Challenges to Field Research: Sexual Harassment and Assault

• In Event: Challenges in Qualitative Data Collection and Analysis

Abstract

In a 2019 op-ed in the New York Times, Rowena Chiu described seeking out a senior female colleague after her boss, Harvey Weinstein, tried to rape her at the Venice Film Festival: “[W]e sat on the floor and cried. Our options were painfully few. We were two young women, with limited resources, stranded in a foreign country.”

Inspired by the broader #MeToo movement, U.S.-based political scientists have recently denounced sexual harassment and assault in the discipline and undertaken a series of initiatives to ensure that our professional conferences and university campuses are free from sexual harassment and assault. Yet little has been said of sexual harassment and assault outside of these privileged sites. This silence is unusually pronounced among scholars of international relations and comparative politics who present field research as an unqualified good.

Similarly, advocates of ethnographic and interpretive methods have extensively theorized positionality and power relations in the field, but have failed to address sexual harassment or assault in the field beyond passing recognition of the usually verbal, usually fleeting inconvenience of street harassment. IRBs similarly focus exclusively on protecting subjects, not researchers from harm, while funders and program coordinators, capable of providing detailed information on crime victimization and prevention, have systematically failed to recognized sexual harassment and assault in the field.

In this article I argue that the very structures that advocates of field research valorize – the researcher’s “outsider” status in the community defined by lack of social connections and unfamiliarity with local norms, customs, and institutions – accompanied by well-documented desperation to fit in; debilitating loneliness; unspoken sexual norms and stereotypes mediated by race, class, and national origin; and intense pressure to perform well in the field in order to make it in highly competitive careers combine to create workplace environments that closely mimic the power dynamics that have led to sexual harassment and assault epidemics in the entertainment industry, elite athletic teams, and newsrooms, to name a few.

Anecdotal evidence shared by dozens of current or former scholars and suggests that workplace sexual harassment and assault of female reseachers in the field is much more prevalent than has been acknowledged. Sexual predators are well aware of “outsiders’” vulnerabilities in the field, and use the researcher’s outsider status as a weapon for sexual assault, much like alcohol is used on college campuses and the chain of command is used in the military to isolate, exploit, and silence victims.

This paper details the parallel power structures in the field and other workplaces that make sexual harassment and assault likely. In a review of 12 funding agencies and programs for international research and efforts within political science to eliminate harassment in the discipline, it outlines the complete silence regarding sexual harassment and assault during field research. It calls for a systematic assessment of the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in the field, and efforts to quantify the extent of the problem and its effects in terms of pushing victims out of the profession, and changing the questions asked and the methods used to answer them for the remainder of the profession. If we are to address the barriers women face in advancing in political science, particularly in the fields of international relations and comparative politics, and to come to terms with the gendered nature of what we study and how we study it, field research needs #MeToo moment. We urgently need to break the wall of silence surrounding sexual harassment and assault during field research and re-examine methodological assumptions that unquestioningly valorize the power dynamics by which women feel “stranded” in foreign countries.

Author

• Stacey Leigh Hunt, Auburn University