Structure and Methods
Feb. 5th, 2010 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ajnabiehIt's amazing how much changing fieldwork sites can alter one's experience of "doing fieldwork."
When I started writing this blog in September, I was just ending the phase of my fieldwork in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, working as a volunteer at the Arab-American Association of New York. The eight months I spent there were both a lot of fun, and very productive for my research agenda. Although I don't yet have a published account of my research there to link to, I will say that I both developed contacts in the community that have been helpful since, and constructed a (I think) strong argument about the work that discourses around education do in order to create a notion of community among recent Arab immigrants. Since I've ended that fieldwork, I've moved into a phase where I am concentrating on political movements in solidarity with Palestinians, advocating for justice and Palestinian rights; the two groups I'm focusing on are Adalah-NY and Al-Awda, both of whose names you may have heard of if you are in the NYC leftist activist circuit. I'm still in the midst of these fieldsites, and don't anticipate moving away from them at any point in the next few months.
Despite the fact that I'm in the same general fieldsite (New York's Arab communities) and that I'm probably doing the same number of hours per week of fieldwork if it's averaged out, I've noticed that the difference in the activities I'm doing in the field have changed the way fieldwork fits into my life. At the AAA, I was teaching a class or volunteering in a program. I showed up once or twice (or occasionally three times) a week, at an appointed time. I stayed for 2 hours or so (more during the summer youth program), and worked on a program that was specified. I often had leadership roles (as teacher or camp counselor) and had to coordinate my activities with others, including AAA staff, my fellow volunteers, and the participants in the programs. All my work was done during the daytime, and in Brooklyn--not near to my home, but not that far, either.
In my activism fieldwork, on the other hand, I attend an organizational meeting once every two weeks, for two hours, in the evening, in Manhattan. Apart from that, however, my schedule varies wildly from week to week. Sometimes I have conference calls in the evening with other members of the group. Sometimes I have projects to finish up on my own, that I've volunteered for at meetings. (In deference to my status as researcher, I've tried to take tasks where I would be involved in following directions, rather than developing plans; but, as most ethnographers know, participant-observation is a messy business.) Sometimes I have a protest or event to go to from one group or the other. Sometimes I have two protests a week, or occasionally three. Events are often long in duration. At public events, I'm usually an audience member: a participant in a protest, an audience member at a lecture, even a mostly-silent attender at meetings. One week, I might be out of the house for a total of ten to fifteen hours of active fieldwork; another week; it might be five; another week, it might be zero.
Moving to a much less structured fieldwork situation has made it difficult to keep myself bound to "proper" ethnographic structures. I find that my fieldnotes are often messier; since more of what I do is done in the evenings, and since more of it lasts for more that 2 hours, I'm much more likely to be moving from jottings to real notes the next day, rather than immediately after. In particularly busy weeks, some of my notes never make it past jottings; I've also been known to annotate meeting minutes, rather than write up my own fieldnotes in their entirety. It's also made it more difficult to have a regular schedule of working, writing, and reading--in particular because I've been teaching while I've been doing this fieldwork. I find that this new, less structured fieldwork has made doing fieldwork, and dissertation-writing, much more difficult overall. (It's also had effects on my personal life; it's put more stress on my wife to care for our son (now fifteen-months) when I'm out for long stretches, and also added a lot of unpredictability to my schedule that makes planning her schedule more difficult.)
Now, this post is at least in part an excuse for why this blog took an unscheduled hiatus from October through February. But I'm also interested in the methodological level here. I'm somewhat unusual as a dissertating ethnographer, I think, in that my fieldwork is deliberately part-time, long-term, and being combined, temporally, with the writing process. The norm as I understand it is, say, six months to a year spent in the field doing nothing but "being in the field," that is, conducting research with no other binding projects. Obviously most researchers' practice varies from that ideal-type description in one way or another. But what differences do these variations make in the type of data that we collect? How does moving from a highly structured ethnographic plan into a less structured one affect what we collect, and how we collect it? I don't yet have answers, but I think this is a question that ethnographers need to think about as we gather data in different settings and then hope to compare it.
