Unbounding the “Field” of Field Research: A Feminist Reconceptualization

The term field research evokes images of traveling “out into the world” to collect otherwise unobtainable data for use in rigorous analysis, whether qualitative, quantitative, or a combination of the two. Current definitions of field research center on the physical placement of the researcher in relation to a participant or context under study. However, delimiting field from non-field research according to location in physical space, we argue, obscures the crucial role of feminist ethics in fieldwork. The assumptions that there are spaces in and out of the field, and that the default position of the researcher and knowledge production is outside of the field, reiterates the separateness of subject and object, epistemology and ontology, and fact and value. We reconceptualize field research as a continuum constituted along two dimensions: (1) the degrees of separation between the researcher and the point of data generation, and (2) power asymmetry within the field. This conceptualization motivates a relational approach to the design and conduct of fieldwork while confronting coloniality, harmful masculinities, and misrepresentation. Our approach can also inform the design, conduct, and evaluation of field research adapted to physically distant circumstances brought on by a global pandemic and further entrenched by conflicts and crises across the globe.