Library card and key to the TML
I’m now two weeks into my stay in Montreal and am starting to find my feet. I know where to get my food and buy my ink cartridges, I have a key to the lab and a (provisional) library card. However, I’m still not too sure what I am doing in terms of methods, I have terrible internet connection (when I do have a connection, that is!) and it’s getting pretty cold. Fieldwork/fieldlife; modulations of intensity.
On that note, Joe and I have just submitted a paper on precisely this sort of theme to the journal ‘Performance Research‘, following their call for contributions on ‘Fieldworks’. Here’s the outline of our proposal:
As geographers we are often recognised by our commitment to fieldwork and it is arguably one of the discipline’s motifs. Yet despite the intimacy between geographers and fieldwork, the actual doing of fieldwork remains a black-box; particularly for students who, whilst well-drilled in ethics and risk-awareness protocol, can be unfamiliar with the messy yet productive encounters that fieldwork can afford. Therefore we propose to write a short, performative piece which traces some of the small stories from our respective Masters research. One story narrates the ethnography of glaciological research in Sweden, whilst the other illustrates the ethnography of a participatory mapping group in Colombia. The aim here is the animation of the frenetic rhythms of fieldwork, or as we call it, fieldlife; the contention that the space-times of research are not compartmentalised into desk/field or work/play binaries, but are contingent, overlapping and unfolding encounters; events which can, and should be, deployed productively rather than omitted, from an on-going ‘writing-up’ process. We think that this paper intersects with both the performance-led and scholarly concerns of the proposed issue of Performance Research.
This post is tagged fieldlife, fieldwork, performance, writing