinal qualitative research requires a carefully selected diverse set of study sites and participants to assess the complexities and dynamics of the health system and service provision to ensure that longitudinal research is representative and effective in addressing the research question(s) being investigated.

Remaking Bonds: Adaptive Party Linkage-building in Contemporary China

The legitimacy and vitality of all political regimes require the presence of linkages between rulers and their citizens. Current scholarship has identified different modes of political linkages and focused mainly on liberal-democratic countries, neglecting studies of non-Western regimes which also construct dynamic linkages to remain responsive to citizen demands and mobilise political support. This article addresses the critical question of why and how parties that do not have to compete for power establish linkages with their citizens. China presents a crucial case in this inquiry, since the Communist Party of China (CPC) strategically diversifies and creatively upgrades linkage relationships with its citizens beyond Western-style competitive elections. With first-hand data collected from 11 fieldwork sites across eastern, middle and western China, this article examines the linkage strategies, mechanisms and tactics the CPC has employed to respond to an increasingly complex society and to serve multiple purposes. This research attempts to offer a new conceptual framework for understanding party regime resilience, provide insights into the general theory of party linkage, and to encourage comparative studies of party linkage across different regime types.

On Becoming a People’s College: Placemaking as Hidden Curriculum

This research was originally presented as a chapter in the doctoral dissertation On Becoming a People’s College: An Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry (Ai) is a participatory approach to organizational change focused on an affirmative topic choice. The topic choice of the dissertation was equity, democracy, and justice at the selected site. This article shares the motivations and relevant characteristics of the chosen fieldwork site, De Anza College. Three categories of considerations for the role of place and placemaking within the institution’s hidden curriculum are described: institutional identities, organizational features, and resource scarcity. These characteristics are followed by a discussion of levers of change for enhancing the role of placemaking within the hidden curriculum: prefigurative politics, creativity, and the Anchor Institution approach.

Rippling: towards untamed domesticity

The paper proposes ‘rippling' as a practice of untamed domesticity that contests the hegemony of the essentialised model of modern nuclear family and its associated domesticity. The conceptualisation of ‘rippling' derives from a context of the dissolved household in contemporary rural China — they are families of China's 285 million floating population who have seen the absence of a middle generation. At the intersection of architecture and anthropology, and with Shigushan village in Wuhan as the primary site of fieldwork since 2015, the point of entry is spatial and ethnographic observations and documentations of everyday practice in and around ordinary self-built family houses. The material traces and empirical evidence manifest a constantly diffused distinction between the domestic and the public, enacted by the rural dissolved household. In this way, the practice of ‘rippling' defies the confinement and codification of domesticity. Importantly, ‘rippling' and ‘dissolving' are a temporary, transient state that has become part of a broader structure rather than an exception. Through inhabiting and altering a multiplicity of spatial, social, and political thresholds, an elastic form of association is enacted, through which the act of mediating between genders, generations, households, neighbours, and the village community is constantly framed, and even spreads to the city through ‘floating’. Spatially stretched from house to territory and temporally coordinated from daily to multi-year cycles, domesticity as such is untamed.

Hybrid Ethnography: Online, Offline, and In Between

Hybrid Ethnography: Online, Offline, and In Between

'Therapeutic landscape' experiences - redefining their relationship with the everyday.

Feelings of removal from, and connection to, everyday life, are central to much of the 'therapeutic landscapes' literature, and to understanding of what makes 'therapeutic landscapes' 'therapeutic'. This paper develops understanding of the relationship between the everyday and 'therapeutic landscape' experiences, by exploring the origins of feelings of removal and connection. Data collected through a phenomenological approach (fieldwork sites: Buddhist meditation retreats, and non-Buddhist walking groups and conservation volunteering groups), targeted at capturing highly detailed information, demonstrates that both feelings of removal from, and connection to, the everyday, are bound-up with the everyday itself, with who we are and where we come from, and moreover, that these feelings exist alongside one another.

Human Services Remote Internships: What We Have Learned and Where We Are Headed

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted human services education programs to rapidly rethink the structure of their fieldwork offerings. Mandated social restrictions led to the creation of alternative options to in-person internships. Some of these options included assignment-based tasks, online workshops and trainings, work-based experiences, limited in-person contact at fieldwork sites, and remote internships. For many programs, remote internships were a novel idea that needed to be quickly developed and implemented. The rise of telehealth services and the unknowns of a post-COVID world leave open the possibility of an increase in remote human services internships for the future. This qualitative study takes a first look at what the field of human services has learned about remote internships, including strengths, challenges, and recommendations, and discusses the role that remote internships might play in the future of human services education.

Strictly Confidential Anthropology

Anthropological interest in secrecy and silence – and related aspects such as lying, knowledge, memory, and forgetting – has been long and precarious. Through what may be called personal anthropology, in this article, I describe both private and professional anthropological experiences including family memories, fieldwork sites, and academic practices. By recalling state socialist ideology, censorship, and family secrets, I illustrate how citizens have relied on each other in order to counter state hegemony. I highlight how surveillance in Romania expressly encouraged my informants as well as the secret police to engage in mutual intelligence and observation tactics as evasive tactics. Building on these strategies, I argue that academic life is not immune to secrecy, silence and covert action. I introduce an anthropologist who worked for the Hungarian secret police, and consider how academic life continues to rely on covert programs and an institutionalized hierarchy to promote and maintain its structures and interests.

'Team ethnography visual maps': Methods for identifying the ethnographic object in multiple sites of fieldwork.

