Nature Of Fieldwork Research Articles

Staring out my window: Reflexivity and relationality in research in a Covid-19 world

In March 2020 I faced a research crisis. Like many PhD students, my project quickly fell apart and I was faced with writing a PhD on migration while stood still in London. In this article I explore the techniques I used to try to write about movement through conscious stasis and what this can tell us about the nature of fieldwork. I explore my attempts to answer these problems through experiments in autoethnography and communal storytelling. Both of these methods were attempts on my behalf to think through what it means to do ethical research in the face of a climate crisis and a pandemic. As such, I explore the ways in which using them changed my thinking not only about my project, but about the nature of research itself. I argue that moments of rupture such as COVID shine a light on the structuring of ‘normality’ in research. I write against a return to that normal. A normal that has justified extensive international travel in the face of a deepening ecological crisis, a normal that celebrated knowledge extraction and created material realities which governed ‘who’ the researcher could be.

Anxiety and geology: managing acute anxiety disorder symptoms during field exercises

ABSTRACT Efforts to increase inclusion in the geosciences have progressed much in the past few decades. As inclusion grows our procedures and methods for accommodating individuals’ needs must adapt. Responsible leaders must grow to meet challenges in a way that mirrors modern approaches to dealing with hardships individuals face. Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and related conditions are a growing problem among students. Often compounded by the trying nature of field work, individuals with anxiety disorders encounter challenges that can leave the person debilitated and unresponsive. Simple measures can provide support allowing more individuals to maximize their field experiences. While leaders always carry first aid kits and a basic knowledge of treatment of minor wounds, many people are unprepared for aiding a colleague experiencing anxiety-related symptoms such as Acute Panic Attacks (APAs) or induced mutism. This paper describes simple methods for identifying and managing acute symptoms as well as determining when professional medical intervention is necessary. Our aim is to provide Earth scientists of all education levels a basic overview of the acute symptoms of APAs and provide a guide for preventing and aiding affected colleagues in a field setting.

Entering the "Field": Challenges of conducting fieldwork in an infertility clinic.

Carrying out fieldwork in private infertility clinics poses its own specific set of challenges. Gaining access to these field sites not only obliges researchers to negotiate with gatekeepers but also to deal with structures of hierarchy and power. Based on my preliminary fieldwork in Lucknow city of Uttar Pradesh, I discuss the challenges of conducting fieldwork in infertility clinics and how methodological challenges push the researcher to question the academically established notions of the "field", "fieldwork" and "research ethics". The paper stresses the importance of discussing the challenges of doing fieldwork in private health setups and is an attempt to answer vital questions about the nature of fieldwork, how the fieldwork was conducted, and the need to include questions and dilemmas that anthropologists might face in the process of making decisions in the field.

The loneliness of the long-distance ethnobotanist: a constructive critique of methods used in an ethnoveterinary study in Mongolia

BackgroundFieldwork plays an important role in research projects across a variety of fields, especially in the multidisciplinary setting of natural and social science research. As is the nature of fieldwork, things do not always work out as planned, and yet this is not often written about. In response to the need for honest and transparent accounts of fieldwork, the purpose of this article is to review the methods used during fieldwork for the first author’s dissertation research on ethnoveterinary knowledge.MethodsTo critically review and reflect on the fieldwork methods used for an ethnoveterinary study in Mongolia, we compare the theory underpinning each method with the practical reality of implementing the method in the field. From this comparison, we draw out and discuss a number of key themes.ResultsEighteen methods and approaches used for the research project are reviewed and compared. From this, we distil and further discuss the following five overarching themes: reflections on specific data collection methods (free listing, semi-structured interviews with interpreters, voucher specimen collection); assumptions around involving local people; power dynamics; gender relations; and researcher well-being.ConclusionBy juxtaposing the theory and practical reality of the methods used, we highlight many potential fieldwork challenges and, within this context, offer general pointers, especially for novice female researchers doing fieldwork in foreign countries. A critical review of this type, where the experience and use of various methods, techniques, and approaches are openly shared and evaluated, is a contribution to selecting, adapting, and fine-tuning the methods best suited to a particular research context.

