Sustainability and Social Justice
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Critical epistemologies and methodologies have over time challenged the static and mono-dimensional approaches to fieldwork, allowing researchers to contemplate and conduct their research in spaces of in-betweenness. Despite this important shift, the essentialist idea that both ‘the field’ and ‘home’ in a fieldwork setting must be actual places persists. In this article, we challenge the conceptualization and operationalization of ‘home’ not only as the juxtaposition to ‘the field’, but also as the embodiment of a place in a specific temporality. We argue that the postulation of ‘home’ as a constant disregards the non-predetermined and unpredictable nature of fieldwork relationships that are often complicated by implicit and explicit power dynamics, especially in places researchers identify as ‘home’. We demonstrate that unequal power relations, especially (1) between the Global North and Global South, (2) between majority and minoritized groups, (3) among genders, and (4) between elites and non-elites, require us to envisage ‘the field’ and ‘home’ in relative terms. We propose the reconceptualization of fieldwork place as a hybridized space that conjoins ‘the field’ and ‘home’ as ‘field-home’, particularly at a time when research mobility is restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, we extend the literature on issues related to power, positionality and reflexivity in qualitative research, and provide practical insights for those preparing for fieldwork. © The Author(s) 2023.
Publication Title
Qualitative Research
Publication Date
2023
ISSN
1468-7941
DOI
10.1177/14687941231206770
Keywords
field-home, fieldwork, home, positionality, qualitative research, reflexivity
Repository Citation
Bilgen, Arda and Fabos, Anita, "At home in the field, in the field at home? Reflections on power and fieldwork in familiar settings" (2023). Sustainability and Social Justice. 556.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_idce/556
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.