The allure and privileging of danger over everyday practice in field research

Many geographers in ‘closed’ research contexts focus on the problem of coerced subject responses in a ‘climate of fear’, the challenges of protecting respondents' identities and the potential political or physical harms that research results might produce once published. However, I argue that privileging possible harm from research products (including sensitive data and results) diverts attention away from crucial details that are seemingly less exciting and dangerous, yet are key for understanding power dynamics playing out in and shaping these sites. Shifting our focus towards the everyday details of embodied comportment in the research process reveals other potential harms, such as what we eat beyond the forest grove and the actions of the research intermediaries with whom we work (such as drivers). Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in M ozambique, I draw attention to embodied practices and intermediary relationships that are crucial for the larger project of locating practices of closure across diverse scales and for examining the roles of researchers in closed contexts.