During my studies in anthropology, I was bombarded with the word "fieldwork". I read about case studies, I learned the techniques on how to conduct it and I heard my professors tell wonderful (and horrible) tales of their own experiences in the field. Fieldwork came to mean something both exciting and terrifying for me. And it is will these mixed feelings that I entered the field for the first time when I conducted a study of Evangelist youth meetings in the Ottawa/Gatineau area in 2012, as part of an assignment for an ethnography class. I kept telling myself to keep and open mind, to be aware of my own biaises, I kept remembering the techniques I should use to conduct interviews. Yet, after a couple of meetings (I attended meetings every Saturday nights for four months) I realized that as Prof. Galey wrote in his post, I had to surrender some control to fully embrace the experience and let it guide me for a while in my discovery. I shared personal stories, I cried, I had of lot of group hugs, I sang along with the band. And I believe that my assumptions were truly challenged exactly because I accepted to fully participate in the experience and let the field reveal some answers to me.
I never really thought about fieldwork when I started my studies at the iSchool and I am glad that this week's blogging question encouraged me to think about it. As many of my colleagues argued, I also believe that Hartel and Park's definitions of fieldwork work for particular research projects, like the one I conducted in 2012. Fieldwork in its most simple definition is the action gathering information by going in the field. If understood this way, then I believe the only question is what is the field? Well, it is anywhere the information you are looking for is: in a book, an online chatroom, a database, a painting...
This is such a neat experience! I have never done 'fieldwork' in the traditional sense, but you always read about needing to be objective in the literature. However, in personal accounts of fieldwork that involve working closely in a group of people, you tend to hear of a lot more experiences like yours, where the observer is swept away in the experience they are there to observe. It's certainly a bit of a scary prospect, but also something that I would like to experience in my lifetime as well.
ReplyDeleteThank you Kara! Looking back on it, I am wondering how professional it was to let myself be swept away in the experience... In the moment, I really felt like it was inevitable, or should I say I did not even realize that is was happening. Of course, it was my first experience with traditional fieldwork, so I could not expect things to go perfectly. And the account of my experience ended up being very personal and the experience itself was very meaningful to me. I am curious to see how I would go about doing fieldwork again, but I would certainly have a very different mindset...
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