Evaluating the Impact of Technology Assisted Hotspot Policing on Situational Awareness and Task-Load

Everyday field work of a police officer requires the perception, filtering and understanding of large amounts of information in highly dynamic situations. This presents opportunities for ICT to alleviate strain on officers by providing adequate information provisioning. We evaluate the usage of a mobile location-based hotspot policing system, comprised of a smartphone, smartwatch and a web-application, during real field work with officers in high and low hotspot density locations. We use a repeated measures design to compare possible effects with our baseline measure, i.e. field work without using the system. Usability, task-load and situational awareness (SA), as well as possible mediators, are evaluated to gain insight into the differences between modes of transportation and the overall viability of the system itself. No significant difference was found between the two locations. Officers using the system scored high on usability measures and interview feedback was largely positive. Measures on SA remained stable throughout baseline and experimental shifts. Task-load was significantly higher with the use of the system. The contradiction in these findings can be explained by showing the differences in the nature of field work with and without the system.

From immersion to simulation: remote methodologies and the decline of area studies

Using Sudan as a case study, the focus of this essay is the changing nature of fieldwork in the Global South. More specifically, it concerns the methodological shifts in how the South has been approached as an object of knowledge in the contemporary period. Drawing on the author's own varying engagement with Sudan since December 1973, it was prompted by a return visit in January 2014 to what is now the small town of Maiurno, near Sennar, almost 40 years to the day of beginning his PhD fieldwork there. In doing justice to this privileged experience, it became evident that writing an account of the changes and reunions with old friends was not enough. It wouldn't justify the journey, so to speak, that they have all made. Neither would it bring out the essentially anomalous character of the return at a time when such journeys are becoming more difficult. This results from a hidden complicity between the shift toward research risk avoidance in UK universities and, in this case, the restrictive practices of the Sudanese state. The essay explores several stages in the move away from ethnographic fieldwork being an art of being in the world to a growing remoteness from the world and the compensatory emergence of remote methodologies and the simulation of digital alternatives. At the same time, it traces a shift from the politics of solidarity to the neoliberal marketisation of the sub-prime tele-economic conditions encountered in the Global South.

Lahanan Lunettes: Images of a Borneo Long House

This paper frames the fieldwork and life experiences of an anthropologist over the course of twenty-five years in terms of dreams and practicalities. The dreams are vivid accounts of fieldwork relived in a liminal state, following the death of my spouse, but are primarily taken from field notes, diaries and publications. The dreams took on a particularly intense quality in the two years following his death, because of the unexpected nature of the death, my isolation in an unfamiliar environment and the feeling of tasks left unfinished. The practicalities are a commentary on the nature of fieldwork; the problems faced and solutions sought for the difficulties that all anthropologists face in the field.

Out of the Mouths of Crocodiles: Eliciting Histories in Photographs and String‐Figures

Whom and what do we touch, hear and see when we hold, listen and look at photographs? What histories are enfolded within photographs’ materiality? What elided pasts do they contain, and what possible futures can be negotiated with source communities by engaging with these artefacts in the present? In this paper I consider these related questions through an exploration of the nexus of relations, perspectives and histories enfolded within a particular glass plate (A6510,499) held in the National Australian Archives. Taken by the government anthropologist F. E. Williams in 1922 in the village of Ukiaravi, this portrait of the two young boys Kauei Ove and Kauri demonstrating a string‐figure is one of some ninety‐six glass plates produced by Williams during his eight‐month trip to the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. Viewed with communities, this photograph generated a series of conversations about a set of relations involving the mimetic faculties of Crocodile Monitor Lizards, the growth of knowledge through bodily transformation during male initiation, and various modes of history telling and making. In examining these relationships and the ways in which they unfolded around engagements with this glass plate, I contribute to discussions about the nature of fieldwork and the productive possibilities that connecting source communities to their photographic and archival legacies has for them, museums and the discipline.

