INTRODUCTION
LEARNING THROUGH STORIES
PETER KRAUSE AND ORA SZEKELY
This book began as a conversation during lunch at a small conference on Middle Eastern politics in May 2018. A group of us began swapping stories about our experiences doing fieldwork in countries across the region. Some stories were funny, some were shocking, and some were touching—but the most striking thing was how readily each story led the group directly to asking questions, giving insightful advice, and sharing the kind of knowledge that can only be gained through hard-earned experience. In that moment, we felt that this type of vibrant discussion should not be limited to irregular, fleeting exchanges among small numbers of academics: Someone, we thought, should really be writing this down. That belief became the basis of the book you are now reading.
As we set about putting this book together, we were guided first and foremost by the belief that the best way to learn how to do fieldwork is to hear directly from those who have done it. Unfortunately, scholars rarely systematically share their personal stories and lessons in print, limiting their reach to conversations with trusted colleagues or words of advice shared with graduate students during office hours. This book pulls back the curtain, making available to all honest stories and insights from forty-four scholars who have made fieldwork a central part of their research.
High-quality fieldwork certainly shares some common practices, but solutions to dilemmas that all of us face in the field vary a great deal across locations, topics, and researchers themselves—far more than they do in controlled lab experiments. There is no single ideal blueprint for successful fieldwork. Excellent fieldwork is done by individuals who make very different decisions about how they gather information, how they interact with the society around them, and to what extent positivist or interpretivist approaches guide their work. Following the example of those particularly effective interviews that give the interviewee the agency to drive parts of the conversation, we gave our contributors agency in shaping this text. The result is a “bottom-up” methods book: we as editors provided the idea but the contributors largely selected the content. We asked our contributors to share with us what they considered their best, most insightful stories and lessons from the field: the ones they tell their grad students and colleagues, the ones they’d like to go back and tell their younger selves. Beyond suggesting some broad themes—methods, logistics, ethics, and personal perspectives—we left the rest up to them. We did not ask or assign contributors to discuss certain topics or methods, nor did we ask them to take particular positions on contested issues.
What we did do was purposely approach scholars from a variety of backgrounds who had done high-quality field research. We are thankful that the vast majority of these scholars agreed to participate. This book includes contributions from scholars who focus on North and sub-Saharan Africa; Central, East, and South Asia; eastern and western Europe; Central and South America; North America; and the Middle East. Our contributors work on diverse topics ranging from political economy to international conflict and civil war, and from civil society and social movements to gender politics. We also ensured that we included contributors who represent a healthy range of academic ranks, genders, and national and ethnic backgrounds. This was especially important to us because we recognize the ways in which the identities carried by researchers, and the lived experience they bring with them to fieldwork, shape their experiences in the field. We hope these perspectives will help readers relate the insights included here to their own experiences.
THE UNORTHODOX NATURE OF THIS BOOK
Our unique approach to assembling this book yielded chapters that were both unorthodox and quite effective in their style and substance. In response to our request to simply tell engaging stories from their own experiences that distilled their most important advice, contributors offered insights not normally seen in methods books, or in any academic books for that matter. Rather than describing how to do everything right, the stories included here provide insight into what researchers do when things go wrong, sometimes quite suddenly, or when complicated ethical or logistical issues arise. Instead of a step-by-step guide to designing a survey, one chapter explains how to handle enumerators in Iraq who were themselves filling out the very surveys they were supposed to distribute. Instead of instructions on how to conduct content analysis, another chapter provides insights on interpreting American politicians’ doodles in the margins of classified documents. Instead of an explanation of the best identification strategy, we received advice on how to cook chickens with the wives of rebel leaders in Sierra Leone. Even chapters centered on more “conventional” topics, such as interviewing, discuss how to safely interview sex traffickers in Lebanon and Russia, how to embed with fascist militias in Italy, and how to talk to terrorists—in person or online, your choice.
