PETER KRAUSE AND ORA SZEKELY
What does it mean to do fieldwork?
If we thought we had the answer to this question before we began editing this book, our understanding of the concept has been both broadened and deepened in the course of our work on it. The stories included in this volume cover a lot of ground, both literally and metaphorically, from rural Inner Mongolia to urban Cairo, and from participant observation with Italian fascists to digging through the U.S. National Archives. As Zachariah Cherian Mampilly puts it in chapter 34, “the field is everywhere.” The enormous range of subjects covered herein reflects both the theoretical richness of political science as a discipline and the methodological creativity of researchers in the field. We feel privileged to have had the chance to bring their reflections on their research together in one place.
When we set out to put this book together, we did not have an explicit list of issues we wanted to cover beyond a general desire to include a range of thematic topics and geographic regions. We quickly listed a number of themes we hoped to see addressed—logistics, ethics, methods, and the importance of researchers’ personal identities—but we didn’t have a specific checklist of the subjects we wanted to see discussed. We believe that much of our discipline’s strength is in its pluralism. After all, we could not have predicted that we would be able to include chapters on how to handle contracting shingles in Toledo, Ohio, during election season and what to do when your car breaks down on a highway in Chile.
As chapter submissions began to come in, a clear set of themes emerged. Indeed, despite the enormous theoretical range and methodological variety of field-based research being done in political science, one of the most interesting takeaways from this book is that some elements of the research experience remain relatively constant across a wide range of contexts, topics, and methodologies. Interviewing human traffickers in Lebanon is very different from interviewing retired generals in India, but lessons from one experience can be usefully applied to the other, and vice versa.
One of the strongest common threads that runs throughout the chapters is the sheer unpredictability of the research experience. A researcher can schedule a solid week of interviews, only to have a sudden political event or freak snowstorm leave her with nothing but free time. Chance encounters—a conversation on a bus, an exchange with a friendly waiter, an invitation to a dinner party—can provide important insights and unexpected opportunities. Although planning is obviously tremendously important to successful field research, flexibility—as Nadya Hajj puts it, to “let go and let Ali”—is crucial.
We hope that reading about our contributors’ struggles and failures, the mistakes they made and the challenges they faced in the field, as well as the emotional responses these experiences elicited, will inspire readers to feel that they can surmount such obstacles as well. We also hope these stories serve as a reminder (and perhaps a reassurance) that when things go wrong, sometimes it can represent a new opportunity. Field research is the beginning of the research process, not the end of it. Even very experienced scholars find themselves rethinking their research projects in the midst of field research, or reframing their ideas substantially based on their findings. A chance encounter can lead not only to new findings but to an entirely new project, with new field research to do.
In a similar vein, we were struck by the remarkable creativity displayed across the various stories. Good field research often relies on careful scheduling and organization, scrupulous note taking, and above all, attention to detail, but creativity is also profoundly important. Finding new and interesting ways to build connections with possible informants (for instance, cooking groundnut soup with militants’ wives in Sierra Leone or learning to recite Qur’an to build rapport with Islamist activists in Egypt) not only makes research more successful but also makes it far more enjoyable. We hope these stories inspire readers to develop their own innovative research designs and methodologies.
A second overarching theme is that interpersonal dynamics matter a great deal. Having a strong rapport with a particular local official can be tremendously helpful in opening doors leading to new information or new contacts, whereas an interview with someone with whom you simply do not gel can make an hour feel like a week. Interpersonal relationships are not everything, but the stories collected here demonstrate that they are tremendously important. At the same time, they are no substitute for careful planning, preparation, and the other practical components of fieldwork.