Lost in the field: ensuring student learning in the ‘threatened’ geography fieldtrip

As a result of its importance to the discipline's identity and epistemology, the nature of fieldwork and the fieldtrip itself have recently come under close scrutiny in the education and geographical literature. Moreover, not only is their pedagogical importance being debated, but also their future viability at a time of increasing pressure on institutions to minimise potential risk situations in the field, offer value for money to students as well as following the increasingly common and popular trend of long‐haul fieldtrips. This paper therefore critically interrogates the role and use of fieldwork within geographical teaching and learning in the light of its changing and increasingly contested status within the discipline in three parts. First, it outlines and reflects upon the current debate surrounding the threat to the primacy of fieldtrips in geography at a time of ongoing upheaval in higher education. Second, through the empirical example of personal experiences teaching on second‐year undergraduate urban geography fieldtrips to San Francisco in December 2007 and 2008, the paper engages with the current discussions of the pedagogical importance of fieldtrips. Third, the paper asks, to what extent teaching in ‘the field’ might foster the ‘experiential’ or ‘active’ learning needed to inspire the kind of ‘deep learning’ approaches that hold the kind of ‘transformative’ potential envisaged as a key goal of education more broadly. Through exploring these ideas with reference to recent and relevant experience, the paper aims to critically interrogate the role and value of fieldtrips at a time when their potential demise is being cast as a fundamental assault on geography's founding identity and pedagogical traditions. The paper concludes that despite the threats it faces, the pedagogical significance of fieldwork means that it must remain a fundamental tenet of the geographical educational experience.

Le gringo et l'antropologue: apparence physique, subjectivités et sensualités dans la recherche de terrain

Cet article examine l' anthropologue et sa subjectivité dans ses activités de recherche sur le terrain des apparences corporelles à Rio de Janeiro. Dans cet article, j' ai considéré les différents rôles que l' apparence physique et la subjectivité jouent dans la production des savoirs et des textes anthropologiques. Il cherche à montrer à quel point l' apparence physique et la subjectivité du chercheur jouent des rôles importants et permettent d' aborder des questions centrales en Anthropologie, comme celle de la nature du terrain, des l' usage des sens, de la constitution de la subjectivité dans la compréhension réflexive et enfin de la validité et de la signification de la dichotomie entre moi et l' Autre. En analysant mes expériences et mes relations sociales alors que je réalisais mon terrain de recherche sur la corpolatrie carioca, mon intention était de montrer à quel point la spécificité de chacun de ses terrains de recherche oblige l' anthropologue, non seulement à s' adapter mais également à repenser l' anthropologie en tant que telle.

"Taita Chimborazo and Mama Tungurahua": A Quichua Song, a Fieldwork Story

When a friend in Chimborazo Province, central Ecuador, took me to his home village in 1995, he introduced me there as the gringo who sang the "Taita Chimborazo, Mama Tungurahua," a song broadcast from time to time on the morning Quichua radio program. The song is built on the story of "Amo Badillo," a landowner who died in the middle of this century. After his death Amo Badillo is supposed to have gone to Mt. Tungurahua—locally identified with purgatory or hell—to suffer there for his cruel treatment of the indigenous laborers on his estate. In 1991, when I was living in the house of Aurelio S., a farmer, village catechist, parish political leader, and occasional songwriter, I suggested that this story would make a good basis for a song for an upcoming music competition. Taita Aurelio quickly composed the song, framing the local story of Amo Badillo within more widespread oral traditions concerning Mt. Chimborazo and Mt. Tungurahua and making the story speak to contemporary ethnic politics. When the village music group Shepherds of Caparina Bajo presented the song at a Quichua music festival sponsored and taped by a Riobamba radio station, Taita Aurelio's words won us second prize. This essay discusses what the song—its creation, performance, and reception —can tell us about both the nature of fieldwork and contemporary indigenous identity and politics in Ecuador.

