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Session Submission Summary

What about fieldnotes in comparative and international education research? Approaches, practices and ethical considerations

Wed, April 17, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Group Submission Type: Refereed Round-Table Session

Proposal

A cornerstone of rigorous qualitative research, fieldnotes have been positioned, celebrated, and encouraged as an important methodological tool (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 1995; Taussig, 2011). We argue that fieldnotes are at the crux of knowledge production and offer opportunities for documenting observation and the research process as they are framed as an aide-memoire for researchers to draw on their embodied contextual knowledge and relationships in the field. With the crisis of representation and the reflexive turn (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2017), fieldnotes are a crucial and generative space of inquiry and an important site for facilitating researcher reflexivity, for unpacking researcher positionality and assumptions, and for tracing interpretive musings and emergent analysis. Yet the production of fieldnotes often remains an implicit, private, or unspoken and therefore accepted as an individualized practice. The complexities of how fieldnotes construct the research, the researcher, and the knowledges produced are under-reported.

A number of scholarly collections take up fieldnotes specifically in the context of anthropological research and teaching (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 1995; Sanjek, 1990; Sanjek & Tratner, 2016; Taussig, 2011). Given how fieldnotes are employed across many different qualitative approaches to research, there are opportunities to study the implications of fieldnotes more widely. This panel, What About Fieldnotes? explores the heterogeneous practices of education researchers who use fieldnotes in comparative and international education research and teaching. In particular, the panel provides an engaged discussion of fieldnotes within participatory and collaborative approaches to research across numerous international contexts, including Cameroon, Canada, Hong Kong, and Kenya. Each paper in the panel will address a range of technical, methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues in the following areas:

Producing fieldnotes: Each paper will explore how fieldnotes are produced and the circumstances that affect these constructions. In particular, the papers will examine how various technologies or modalities can shape different fieldnotes practices, for example, across typed notes, handwritten notebooks, drawings, photographs, and social media. This analysis highlights the associated possibilities, risks, and implications of these practices for knowledge production, and considers how fieldnotes practices work with other research methodologies.

Using and sharing fieldnotes: Each paper also interrogates how fieldnotes can be used, analysed, and shared. These considerations include the importance of fieldnotes in terms of researcher reflexivity, how fieldnotes are represented in academic writing, and instances when fieldnotes might not be useful. In so doing, the papers tease out the ethical implications of keeping fieldnotes private and of sharing fieldnotes publicly, and the role of audience in eliciting various kinds of feedback and engagement. These critical examinations will explore when fieldnotes can offer a type of ‘intervention’ and when they might be problematic.

Far from a neutral process, fieldnotes consistently emerge as deeply contested terrain. Fieldnotes have and continue to be the site of many types of controversy and debate, with methodological, ethical, theoretical, and legal implications (American Anthropological Association, 2003; Association of Social Anthropologists, 2018). These points of contention often relate to questions about power, including what is at stake when fieldnotes remain under-reported, as well as questions about positionality and who is writing about whom. These considerations are critical within social justice research that seeks transformation, empowerment, and social change within education and international development.

Building on these spaces of debate, the conceptual framework for this What about Fieldnotes? panel draws upon theoretical orientations that interrogate the relationship between power and knowledge production, with a focus on ethical and methodological questions. The panel’s social constructionist lens (e.g. Burr, 2006; Gergen, 2012) explores how fieldnotes work to construct research—peoples, places, and practices. The panel is also grounded in critical theoretical orientations that attend to power and how structures of power are solidified and disrupted through fieldnotes practices. With concerns about participation, education, learning, power, and “research as social change” (Schratz & Walker, 1995), each author considers how self-study using reflexivity offers a pedagogical space for interrogating and transforming one’s own educational practice (Mitchell, O’Reilly-Scanlon, & Weber, 2005). Taking up postcolonial concerns, Author 1 explores positionality as an outsider in relation to ethical questions about ‘researching others’ and discomfort in fieldnotes production. From a feminist perspective, Author 2 takes up the role of reflexivity in the production of fieldnotes in relation to emotion, uncertainty, and writing processes. Author 3 works with an anarchist lens to explore the relationship between affect, academic identity, and hierarchies of knowledge in her fieldnotes. Author 4 incorporates a participatory visual ethos in the analysis of her public, comic-style fieldnotes.

In presenting these different aspects of fieldnotes practices, the panel emphasizes the intensively creative process of doing research and highlights the importance of diverse practices in relation to context, topic, and method. Each paper interrogates the complexities of power through fieldnotes practices in relation to different data collection tools (participant observation, interviews, photovoice, participatory video, cellphilming, digital archive), and in the study of questions about social justice related to education and participation in different global contexts. The authors bring these discussions about fieldnotes practices together across the areas of gender safety and gender violence in primary schools in Kenya, the gendered politics of women’s participation in daily water management and formal decision-making in Cameroon, access to education for homeless and precariously housed youth in Canada, and questions of belonging and resistance among ethnic minority youth in Hong Kong. In sharing different fieldnote approaches, practices, and ethical considerations, this panel works to make the diversity of fieldnotes practices more visible.

The panel seeks to expand the boundaries of qualitative research practices in critical and thoughtful ways that explore fieldnotes practices in relation to questions about positionality and power. The panel will provide qualitative researchers working within comparative and international educational research contexts examples of researchers’ critical examination of their own work with fieldnotes. The panel will also explore the pedagogical implications for teaching fieldnotes within education research methods courses. By contextualizing and making visible different fieldnotes practices, the panel aims to theorize how fieldnotes can advance research and teaching in higher education such that researchers might make more explicit and informed choices about fieldnotes in their work and within the politics of knowledge production.

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Individual Presentations

Discussant