What we have here—in style and in substance—is therefore the opposite of most academic work. We tell our students (and ourselves) not to write a novel but, instead, to “put the bottom line up front.” But that’s not how the field research process works, despite our desire to make it seem neat and tidy in our publications. As Nadya Hajj, Daniel Posner, and Marc Trachtenberg all note in their chapters, planning in fieldwork is important, but plans change. As Richard Fenno explains, you “soak and poke,” you stumble around and discover things you didn’t even know you were seeking.1 As these pages attest, even the most respected academics in our field experience uncertainty and sometimes make mistakes. These chapters are presented according to a logic of discovery—not to the classic logic of explanation. With the story first and the takeaways last, you travel with the authors through their challenges, not knowing the end result.
There is much to be gained by thinking and feeling through those struggles alongside the authors rather than hearing the lesson up front, devoid of the sweat and stress that earned it in the first place. These academics are not distant two-dimensional figures; they are real three-dimensional people. Furthermore, as each chapter’s focus is a story from the field—from a period before the research itself was published—these chapters can be read as prefaces to some of the most interesting books and most productive careers in political science. Readers come to understand why Stathis Kalyvas decided to study Greek history and write The Logic of Violence in Civil War, how David Laitin first acquired local knowledge in Africa, and how Erica Chenoweth has worked to reconcile her interactions with both governments and grassroots activists as she published groundbreaking research on nonviolence. In demystifying the process by which such important research took place, our hope is to encourage readers to think ambitiously and creatively about their own research.
One of the advantages of the “how the sausage gets made” approach is that stories that honestly reflect the complexities of the research process can serve as a starting point for conversations about research ethics, both inside and outside the classroom. Many of the chapters included here involve complicated and difficult ethical challenges that the authors address openly and honestly. Although research ethics are often presented as a simple set of guidelines based on abstract hypothetical scenarios, the real world experiences shared here demonstrate that in practice these questions require a lot of careful thought, and that the best answers aren’t always easy, obvious, or universally agreed upon. Contributors also demonstrate the ways in which norms and guidelines have had to evolve over time to keep pace with the changing nature of field research, particularly with regard to new technologies of communication and data storage, as well as research conducted online.
We should note that these issues stood out to us in part because, in addition to our experience as field researchers, Ora Szekely, coeditor of this book, spent six years as a member of her university’s institutional review board (IRB), charged with authorizing and overseeing research on human subjects. In this role, she observed firsthand the range of questions that this type of research can raise, and the complexity of answering them. Questions such as “How do power disparities shape the nature of informed consent?” and “How do our own identities shape the ways in which our research participants engage with us?” have always been an important part of constructing an ethical research design. Meanwhile, the evolving natures of technology, the research process, and even “the field” itself generate new questions, such as “Are online spaces public or private?” and “How do we most effectively protect digital data?” There is no universally correct set of answers, but we hope these stories spark conversations about these and other questions, help readers think through ethical issues, and give them the tools to develop their own sets of guiding principles.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Faculty and students who are preparing to go into the field, sharpen their skills for the future, or teach about fieldwork can all make great use of this book. Moreover, the book contributes to our intradisciplinary conversation more broadly in that it serves as a companion to the existing publications of each contributor. Reading these chapters side by side with the books and articles that resulted from the fieldwork they describe provides fascinating context for the authors’ work and a soup to nuts guide to designing, organizing, and conducting one’s own research. To facilitate this process, the publications that resulted from each fieldwork story are listed at the end of each chapter.
We also hope this book will be read as a complement to the growing number of excellent books on research methods, including more formal theoretical guides to field research. These stories add insight on issues and skills that graduate and undergraduate coursework rarely covers, including how to travel securely in conflict zones, how to handle conversations on sensitive topics, and how to eat and drink socially (and safely) when in the field. Readers will learn from our contributors’ mistakes, as many of these chapters serve as humble entries in the “failure CVs” that scholars have begun to post publicly, with narration and lessons-learned attached.
For professors teaching classes on research methods and fieldwork, this book can be effectively assigned to, and happily consumed by, both graduates and undergraduates. As those who have taught or taken research methods courses know, overly dry or instructional textbooks can make it challenging to capture students’ attention and imagination. Furthermore, it can be challenging to find relevant sections among long academic books and articles when there is a limit to the number of pages one can assign for each class meeting. Our hope is that this book will provide a way of addressing these issues. The chapters included here are engaging, practical, and written in an accessible narrative style with no unnecessary jargon—a style that we think students (and other readers) learn from particularly well. Furthermore, the fact that they are generally only a few pages long ensures that there are no wasted words, and a chapter can easily be assigned and read alongside any other content for a given course.