Applying a systems approach to the management of change in fieldwork

Abstract Fieldwork is increasingly subject to a variety of external pressures. The management of change in fieldwork provision can be aided by an appreciation of the systemic nature of fieldwork. Social paradigms of team behaviour are particularly applicable to fieldwork, and to understanding some systems failures.

The prehistory of Cyprus: Problems and prospects

The archaeological record of prehistoric Cyprus is rich, diverse, well-published, and frequently enigmatic. Regarded by many as a “bridge” between western Asia and the Aegean, Cyprus and its past are frequently seen from scholarly perspectives prevalent in one of those two cultural areas. Its material culture, however, differs radically from that of either area. Apart from the early colonization episodes on the island (perhaps three during the pre-Neolithic and Neolithic), evidence of foreign contact remains limited until the Bronze Age (post-2500 B. C.). This study seeks to present the prehistory of Cyprus from an indigenous perspective, and to examine a series of archaeological problems that foreground Cyprus within its eastern Mediterranean context. The study begins with an overview of time, place, and the nature of fieldwork on the island, continues with a presentation and discussion of several significant issues in Cypriot prehistory (e.g., insularity, colonization, subsistence, regionalism, interaction, social complexity, economic diversity), and concludes with a brief discussion of prospects for the archaeology of Cyprus up to and “beyond 2000”.

From the Research Assistant's Point of View

Among anthropologists' recent extensive efforts at self‐scrutiny, one neglected topic has been the practice of training members of a community under study to act as research assistants in the field. Central to this article is a narrative account by one such assistant of the ways in which working for foreigners transformed his inner and outer worlds. A preface and afterword by one of his former employers sets this account in recent debates on problems of power and knowledge raised by the interpersonal nature offieldwork, sketches her own recollections of working with this assistant, and considers how such relationships affect ethnography and lives.

Terrains, je vous aime: In Search of a Thesis Topic in the Field in Burkina Faso

Terrains, je vous aime: In Search of a Thesis Topic in the Field in Burkina Faso

Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating

PREFACEThis volume, Toward a Science of Translating, has been largelynprompted by the nature of field work in which I have been involvednduring recent years in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. An earlier book,nBible Translating (Nida, 1947a), though very useful to the Bible translator,nis essentially only a practical handbook, with a kind of rule-of-thumbnorientation. Increasingly it became obvious that in order to assistntranslators more satisfactorily it was necessary to provide somethingnwhich would not only be solidly based on contemporary developmentsnin the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and psychology, but would alsonrelate the specific area of Bible translating to the wider activity of translatingnin general. The present volume is an attempt to fill this need.As the title of this book implies, it makes no pretension to be andefinitive volume, for in the present state of development in the field ofnsemantics it is impossible to contemplate writing such a final work.nHowever, there have been a number of important and fruitful developmentsnin linguistics, both in the structural as well as the semantic areas,nand these have contributed very significantly to the organization ofnthis book.Though the scope of translation theory in this volume is all-inclusive,nthe illustrative data are drawn primarily from Biblical materials, andnespecially so in the later chapters. This is not as great a disadvantagenas it might appear at first glance, for no other type of translating hasnsuch a long history, involves so many different languages (at present morenthan 1,200), includes more diverse types of texts, and covers so manyndistinct cultural areas of the world. But though the examples are drawnnprimarily from Biblical data, this volume is not prepared with thenaverage Bible translator in mind, for it is rather too technical in orientation.nNevertheless, it should serve as an important help to such translatorsnas may have some background in present-day linguistic theory andnit will be the basis of other more simply written books now in preparation,nwhich will be aimed at teaching translation methods.n n n