Preparatory participation as method: Reconceptualising pre-fieldwork through embodied and relational practice

This Note proposes the concept of preparatory participation as a way of attending to early relational and embodied engagements that shape qualitative research before and alongside moments typically recognised as fieldwork. Drawing on work undertaken with visually impaired co-participants in blue space environments, it reflects on volunteering, sighted-guide training and open-water safety certification as practices through which methodological sensibilities are cultivated. These engagements are approached not as preliminaries to research but as critical sites of methodological thinking where co-presence, sensory reflexivity and relational ethics are learned through lived practice. Situated within established traditions in ethnography, sensory methodology and critical disability studies, the Note contributes to ongoing methodological conversations by tracing how ethical and epistemological orientations are co-produced through early encounters involving access, risk and interdependence. Rather than proposing a new method, preparatory participation offers a vocabulary for recognising forms of embodied and relational labour that many researchers already undertake, and which preparatory participation helps to bring into methodological focus.