Finally, we encourage readers to use these chapters as conversation starters. Everyone relates to compelling personal stories, and even though the chapters are bite-sized, the issues and questions they raise are not. Instead of (or alongside) a forty-page article discussing research design or ethics, professors can assign a chapter from this book that covers almost any topic or region of the world. Each chapter’s focused nature assures it can be read quickly—including during class time—and it can spark reflection and discussion, both inside the classroom and out. For students, there is no reason to wait to take a class on fieldwork to read this book. For the ever-growing number of students planning to travel abroad, this book can help you prepare for these experiences and learn how to engage in more meaningful ways with the places where you live and study, as well as with the people around you.
In short, treat this book as a guidebook. Underline it, bookmark it, annotate it, and throw it in your bag on your way out the door. We hope it provides comfort and guidance when you face inevitable, unexpected challenges in the field (or at least something interesting to read while you’re waiting for that border guard to come back with your passport).
WHAT’S TO COME: THE OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
Whether it involves stepping off a bus at two in the morning in an unfamiliar city or discovering that you’re going to be sharing a hotel room with some exciting local wildlife, field research often begins with a sense that you have been tossed into the deep end. In that spirit, this book’s first part addresses some universal themes, including the power of personal relationships, the impact of bias, and the role of emotions, in stirring chapters by Ian S. Lustick, Zoe Marks, and Richard A. Nielsen. The book then pulls back out for a more orderly, thematically organized progression, filled with engaging and dynamic stories. After we welcome you to the field, the book progresses as one would through the fieldwork process: designing the research and deciding where to go, dealing with the unexpected upon arrival, collecting evidence and developing local knowledge, grappling with issues of identity and ethics, and staying safe and healthy.
In part II, “Designing Your Research and Deciding Where to Go,” five contributors provide valuable insight on the first steps in the fieldwork process. Stathis N. Kalyvas details the serendipity that drove him to conduct fieldwork on the Greek Civil War, and how the inductive process forced him to rethink his assumptions about the dynamics of political violence. Christina M. Greer details the process of designing and carrying out a survey with a social services employees union to analyze the distinct identities of African, Caribbean, and Black Americans in New York City. Krista E. Wiegand discusses the personal challenges of navigating institutional review boards as she shifted from interviewing Hezbollah members to interviewing Filipino government officials after being placed on government watch lists. Stephen M. Saideman describes various strategies for conducting effective fieldwork in countries where he doesn’t speak the language—Brazil, Chile, Japan, and South Korea—from working with local scholars to hiring student researchers. Finally, Fotini Christia offers sharp personal insights on how she built connections with journalists and expats, remained disciplined in structuring her surveys and field experiments, and navigated being the “third gender” as a Western woman conducting fieldwork in war-torn Afghanistan.
Like military engagements—where plans go out the window at the first whiff of grapeshot—part III cautions readers who are heading into the field to “Make a Plan … Then Be Ready to Toss It.” The six chapters in this part progress from contributors making smaller (and happier) adjustments to their research question or personnel … to full-scale exit and reentry with an entirely new approach for those who hate conducting fieldwork. Nadya Hajj “lets go and lets Ali” by allowing her Palestinian interviewees to not simply answer her questions, but also teach her what questions she didn’t even think to ask. Daniel N. Posner tells of a similar experience in Zambia and Malawi, where he changed the focus of his dissertation once he realized that the perceptions of the people there were far different than what he had assumed from afar. In a related vein, Kristin Michelitch recounts the adjustments that she and her collaborator needed to make while doing research on the effects of listening to the radio on voter behavior in rural Mali. Sometimes flexibility in the field means learning how to cope when, due to identical names and the need to set appointments over the phone, you interview the wrong people. In the case of Bethany Lacina, preparation to learn her interviewees’ backgrounds helped mitigate otherwise trying situations with Indian politicians and military generals. Such mistakes are innocent, but how should you cope when local research partners are intentionally dishonest or corrupt? Matthew Franklin Cancian and Kristin E. Fabbe explain how they resolved a sensitive situation involving one crooked enumerator team that threatened to harm their reputations and sink their survey in Iraq. Finally, it is important to remind ourselves that not everyone enjoys the fieldwork process. Amelia Hoover Green openly admits to being a fieldwork-hater, providing an honest and engaging tale of how she nonetheless revamped her entire approach to be effective, if not elated, in the field.
