Description
Book SynopsisThis handbook offers epistemologically and ontologically important personal accounts of academic and professional researchers having long-term intensive, comprehensive and ethnographic fieldwork in various social settings and versatile regional contexts across the globe. The accounts are cross-disciplinary including anthropology, sociology, geography, political sciences, gender studies, forestry and environmental studies, economics, and international relations. They are also trans-regional, covering the globe including South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America. The book offers a comprehensive portrait of multifaceted challenges that social researchers experience while doing fieldwork in various social settings. The accounts provide both challenges of doing fieldwork in the 21st century and the ways how to address/redress them in the field by complying with the codes of ethics, and the politics of fieldwork. Readers will benefit from the handbook by understanding methodological issues from both disciplinary relevance and regional specificity across time and spaces.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Methodological issues in social research: Experience from the 21st century
Nasir Uddin
Department of Anthropology, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh
Part-One: Fieldwork in Challenging Social Settings
2. An active partner in disgraceful context: research, surveillance and risk in the Chittagong Hill Tracts
Maggie O’Brien
Department of Law, University of Warwick, UK
3. Researching Garo Death Rites (reprint with revision)
Erik De Maaker
Department of Anthropology, the University of Leiden, the Netherlands
4. Negotiating the tyrannies of fieldwork in Africa: A Nigerian experience
Adebayo Adewusi
Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria
5. Trial by fire: Reflections on fieldwork in Nagaland, Northeast India
Debojyoti Das
Department of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK
Part-Two: Field, Relations, and Emotion
6. Encounters in the field: The influence of emotions on data
Anuradha Sen Mookerjee
The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
7. Developing relationships over many years: Under investigated but important types of qualitative Research
Ian G. Baird
Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
8. Sick in the Field: Illness and inter-being encounters in anthropological fieldwork
Olea Morris
Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University, Hungary
Part-Three: Bio-Ethics, Fieldwork Practices, and Ground Reality
9. At the organ bazaar of Bangladesh: In search of kidney sellers (reprint with revision)
Monir Moniruzzaman
Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, USA
10. “Can we talk about surrogacy?” Legal precariousness and the perils of qualitative research in the biomedical Context
Pragna Paramita Mondal
Narajole Raj College, West Bengal, India & Women’s Studies Research Centre, University of Calcutta
11. Qualitative ‘fieldwork’ in health geographic research: self-reports from Bangladesh
Alak Paul
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh
12. Adolescent drug abuse in Connecticut private high schools: Zero tolerance, contextual peer Influence, and deterrence effectiveness.
Minjune Song
Independent scholar living in Connecticut, USA
13. Researchers’ dilemmas and challenges in qualitative fieldwork with climate-vulnerable communities
Masud-Al-Kamal, S. M. Monirul Hassan
Department of Sociology, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh &
Nasir Uddin, Department of Anthropology, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh
Part-Four: Gendered Fieldwork and Gender in Social Research
14. Risks and challenges in fieldwork on gender-based violence: Identity, social taboo and culture
Nahid Rezwana,
Department of Geography and Environment, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh
15. Rethinking ethnographic research as ‘gendered and en-casted labour’: Reflections from researching caste and partition-induced forced-migration in a non-metropolitan city of West Bengal
Ekata Bakshi
The Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
16. Photovoice as a method for women’s empowerment in domestic violence: a reflexive account
Zuriatunfadzliah Sahdan
Department of Geography and Environment, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, Perak, Malaysia
17. Working with opposite gender: Experience of doing fieldwork among rural women in Bangladesh
Main Uddin
Department of Anthropology, Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Part-Five: Theoretical and Epistemic Challenges in the Field
18. Between an activist and academic: Contested (re)positioning in refugee research
Nasir Uddin
Department of Anthropology, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh
19. Moving research methods to the field: Challenges and Lessons learned across African contexts
Deo-Gracias HOUNDOLO
International Institute of Social Studies-Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands
20. Entry, access, bans and returns: Reflections on positionality in field research on Central Asia’s ethnic minorities
Matteo Fumagalli, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, UK.
21. Doing ethnography on sexuality among Young Men in Dhaka, Bangladesh: How Has Reflexivity
Helped?
Sayed Md Saikh Imtiaz
Department of Gender Studies, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh
Part-Six: Nativity, participants selection and challenges in archival research
22. A native anthropologist’s positionality of being insider/outsider: A reflective account of doing ethnographic research in Nepal
Kapil Dahal
Department of Anthropology, The Central Tribhuvan University, Nepal
23. Recruitment of participants from vulnerable groups for social research: Challenges
and solutions
Melati Nungsari
Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and a Research Affiliate at MIT Sloan School of Management in Boston, USA.
24. Navigating Archival Readings of Rural Technology
Sanjukta Ghosh
South Asia Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
Conclusion
25. Challenges of social research: Way forward
Alak Paul
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh
