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Fieldwork Guidance

We invite collaborations with individual and group-based social scientists and interdisciplinary researchers.

Fieldwork can be challenging, and particular academic niches have encouraged a disciplinary culture where that hurt has been normalized, or at worst, even lauded or celebrated. Fieldwork is also marked by long absences in which less visible/articulated mental health issues are rife.

Moreover, the sheer range of ethico-moral encounters, relational difficulties, intersectional struggles undergirding positionality and identity, and very real emotions of isolation, for example.

Womxn on the field face a diversity of challenges, from everyday invalidation, the the dangers of assault and violence, to less articulated dynamics such as paternalistic/”benevolent” sexism. Therefore, the need to open up and hold space for barely articulated conversations on research that take people for extended periods of time. 

In the same vein, a profound sense of disconnection from field-related settings may emerge as another internal struggle, in which the clinical environs of academic ivory/ebony-towered life (for some), remain just as much alienating and dismissive.

We offer group-based workshops and individualised counselling on the following:

  • Demystifying interpretative and other forms of qualitative fieldwork for natural scientists and other interdisciplinary academics;
  • Ethnographic fieldwork methods, ethics & reflexivity, power & positionality
    - Fieldwork guidance; Safety on the ´field´;

Image: Terry Granger ©