When I started writing this blog in September, I was just ending the phase of my fieldwork in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, working as a volunteer at the Arab-American Association of New York. The eight months I spent there were both a lot of fun, and very productive for my research agenda. Although I don't yet have a published account of my research there to link to, I will say that I both developed contacts in the community that have been helpful since, and constructed a (I think) strong argument about the work that discourses around education do in order to create a notion of community among recent Arab immigrants. Since I've ended that fieldwork, I've moved into a phase where I am concentrating on political movements in solidarity with Palestinians, advocating for justice and Palestinian rights; the two groups I'm focusing on are Adalah-NY and Al-Awda, both of whose names you may have heard of if you are in the NYC leftist activist circuit. I'm still in the midst of these fieldsites, and don't anticipate moving away from them at any point in the next few months.
Despite the fact that I'm in the same general fieldsite (New York's Arab communities) and that I'm probably doing the same number of hours per week of fieldwork if it's averaged out, I've noticed that the difference in the activities I'm doing in the field have changed the way fieldwork fits into my life. At the AAA, I was teaching a class or volunteering in a program. I showed up once or twice (or occasionally three times) a week, at an appointed time. I stayed for 2 hours or so (more during the summer youth program), and worked on a program that was specified. I often had leadership roles (as teacher or camp counselor) and had to coordinate my activities with others, including AAA staff, my fellow volunteers, and the participants in the programs. All my work was done during the daytime, and in Brooklyn--not near to my home, but not that far, either.
In my activism fieldwork, on the other hand, I attend an organizational meeting once every two weeks, for two hours, in the evening, in Manhattan. Apart from that, however, my schedule varies wildly from week to week. Sometimes I have conference calls in the evening with other members of the group. Sometimes I have projects to finish up on my own, that I've volunteered for at meetings. (In deference to my status as researcher, I've tried to take tasks where I would be involved in following directions, rather than developing plans; but, as most ethnographers know, participant-observation is a messy business.) Sometimes I have a protest or event to go to from one group or the other. Sometimes I have two protests a week, or occasionally three. Events are often long in duration. At public events, I'm usually an audience member: a participant in a protest, an audience member at a lecture, even a mostly-silent attender at meetings. One week, I might be out of the house for a total of ten to fifteen hours of active fieldwork; another week; it might be five; another week, it might be zero.
Moving to a much less structured fieldwork situation has made it difficult to keep myself bound to "proper" ethnographic structures. I find that my fieldnotes are often messier; since more of what I do is done in the evenings, and since more of it lasts for more that 2 hours, I'm much more likely to be moving from jottings to real notes the next day, rather than immediately after. In particularly busy weeks, some of my notes never make it past jottings; I've also been known to annotate meeting minutes, rather than write up my own fieldnotes in their entirety. It's also made it more difficult to have a regular schedule of working, writing, and reading--in particular because I've been teaching while I've been doing this fieldwork. I find that this new, less structured fieldwork has made doing fieldwork, and dissertation-writing, much more difficult overall. (It's also had effects on my personal life; it's put more stress on my wife to care for our son (now fifteen-months) when I'm out for long stretches, and also added a lot of unpredictability to my schedule that makes planning her schedule more difficult.)
Now, this post is at least in part an excuse for why this blog took an unscheduled hiatus from October through February. But I'm also interested in the methodological level here. I'm somewhat unusual as a dissertating ethnographer, I think, in that my fieldwork is deliberately part-time, long-term, and being combined, temporally, with the writing process. The norm as I understand it is, say, six months to a year spent in the field doing nothing but "being in the field," that is, conducting research with no other binding projects. Obviously most researchers' practice varies from that ideal-type description in one way or another. But what differences do these variations make in the type of data that we collect? How does moving from a highly structured ethnographic plan into a less structured one affect what we collect, and how we collect it? I don't yet have answers, but I think this is a question that ethnographers need to think about as we gather data in different settings and then hope to compare it.