In part IV, “Creatively Collecting Data and Evidence,” seven excellent chapters cover a range of new twists on the classic methods of interviews and archival research. Jessica Stern details how she developed her approach to interviewing terrorists over time, touching on the psychological costs involved in this work, as well as the impact her identity as a woman had on interviewing (mostly) violent men. Marc Trachtenberg and Lindsey O’Rourke each spin tales of sifting through countless documents in the archives, reminding us that not all fieldwork focuses on talking to others. Trachtenberg details how “stumbling around in the archives” can nonetheless lead to great discoveries if you have a solid understanding of the issue area. O’Rourke explains how notes and drawings on archival documents—sometimes obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests—can provide unique insights into the minds of politicians who scribbled them long ago. Even fieldwork based on interviews can involve a great deal of innovation, as Keith Darden’s chapter detailing his experience acting as an informal taxi driver in Ukraine demonstrates. Mia Bloom and Ayse Lokmanoglu also used less traditional research methods in their online field research on jihadi propaganda. Their retelling of interactions with jihadi fighters, spokespeople, and sometimes suitors confirms that, in today’s world, “fieldwork” need not require physical travel, although it can still involve significant risk. Valerie Sperling relates how sometimes the most insightful data collection is the least planned, as she learned about anti-Americanism and gender roles in Russia by interacting with local shopkeepers and cold-calling the numbers of risqué ads on the local sidewalk—for research purposes, of course. Robert Ross provides another fresh angle on collecting evidence in the field through his experiences interviewing Chinese academics abroad, who provide both windows into China’s security policy and examples of its suffocating nature.
In part V, “Developing Local Knowledge,” six contributors detail how they came to know their fieldwork location and its people in unconventional ways. Wendy Pearlman makes an articulate case for “field-being”: simply living and interacting in the field in noninstrumental ways. Her own experience doing so with communities in the Middle East has led to enduring relationships and deep knowledge that cannot be acquired through quick, overscheduled visits. What better way to get to know an area than by walking all over the place? That’s exactly what Paul Staniland does, and his stories of strolling without a fixed destination through fieldwork sites in South Asia productively demonstrated his outsider status while revealing key social and political dynamics on the inside. David Laitin provides a simple but effective standard for sufficient local knowledge that all can strive to meet—the “onion principle.” Until one has the ability to buy onions (or other products) at the going market rate for locals, one lacks the ability to effectively navigate the manipulations of the area and do quality fieldwork. Food- and drink-based pathways to knowledge are not uncommon in the field. John McCauley explains how getting drunk on dolo for two days with village elders in Burkina Faso served as an unexpected vetting process that ultimately built trust and gained him and his team the necessary access to conduct research there. Will Reno addresses the importance of local knowledge when doing research in insecure environments, specifically discussing the need to find a trusted local host with an effective private army to do field research in Mogadishu. And Amaney Jamal reflects on the importance of fieldwork—as distinct from data collection in the field—as a means of developing local knowledge and networks.
In part VI, “Seeing and Being Seen: Identity in the Field,” five contributors offer intimate tales of how their personal and professional identities affected their fieldwork. Laia Balcells tells of the draw of studying a civil war in her home country of Spain, and describes the emotional toll and ethical challenges of remaining objective despite her Catalan identity. Enze Han explains how his Han Chinese identity generated a mix of indifference and animosity among minority communities he interacted with in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, forcing him to consider his own subjectivity and positionality for the first time. Melissa Nobles set out to research a Brazilian democracy that supposedly had no racial discrimination, only to find that no one wanted to assert a “Black” identity for themselves (or for her). She related how her own Black and American identities played a key role in how she was able to access and perceive the society during a period of ethnic awakening. Desmond King relates how often Americans were surprised that a non-American like him was researching the politics of race and the federal government in the United States. Although his outsider status raised initial questions, it ultimately provided him with more intimate access to archives and interviewees on this sensitive topic. Finally, Peter Krause explains how chosen identities—such as institutional affiliations, political agendas, and personal candor—can help transcend differences in born national and religious identities between people in the field, whether they are former Irish militants or skeptical Algerian archivists.
