Fieldwork and the Geographical Review: Retrospect and Possible Prospects*

For the 100 the volume of the Geographical Review its editors, Editorial Board members, and American Geographical Society Counselors received invitations to pen essays reflecting on the journal's past, present, and future. Because of my work as guest editor with Paul Starrs on the 2001 Doing Fieldwork special double issue of the journal (DeLyser and Starrs 2001a, 2001b), I took on the task of writing about fieldwork. In this essay for the centennial volume, Paul Karolczyk and I review how geography as a field-based discipline has actually been written in the Geographical Review and offer some thoughts on how we might do it, and write it, in the future. THE FIELDWORK TRADITION IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW Research based on fieldwork, especially research based on explicit discussions of fieldwork, seemed to us a strong tradition not just in the Geographical Review but in all of geography (see Platt 1959; Parsons 1977; Rundstrom and Kenzer 1989; Katz 1994; Nast 1994; PG 1994; Driver 2000; Gerber and Goh 2000; DeLyser and Starrs 2001a, 2001b; Sundberg 2003; Abbott 2006). But is it now, and has it really ever been? In 1989 Robert Rundstrom and Martin Kenzer attempted to answer this question for human geography using three journals: the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, the Professional Geographer, and the Geographical Review. They surveyed articles published between 1945 and 1988 and found that fieldwork was widely used but, as of the 1980s, in decline. Our efforts were somewhat different: Using criteria narrower than those used by Rundstrom and Kenzer, we examined every article published in the Geographical Review between 1916 (when the journal was given its present name and replaced the long-running Bulletin of the American Geographical Society) and 2009 in search of articles based on and including descriptions of fieldwork. We built two lists, one of articles that briefly mentioned fieldwork in the main text or confined discussion of fieldwork to its notes, and another of articles that provided readers with much richer detail about field methods, experiences, funding sources, and regional field focus. Articles in the latter list were the ones that really described and engaged the fieldwork undertaken, and many of them were written in the first person. Together, the two lists likely account for the majority of articles published in the Geographical Review that detail their fieldwork. (1) Although, according to Rundstrom and Kenzer (1989), a mean of 81 percent of articles published in the Geographical Review between 1945 and 1985 had some form of field component to their research, our research both broadened that time span and sharpened the field focus. To our surprise, when we focused on published works that actually detailed the fieldwork undertaken, of some 3,100 articles published in the journal since 1916, we found that only 648--or about 21 percent--actually described doing fieldwork or reflected on that fieldwork. Of those, only 403--or about 13 percent--engaged that fieldwork in detail. Many of the 79 percent of the articles published that did not engage an author's fieldwork either described a region (or a regional issue) without detailing any fieldwork in the region or relied on the fieldwork of others. (2) Of all the articles, only the fifty-six in the 2001 Doing Fieldwork double issue and twenty-one others could be called methods or methodological pieces--articles that focused heavily, or centrally, on issues of fieldwork. (3) With the exception of the Doing Fieldwork double issue (DeLyser and Starrs 2001b), graphing the total number of fieldwork-engaged articles along with the total number of articles in each issue of the journal shows a persistent and prominent gap between the total number of articles published in the journal and those published that actually describe their fieldwork in any detail (Figure 1). This finding points to an issue for the past, present, and future of field-based work that raises important questions for field-based geography--in the Geographical Review and elsewhere. …