A social science
graduate
students workshop
January 29th, 2023: deadline call for contributions
February 2023: Selection of participants
March 14th, 2023: workshop at McGill
What?
A workshop to build community over fieldwork research
This is a full day graduate student workshop organized by students, for students, with students. It brings together social science graduate students from the four Montreal universities who: (1) have been on fieldwork collecting data, (2) are currently in the field collecting data, or (3) are preparing to go in the field to collect data.
Format: Four panels and round tables built around presentations of fieldwork experiences either in paper format or other mediums of communication (video, arts, etc.).
Contributions can be either in English or French. Panels will be organized according to students’ indication around their language proficiencies. The event is geared towards graduate students (Masters and PhDs) but will also be opened to audience.
Why?
fieldwork remains a black box
Fieldwork is the cornerstone of qualitative social science research, yet students are often poorly trained, operate within a mindset that either mythologizes fieldwork, or obscures its challenges. As academia today is more diverse in both knowledge generation avenues and the people that inhabit it, we have to tailor our training around these new lived realities and perspectives: understand why women and racialized communities face particular barriers to successful fieldwork; engage with the ethical challenges around people in the field and our own positionality, limits, traumas, emotional wellbeing as we conduct this type of work; embed fieldwork in the bigger cycle of qualitative research, which is seldom linear, objective, detached from the subject of research, and neither in line with the assumptions and worldviews set as standards by quantitative researchers. Students are also “thrown” into the field to learn their way into research – a powerful yet often challenging moment. We are often trained about fieldwork through completed projects that emphasize success from the vantage point of the present, but we are rarely guided through moments of failure, reflection, derails, reconsiderations, research shifts that happen as we engage with the lives and lived experiences of the people we meet in the field.
Call for contributions
Deadline for submissions
01/29/2023
fieldwork mythology
Fieldwork is at the center of social science research. However, in some disciplines, such as political science for instance, scholars have only recently begun opening the black box of fieldwork from a critical perspective (Kušić & Zahora 2020; Simmons and Smith 2021). By doing so, social scientists have challenged some major assumptions that underpin training and preparation for fieldwork, as well as its role within the research process. Yet, in spite of these encouraging efforts, several myths persist in many social science disciplines regarding fieldwork and the process of “fieldworking”, hindering both conception of success and failure as well as researchers’ emotional wellbeing while conducting fieldwork.
Our disciplines suffer from a presentism perspective when referring to fieldwork, once a research is finalized and published: fieldwork is either reported simply as a step within the research process (x interviews, y visits to research sites, etc.), or referred to from the vantage point of the present success of a completed research, where pitfalls, failures, challenges and the overall messiness of the process is subsumed to the neatness of the final result. As we arrive in the field with a doctoral committee-approved “research proposal”, what was intended to offer a reassuring path for us to follow may act as an anxiety-inducing constraint.
But for many of us, “fieldwork” is not the type of place and space we expect, nor is our relationship to it linear. We assume to encounter the field as a “place” where we “go” to “collect data” and then “come back”, but we are instead confronted with multiple, overlapping spaces with blurred boundaries and in constant re-shaping. Our movements and transitions “in” and “out” of the field are not as clearly defined, even more so with the possibilities and limitations offered by pursuing research online, from afar, in a pandemic era. The temporal and spatial boundaries of fieldwork can thus dramatically shift our idea of what research in social science constitutes. It can lead us to redefine our research’s “unit of analysis” or “cases” on which our empirical endeavors will be centered—but also our core ontology and theoretical framework.
