Fieldwork as Social Transformation: Place, Time, and Power in a Violent Moment

This special issue addresses the urgent need for reflexive introspection about conducting research in violent contexts. To do so, it explores two interrelated dimensions of the places where researchers conduct fieldwork: 1) temporality; and 2) power. In the current political moment, fully engaging with these dimensions of field sites has become an ethical and security imperative, as well as a methodological imperative. Once we put these two dimensions at the centre of analysis, the need to re-conceptualize fieldwork beyond the binaries of here/there and insider/outsider also becomes apparent. Thus, this special issue approaches fieldwork, not only as a means to a research end, but instead, as an opportunity for social action in itself. From a variety of methodological and epistemological positions, the contributors to this issue build on recent feminist work that explores fieldwork’s geopolitical dimensions. Collectively, these interdisciplinary essays argue in favour of reimagining fieldwork as an imaginative and transformative act.