What happens if you are in “the field” and “the field” gets dangerous (retro-posting a letter to my students)
Dear all,
Never have I ever … had to figure out what to say to a courseful of students during a pandemic. It has taken me all week to think up what I am about to type here. Forgive me, please, my wordiness, and anything else that comes off as tacky or delivered in the wrong tone… I am vying for sincerity, empathy, and a little bit of: hey, look, the field gets dangerous — look how real our own research experiences just got.
Officially, we are in Week 8, and in our third of four investigation phases, and sure, as luck would have it we are trying on online research methods this week, which seem pretty harmless, right? But … suddenly the world in which we are doing our research is no longer just like it was when we began, and I would be remiss to ignore this fact. Thus, the first thing I have been thinking to tell you this week is the following:
1. There are all sorts of reasons why a researcher has to come in from “the field.”
War is a common one. Health risks is another. In 2010, drug violence in rural western Mexico was so bad that undergrads, grad students, professional academics, activists, government officials, etc. (the people who looked especially out of place in the campo and thus were at highest risk of attracting the bad kinds of attention), all of whom were working with indigenous residents in the region and many of whom were doing good and important work, were forced to leave and go “home.” (There are many problems with distinguishing between “the field” and “home” which I will not go into here but hence my use of quotes.)
We began this class by looking at Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ work on human organ trafficking, a subject that may or may not have felt dangerous at times (I’ve never heard NS-H talk about danger, but I suspect she has somewhere). Other scholars study terrorism and “terrorists.” Medical anthropologsts have studied pandemics of the past, in fact, and especially the human, socio-cultural responses to these pandemics. When “the field” gets *too hot,* these scholars retreat.
Sociologists, while best known for their quantitative / statistical research, increasingly do the same kinds of ethnographic (immersive) research anthros do (as do psychologists), and so they, too, frequently find themselves cut off from their research sites abruptly, rethinking their methods, and reworking their questions to maintain projects that are feasible.
And then, what about the human centered design (HCD) turn in the design world which suddenly (in about 2000) inspired designers of things to start getting out into the real world to ask real people real questions about how they use things? Or there are masses of market researchers who work “in the field” — I know a French perfumist turned social scientist who used to spend long days in working class neighborhoods in Mexico City asking female heads of households questions about their fragrance preferences for laundry detergents (as an employee of Mane)…
My point throughout all of the above is this: doing real research in the real world, regardless of your discipline and/or motives does not always go as planned. This isn’t a white box laboratory in which we are doing our asking this semester, just as those I mentioned above don’t work in white box labs. And thus, adapting to new risks as they present themselves, and deciding when to get out and/or stop asking and/or change one’s methods, is a part of research that is both a) totally normal, and b) totally vital. Summary: this absolutely non-normal moment in which we find ourselves is, in its abnormality, a normal research experience. Did you follow? Summary 2: Welcome to the social sciences; sometimes things get hairy and we have to walk away and/or change what we set out to do.
In the words of Sherry Ortner, ethnographic (immersive) research methods have “always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self — as much as it of possible — as the instrument of knowing” (2006). Awesome, and important, too — up until putting one’s self out there gets too dangerous. As J. Christopher Kovats — Bernat wrote in a chapter titled “When all hell breaks loose: Conducting ethnographic fieldwork amid gunplay, catastrophe, and mayhem” inside of a book titled The Secret Lives of Anthropologists (Hewlitt 2019):
And okay, Kovats-Bernat is a bit more of a drama-queen than most of the researchers I know, but … let me get us from here to the second point I want to make in this already overly-wordy announcement:
2. Not only are we adapting to a new, campus-wide schedule this semester, but we are also suddenly adapting to doing research in a world where non-essential social interaction is, for the immediate present at least, discouraged…
What a weird world in which to ask our questions, no? So here is what I want to say:
A. Just like your other professors, I will be looking for ways to shorten this semester, without changing our course objectives or any of the key assignments — yes, we are still working toward a 2500 word, 20 citations (in-text), “scientific portrait,” though now we are, likely, going to move much more quickly from first draft to revised final, for example. [I promise to write you about all concrete changes to this course after I make them in the following week, and I promise any changes I make will ONLY SIMPLIFY your lives.]
B. Sanjit announced this afternoon that MCAD will be closed, after tomorrow, for the following two weeks. I will be changing course content deadlines to fit this new schedule … What you should have completed and what will be included in your mid-term grades for this course are all assigments through 8.6 (officially due this Sunday at 11:59pm).
C. I will be asking of all of you, once we are back in session, that you rethink your Arts Based Research methods (including those of you who have been planning on using photovoice in cool and exciting ways and yes, this is breaking my heart as I type it, but). Ask yourselves if you can use the arts-based methods you planned to use safely in the present context. If the answer is yes, then you will proceed through the fourth phase of our investigation unit (W9) once we are back as you originally planned. BUT IF the answer is no — you were going to organize drawing sessions turned focus groups and now nobody wants to get together, for example — THEN I am going to suggest either i) you shift to online visual research methods OR ii) you try out a second research method from the many that are listed for this current week (W8 / online research methods). If you have live interviews still pending, or other participant-observation work in social contexts still pending, I will ask you to rethink the safety of these methods as well.
D. If what you most need is a break from all things MCAD right now, please get me your fieldnotes for 8.6 (online research methods) and then go and make that break happen. Your grades will be current in the next few days, and I will be back in touch when we return at the end of March. If, however, in contrast, you want to use your research project in this course as an escape from the rest of the world right now, and/or if you just want to get through it, so you can spend the rest of the semester focusing on the rest of your life, I am going to go ahead and open up all modules in this course, in their revised forms, by next Wednesday (March 18th) at 11:59pm. This means, though there is no pressure to do so, you can work through the rest of this course faster than intended if you so choose. Regardless of if you choose to disappear or intensify your presence here, or if you choose something in between, please remember to take care of yourself first. That started out as my mantra for us all this semester, and I’m sticking to it.
Lastly, if you have any questions about anything I am in position to answer, as always, do not hesitate to reach out to me. Wishing you each goodness and rest,
Dawn
