Demystifying Fieldwork in Peace&Conflict Studies – w/Birte Vogel & Roger Mac Ginty
New podcast episode of Opinion Peace is now available online. Find it here
“The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork” – recently published volume edited by Roger Mac Ginty, Roddy Brett, and Birte Vogel – takes a reader through a life cycle of fieldwork. Through 33 chapters written in the first person, the Companion offers honest, thought-provoking, and imbued with humility accounts of practical, emotional, and ethical aspects and dilemmas of fieldwork as “a corrective to the under-reporting of what might go wrong in fieldwork and the Indiana Jones syndrome”. The editors and the authors emphasize that research is a personal, sensory, emotional, and relational experience and the importance of writing the Researcher back into the fieldwork process.
In this episode, you’ll be hearing about:
- need to demystify the image of a lone researcher going on fieldwork in a faraway place;
- perfection is unattainable;
- weather or not we should do fieldwork;
- considerations about security, ethics, privilege, humility, the pressure to be successful;
- “Don’t be a dick!” in fieldwork and in life.
