Unbounding the “Field” of Field Research: A Feminist Reconceptualization

• In Event: Reconsidering the Field: Researchers, Subjects, and Positionality

Abstract

The term field research evokes images of traveling “out into the world” to collect otherwise unobtainable data for use in rigorous analysis, whether qualitative, quantitative, or some mixture of the two. Current definitions of field research center on the physical placement of the researcher in relation to a participant or context under study. However, delimiting field from non-field research according to location in physical space, we argue, obscures the crucial role of feminist ethics in fieldwork. The assumptions that there are spaces in and out of the field, and that the default position of the researcher and knowledge production is outside of the field, reiterates the separateness of subject and object, epistemology and ontology, and fact and value. This unnecessarily ties the role of reflexivity in fieldwork to location and personal risk, renders the production of knowledge through fieldwork as an extractive “doing to” rather than a cooperative “doing with,” and leads certain sources of data and topics to be overlooked as sites of engagement with the field.

This paper draws on feminist methodology to unbound the definition of the field and develop a more capacious notion of field research. We re-conceptualize field research as a continuum constituted along two social dimensions: the degrees of separation from the point of data collection, and the extent of difference in positionality. This conceptualization of field research motivates a relational approach to the design and conduct of fieldwork. In doing so, we address limitations of existing conceptions and encourage scholars considering field research to confront harmful masculinities that pose risks to themselves and participants. Moreover, our re-conceptualization can aid in the design, conduct, and evaluation of field research adapted to physically distant circumstances brought on by global pandemic.

Authors

• Carissa Ann Cunningham, Rutgers University

• Summer Lindsey, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Michael FitzGerald, Rutgers University, New Brunswick