With no end in sight to the scholarly arms race to publish more, faster—and gather ever-more data to do so—our contributors remind us that research can be most productive when a long-term vision accompanies short-term demands. Many of the best (and happiest) researchers lay down deep roots in the communities in which they work, and as Wendy Pearlman points out, that process starts early and is developed over the course of a career. Amaney Jamal demonstrates that fieldwork is far more than data acquisition, and that building professional networks via “active engagement and intellectual reciprocity” is the key to improving both one’s own research and that of our international community of scholars. In an era when students and professors are continually pushed to publish their next paper as soon as possible, the experience and impact of these contributors demonstrate the tremendous value of “slow scholarship.”
A corollary to this, of course, is that the individual researcher is far from invisible in the research process. Most academic researchers strive for objectivity, in the sense that we try to figure out what’s true based on evidence, not what we wish were true or what someone else wants to convince us is true. But no one goes into the field (or the lab) as a blank slate. We all bring our individual histories, preferences, and perceptions with us when we do research, whether we are interviewing Al Qaeda members or seeking to understand the Brazilian census. An awareness of our own subjectivity is a tremendously important feature of the research process. Moreover (and this is another clear theme here), the experience we bring with us can be an asset or a disadvantage in the research process. Our own identities, both as we ourselves understand them and as they are perceived by research participants, can make it easier or more difficult to work in certain communities, meet with certain informants, or even sit alone comfortably in a café reading the newspaper.
A third theme that arose from the stories collected here is a real concern with the ethics of field research. What do we owe our research participants? How do we ensure maximal intellectual honesty and theoretical rigor while conducting research under sometimes unpredictable circumstances? How can we hold ourselves accountable to both of these principles at the same time? Who are we ethically responsible to, what are we responsible for, and what does that responsibility mean in practice?
For many researchers, the human connections created through the research process do not necessarily end with the end of research. Researchers may develop moral commitments and emotional attachments to their research sites; indeed, these may have influenced their choice of research topic in the first place. Some of the contributors chose their field sites for methodological or empirical reasons, and others chose theirs based on prior experience, personal or family connections, or political commitments. Regardless of the original impetus behind the choice to do field research in a particular place, the experience itself can create both an incentive and an opportunity for researchers to give back to the communities who have shared their insights and experiences with us. Such engagement can take a range of forms, from political advocacy, to using relevant language skills in volunteer work in one’s home community, to fund-raising, to bringing a little-discussed issue to public attention through public talks, op-eds, and other media engagement. But what if such engagement—because of security, political allegiance, or some other complicating factor—is either impossible or undesirable? There is, after all, a substantive difference between doing research in a civilian community and interviewing warlords. What do we owe research participants who have done things that we personally may find troubling? These are not easy questions. Some of the chapters tackle them directly, and others reference them in passing, and not all of us approach these issues in the same way. It is our hope that this book can contribute to a fruitful discussion of these issues in the discipline.
The stories, reflections, and insights collected here demonstrate that field research, for all its variation, is at its core a human experience. To “do field research” means to go somewhere—whether that is a community meeting at the YWCA in one’s own neighborhood, a Telegram channel frequented by ISIS members, or a refugee camp in Lebanon—to learn something about the experiences and beliefs of those involved in a particular phenomenon. It may involve working with a team of researchers and enumerators, long hours of participant observation at protests and rallies, or many solitary hours painstakingly transcribing and translating interviews. It can be exciting, tedious, joyful, heartbreaking, and terrifying, sometimes all at once. It almost invariably involves discovering something strange, unexpected, and fascinating. It can involve long plane flights, long bus trips, and long walks. It can require learning a new language, relearning how to buy vegetables, figuring out how not to get kidnapped, or learning to see one’s own neighborhood in an entirely new light. What defines field research is not the location itself but our relationship with a particular context and our engagement with the people involved.
What, then, is “the field”? It can be anything—or anywhere—we want it to be. We hope this book has expanded and enriched your conception of the field, challenged your assumptions about fieldwork, given you new ideas for research questions and methodologies, made you reconsider pressing ethical issues, and inspired you to think about your own identity and its impact on your research. If reading these stories and their related lessons did even some of that for you—with a laugh, a tear, a cringe, or a smile of recognition along the way—we will have succeeded.