Navigating the Field

This volume is a collation of postgraduate fieldwork experiences in social research that provides a platform for early career researchers (ECRs) to be open about the hidden labour of doing postgraduate fieldwork. This book documents diverse fieldwork experiences, gathering critical reflections on ‘the field’ from a wide range of ECRs. The issues presented here go from the process of identifying the field to navigating life in (and after) it, including things that happen in-between.

This text shows a different set of methodological considerations in relation to access, ethics, identity, positionality, power and practices, highlighting how ECRs'' fieldwork experiences may help broaden traditional frameworks of research. Exploring how postgraduate researchers make sense of these issues and what kind of decisions they make in specific circumstances helps to reveal broader concerns, institutional practices and constraints. Through these reflections, this book makes an important point that there is a need for researchers to document the ‘real story’ behind fieldwork. The honesty and openness of contributors in this volume are positive steps towards fostering a research culture where reflections upon weaknesses and failures are as welcome as presentations of successful fieldwork techniques and methods.

The fact that this book is written and edited by ECRs, the topics it presents — both emerging and long-debated but still relevant — and the broad range of approaches make this text unique. We hope these points will make this work useful for researchers of all levels and across disciplines, and that this text will allow the reader to rethink some essential aspects of social research that are often taken for granted. We expect the diverse reflections offered in this book to appeal to researchers across disciplines at different stages of their career and that this will be a useful resource for researchers to map and navigate their own research pathways.