As we are taught to think about the field in terms of its methodological use, our experience nonetheless has equally made us feel the field, physically, emotionally. Focusing on intellectualizing the field, we are often left without a space where to channel emotions and embodiment. Yet we find that our feelings of guilt, loss, nostalgia, loneliness, fear, but also excitement, joy, boredom, or indifference shape to a greater extent than often acknowledged how we “make sense” of the field. These feelings are often trapped in our fieldnotes or personal journals, sidelined, or repressed in ways that can become overwhelming, as we learn to navigate spaces that are violent towards gender, class, sexual and racial minorities. As young researchers we may be unequipped to process discomfort, confusion, rejection, aversion that certain experiences in data collection may provoke, be it an interview. Even when deciding to prioritize self-care and safety, we deal with an invisible pressure to “face our fears” and access spaces, people, or situations that jeopardize our wellbeing.
experiences in the field
workshop intentions
As graduate students who are at different stages of their research (still in the field, back in the writing process, finishing the dissertation), we feel the need to share our experiences and reflect collectively on the gap between expectations (drawn from our training, or lack of it) and our own experience in the field.
Stemming from conversations amongst friends and colleagues, the workshop is targeted towards graduate students in the social sciences, coming from both interpretive and positivist epistemological orientations. This conversation, organized around panels and roundtables, would allow us to identify common experiences and challenges and to reflect on avenues to improve the way our disciplines treat fieldwork and trains students.
In all, we intend the workshop to act as a forum to normalize the messiness of fieldwork and collectively work on strategies to embrace its “real nature”. In particular, we aim to offer a space for students coming from social science disciplines in which fieldwork is not given a central role, such as political science, economics, public policy, geography. If space permits, we will consider proposals from students in humanities, engaged in fieldwork research.
suggested themes (non-exclusive)
❖ Positionality in the field: Who’s the outsider? Who’s the insider? How does “(not) being from” or “being from” here/there, “in-group” or “out-group” shape our experiences on the field?
❖ Process and sequence: should we re-think how we approach the research process, usually in different “steps” of data “collection”, “analysis”, “writing the results”? How do the assumptions of linearity shape the researcher’s experience and their research?
❖ Destruction, Deconstruction, Reconstruction: how to deal with the epistemological and ontological challenges that fieldwork poses? What tensions emerge when a researcher changes their worldviews in the field? What role does a research proposal play in a process that will inevitably change?
❖ Critical, Feminist, and Decolonial Approaches to Fieldwork: While the urgency of decolonizing the social sciences is increasingly recognized in our disciplines, how do the epistemological and methodological imperatives that such approaches require unfold in practice? Can we as student-researchers mitigate power inequalities in our interactions, and how may we inadvertently reproduce them in our practices?
❖ Ethics in the field: How does a “deductive-based” ethics procedure clash with the reality of the field and the complexity of human relations? How can we ensure that our research is truly fair and ethical? What role does trust play in an ethical research process? How do we square the institutional ethics procedures with different worldviews on what is ethical once we reach the field? In what ways do REBs conceived in specific institutions and legal traditions hinder or help fieldwork?
❖ Serendipity, luck, bad luck: How can we make sense of randomness in the field? How should we treat the unexpected encounters we have in the field, epistemologically, methodologically, and theoretically?
❖ Emotions in the field: How do emotions affect the research process? How can emotions be incorporated in our methodological approach? How have disciplines such as feminist studies, race and postcolonial studies, contributed to this discussion and how can we borrow from these approaches to inform our practice?
❖ Mental health in the field: How can the field affect researchers’ mental health? What aspects of our trainings could be improved to better prepare students to face these challenges? While there are increasing discussions on well-being and mental health in academia, what are some blind spots that still reproduce toxic habits and taboos in our field?
❖ Defining fieldwork: Is fieldwork a unit of experience?
Workshop
Where?
McGill University (Downtown Campus)
When?
March 14th, 2023
Organizers
This workshop is organized by two PhD candidates in the department of political science at McGill University: Sashenka Lleshaj (sashenka.lleshaj@mail.mcgill.ca) and Rose Chabot (rose.chabot@mail.mcgill.ca).
Sponsors
This project is supported by McGill University's Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies through the Student Engagement Fund, the Research Team on Inclusion and Governance in Latin America (ÉRIGAL), and by the Department of Political Science at McGill.