Team ethnography is becoming more popular in research. However, there is currently limited understanding of how multiple ethnographers working together actually share their experiences of conducting team ethnography. There is also an associated lack of explanation regarding how evidence and conclusions are drawn from such collective endeavour. This article attempts to address this absence of detail regarding the practice and conduct of team ethnography. In the following account, the authors present details of the design, development and application of 'team ethnography visual maps' and the collaborative reflexivity that took place within 'team ethnography data sessions' that were each embedded within a mixed methods study of frontline services located in six different National Health Service Trusts throughout England (UK). After a presentation of the ethnographic methods and analyses that occurred as part of team ethnography, they are then discussed in terms of their applied and academic value from a methodological perspective.

Detection of thermokarst lake drainage events in the northern Alaska permafrost region

The rapidly warming Arctic climate is reducing the stability of near-surface permafrost, and the thawing of ice-rich permafrost causes landscape changes known as thermokarst processes. Growing evidence suggests an increasing trend in the frequency and magnitude of thermokarst lake drainage events, which would significantly alter topography and hydrology, affecting ecosystem stability and carbon cycling. Dynamic monitoring of thermokarst lakes through satellite imagery remains a challenging task, as current temporal trend analysis methods have difficulty in accurately detecting when thermokarst lake drainage events occur. In this study, to improve the detection of time series breakpoints, an advanced temporal segmentation and change detection algorithm developed for forest change detection was, for the first time, transposed to monitor thermokarst lake dynamics. Moreover, to filter out spurious signals caused by fluctuations in lake area, we developed a hybrid algorithm to validate the detected thermokarst lake drainage events at the pixel-level and lake object-level, respectively. The method developed in this study demonstrates its effectiveness in detecting thermokarst lake drainage events in Arctic permafrost ecosystems and the potential to monitor the evolution of thermokarst landscapes using Landsat archive. A time-series analysis of changes in the thermokarst lake region of northern Alaska since 2000 using all available Landsat continuous data was performed on the Google Earth Engine platform. In total, 90 drainage lakes larger than 5 ha in size were detected in our study area, nearly a third of which were almost completely drained. As thermokarst lakes drainage represent hotspots of permafrost degradation, we publicly share information on these drained lakes to help select more targeted sites for costly fieldwork and validation activities. This study provides a basis for understanding and quantifying thermokarst lake dynamics in the Arctic permafrost region, which will contribute to the goal of integrating thermokarst processes into earth system models.

Fieldworker reflections on using telephone voice calls to conduct fieldwork amidst the Covid-19 pandemic

The declaration of Covid-19 as a global pandemic on 11 March, 2020, and the disaster management regulations implemented in reply to it had enormous ramifications on ethnographic fieldwork. This situation presented an opportunity to reconsider the methodology used in a research project on lived experiences of childhood health and well-being in Free State province, South Africa. This study explores the argument that technology can establish a virtual space that fieldworker and research participant can treat as “real.” It uses fieldwork diaries and insights to evaluate the benefits and disadvantages of telephonic virtual conversations as a replacement for conventional face-to-face fieldwork to access inaccessible fieldwork sites. It adopts a reflexive qualitative case-study approach to document the experiences of two fieldworkers moving from on-site fieldwork to telephone voice calls to conduct their research. By offering a reflexive account of these technology-mediated fieldwork experiences, this article proposes this methodology as possible alternative to documenting lived experience. Lessons from this experience can contribute to reviewing the traditional practice of ethnographic fieldwork and imagining alternative and complementary methodological possibilities.

Inheritance and reflection: \u201cre-study\u201d of three anthropology fieldwork sites in China\u2019s Yunnan Province

This article is a research report involving three anthropological studies conducted during the period of “Kuige” and their “re-studies.” By narrating the project, I set forth my views on the connections and differences between Chinese anthropological explorations from two historical periods. These anthropological explorations refer to the study of Lu Village conducted by Fei Xiaotong, that of “West Town” (Xizhou) by Francis L. K. Hsu, and that of “Pai-IPai” (Dai) villages by Tien Ju-Kang. They were all completed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Each writer extracted a framework to analyze the land system, ancestor worship, and the relationship between humans and gods from the writer’s own field experience. Despite the difference in research methods, all three studies noticed the cultural differences between rural society and modernity. Since 2000, Peking University and Yunnan Minzu University have launched a “Province-university Cooperation Project.” During the project, a research team formed of several young scholars revisited Lu Village, “West Town” (Xizhou), and Namu Village. These writers’ works were based on the data acquired in their fieldwork and drew upon the opinions raised by global anthropologists on “re-study” in recent decades. Considering the dual effects of social change and shifts in academic concepts around “follow-up research,” the scholars put forward several points of view with their ethnographies, which all featured the characteristics of inheritance and reflection. Based on the results of the three “re-studies,” this article emphasizes the importance of the study of public rituals for the research of rural society. This article also attempts to re-examine the methodology of “human ecology,” which profoundly impacts Chinese anthropology and sociology.

Elite interview, urban tourism governance and post-disaster recovery: evidence from post-earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand

ABSTRACT Despite the long tradition of fieldwork and qualitative research practice in tourism studies, the reporting of methodological notes and reflections is limited in the literature. Many excellent methodological remarks in research reports and graduate theses find few outlets in academic journals and those few contributions that are eventually published often emphasize the novelty of the method rather than crucial aspects such as positionality and embeddedness. This is further evident in urban studies with regard to post-disaster recovery research. This article seeks to fill the current gap in the field by providing a reflective methodological account on fieldwork and elite interviews in post-earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand. It does so by implementing a framework addressing key points in the elite interview process, with emphasis on access to fieldwork sites, power relations, positionality, rapport and ethical issues. The manuscript presents aspects of fieldwork, spatiality and power relations that tend to be overlooked in the literature. Albeit being context-specific, it is argued that the evidence from this study can also have relevance to the understanding of fieldwork in other post-disaster and tourism contexts.

Democracy as Fetish

Democracy as Fetish