In this panel, we ask, how has the fact of diminished mobility changed our approaches to research? How has it changed our perspectives on the relationship between researcher and field site? What does it mean to do fieldwork closer to the places we call home in light of pandemic-related travel restrictions?
We suggest that lived experience is too often undervalued in the institutional production of knowledge, even or especially when knowledge is centered on some specific place. Despite this ingrained bias against the local, we propose that being from a place can afford a kind of “double vision” of the sort that Sandra Harding and other feminist STS scholars have theorized, whereby scientists, including social scientists, “and their communities be integrated into democracy-advancing projects for scientific and epistemological reasons as well as moral and political ones.”1
In staying closer to home, what alliances do we form or strengthen? Do new forms of reciprocity emerge? How does the dimension of lived experience inform our projects, when our field sites and personal geographies overlap? How do we self-situate in these contexts, whether as Indigenous, Native, local, settler, visitor, or some combination of these? How do we engage Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies responsibly? What are the potential pitfalls?
We invite researchers to share their experiences, insights, and methods relating to these questions around field site selection in an era of diminished mobility. We welcome loosely scripted presentations in various media and hope to make time at the close of this panel for an open-ended conversation.
1.Harding, Sandra G. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity?’” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. Sandra Harding (ed.), New York: Routledge, 2004. 136; And Harding, Sandra G. Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Also see Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York, NY: Routledge, 1991.
2.Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York, NY: Zed Books, 1999; Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, No. 1 (2012): 1-40.