In part VII, “Being Ethically Accountable,” six contributors grapple with the ethical challenges they faced while conducting fieldwork, from funding sources, to relationships with governments of all stripes, to a researcher’s accountability as a participant observer. Erica Chenoweth describes the tensions when studying violence and nonviolence and, relatedly, engaging with both governments and grassroots activists. She shares the questions that inform her own personal code of conduct, which can help others prepare for the moral and ethical conundrums that are inevitably present in political research. Zachariah Cherian Mampilly challenges the notion of a distant, othered “field,” relating searing personal experiences at home that nonetheless bear the marks of research in uncomfortable territory. He then raises tough ethical questions about the close relationship between governments and scholars of security issues, challenging whether the latter fully appreciate their impact on the former. Marc Lynch reminds us that even at the moment of greatest hope and openness in the field, things can change, and change quickly. As political winds blow to and fro in Egypt and the broader Middle East, he demonstrates with heavy examples that scholars have a serious responsibility to protect their sources, even if prominent journals say otherwise. One would expect that embedding with a fascist militia in Italy would be replete with ethical challenges, and Alessandro Orsini pulls no punches in detailing them. Faced with threats if he failed to turn over his manuscript before publication, he explains how he responded in light of the responsibility scholars have to each other. Emil Aslan Souleimanov describes the responsibility he had to his interviewees, in this case Chechen ex-militants. He thinks through the importance of trust and interpersonal relationships, and the ethical implications thereof, in the context of his research. Finally, Ora Szekely considers what it means to be perceived in particular ways by one’s research participants, and the particular discomfort of accidentally ending up on Hezbollah’s satellite TV news coverage.
In part VIII, four contributors offer their advice for “Staying Safe and Healthy,” based on their harrowing experiences living in conflict zones, interacting with criminals, and getting violently ill. Sarah Zukerman Daly details the uneasy feeling of not knowing who was in control when she stepped into conflict zones in Colombia. Nonetheless, she offers sharp advice for how to identify trusted allies in the field, even as she honestly details some of her own slips in judgment. Carla B. Abdo-Katsipis knew that there would be safety concerns when she approached members of a sex trafficking ring in Lebanon. Even though she had to be flexible about meeting the involved parties on their terms, she explains how she was still able to maintain safety on her terms. The United States is “the field” for many, and the challenges of health and safety do not disappear inside its borders. Ravi Perry describes a series of serious health episodes that forced a reappraisal of how he cared for himself while covering elections in Ohio. Vipin Narang brings this section to a close with a simple message: drink the tea—even if it’s lukewarm and gives you “Delhi belly,” as it did Vipin. Because of that tea, Vipin gained unique knowledge about India’s nuclear strategy, which he argues was worth the slight risks to his health.
We couldn’t assemble such a large, impressive cast of scholars and not have them offer “One Last Thing Before You Go.” If we’re lucky, most of us have a few good mentors throughout our lives. This chapter is a chance to have forty-four of them offer you their best short piece of fieldwork advice in one place, separate from their chapter stories. Think of it as stopping by during the office hours of all of our contributors one last time before setting off into the field. Except that in the case of this chapter, gaining the insight will take you far less time and effort, and you can take it with you to read and reread in the field.
Finally, we conclude by asking, What does it mean to do fieldwork? Here, we draw out some of the overarching themes in this book and ruminate a bit on the broader lessons to be learned from our contributors’ insights regarding the practice of field research.
Everyone loves a good story, and we all enjoy hearing about others’ research experiences in the field. But the stories shared here are more than just gripping anecdotes. They represent both an important source of shared knowledge about practical research methods in the field and an invaluable way of illustrating methodological, logistical, and ethical concepts that, in the abstract, can seem dry and distant. We hope this book provides useful advice and sparks good conversations, and that one day you will have your own stories from the field to share. We’re all ears.
NOTE
1. Richard Fenno, Homestyle: House Members in Their Districts (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1978).