Becoming Fluent in Fieldwork: (Un)learning What Is Good/Ethical/Responsible Fieldwork

What is it about?

This running theme’s introduction provides an opening to think of and practise fieldwork as an ongoing process. It explores experiences and conceptions of “becoming fluent in fieldwork”: the contextual processes through which we do, learn, and unlearn practices of fieldwork. The introduction guides our thinking to imagine fieldwork praxis in an ongoing way. It sees fieldwork as a collective project. Recognising the entanglement of field sites and travelling with fields to certain other fields, we become multiply entangled and thus we ask: what do these plural relations/relationality demand from us? We turn to the concept and praxis of love to think about the care work and responsibilities our fieldwork praxis entails. Love asks us to consider the responsibility, care work and thinking-working together that is needed to acknowledge the reality of other people together with them. We thus foreground the notion of ‘becoming fluent’ that reflects fieldwork as a work in process (not progress), and emphasise the processual aspects of fieldwork: the journey in itself that spans the time before, during and after the fieldwork, rather than fieldwork fluency as end station. We propose that fieldwork fluency carries certain components: relations, relationality and collaboration, ‘ongoingness’ and ethics in motion. In this introduction we reflect on the mentioned central themes and contributions of this running theme and briefly introduce the different articles that it ties together.

Featured Image

Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash

Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash