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Being True and Being You: Race, Gender, Class, and the Fieldwork Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2009

Erica Townsend-Bell
Erica Townsend-Bell
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Extract

Fieldwork advice has increased and improved over the years. Yet, the bulk of political science fieldwork advice is general; it assumes that the subject to whom advice is given is simply a political scientist—in training, perhaps—with no other salient identities that might intercede (but see Mazzei and O'Brien 2005 and the PS 2006 fieldwork symposium, The Methodologies of Field Research in the Middle East, for recent exceptions). Of course in reality it is not just the fieldwork setting that varies; the relationship of the researcher to the field matters a great deal—and that may be much more dependent on our specific identities than we have previously credited. It is not simply the subjects that we study, but us as well who have to negotiate sometimes sticky issues of race, class, gender, nationality, and so forth.

Type
Symposium
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 311 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 2009

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References

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