Fieldwork

Question 1

How is the field conceptualised?

Answer 1

A place ‘out there’ to which the researcher travels in order to have an (authentic) empirical encounter with a part of the world -> a distinct space of knowledge production.

This view has shifted, field is now understood as inherently unstable, not geographically-fixed.

Question 2

What is the relationship between fieldwork and vision?

Answer 2

Geographical fieldwork involves practices of interaction and skills of ‘observation’.
Geographers are supposed to be able to ‘read’ landscape.

Question 3

What are the key markers of positivism?

Answer 3

• Explains the material world by means of our five senses… the social world is out there, can be grasped, calculated, objectively evaluated
• Seeks to separate facts from values.
• Uses a single scientific method to investigate all of reality—fact can be observable:
• Conviction of the validity of objective knowledge.

Question 4

How is fieldwork conceptualised as a situated encounter?

Answer 4

Fieldwork necessarily involves “a variety of spatial practices - movement, performance, passages and encounters” (Driver, 2000: 267)
Facilitated by technology
Every researcher is a subject and enters the field with pre-existing identities. Informs our ontologies and epistemologies.

Question 5

Describe the ‘reflexive turn’.

Answer 5

• Identify weaknesses in positivism and destabilise realism in field practice, writing, methodology (i.e. a holistic/transformative project)
• Problematise, in particular, the roles of the researcher/author in producing social worlds as universally ‘knowable’
• Seek more ‘transparent’ research practices—focusing on the relations between subjectivity and power/knowledge

Scholars have argued that a reflexive approach… is more reliable than a non-reflexive account because it [more] accurately reflects the objective fact that you did not talk to everybody, or see everything, and therefore refuse to make sweeping generalizations about an entire social group on the basis of limited knowledge (Shultz & Lavenda p. 51)

Question 6

What is self-reflexivity and meta-reflexivity?

Answer 6

Meta-Reflexivity

• awareness of the self in situated context and the larger implications
• occurs at all stages of the research; in anticipation of research, in writing up, disseminated, critiqued, etc.

Question 7

Limitations of reflexivity? (Adkins, 2002)

Answer 7

• Tendency to bracket referential reflexivity
• Tendency to produce inward-looking practice (‘naval gazing’)… ‘with the consequence that the authenticity of the author often becomes an important focus’
• A sort-of dominance in who is ‘able to “speak” (and to be viewed as “correct”)’

Question 8

Explain Rose’s (1997) ‘goddess-trick’.

Answer 8

We can never be fully transparent. Need to write in a way that leaves uncertainty, but knowing uncertainty not ignorance.
‘the questions are so presumptuous about the reflective, analytical power of the researcher, that I want to say that they should be simply unanswerable: we should not imagine we can answer them. ‘

‘a full understanding of the researcher, the researched and the research context’ is infeasible and cannot be the objective

Question 9

Explain feminist standpoint theory.

Answer 9

(1) Knowledge is socially situated.
(2) Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized.
(3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized.