We just started our @Ceres_Dev course on how political regimes shape our research practices. Very exciting discussions w/ PhD students at @issnl & wider NL students reflecting on various ethical and methodological concerns in field research.
(1) We began by examining the state of #fieldwork in social sciences & development studies. In restrictive environments, field research is more complicated & risks for personal security higher. YET disciplinary incentives simply do not encourage valuing time & energy needed.
(2) Yet, policy relevant & ground breaking work often require good fieldwork, not just theoretical rigour. So we need to do better at encouraging fieldwork based data collection.
(3) Political contexts often shape a researcher's choice of theme, research site, & methological techniques. Many comparative politics work on #Eurasia have switched to mixed methods & content analysis, in addition to publishing in #AreaStudies as opposed to discipline journals.
(4) Yet, we need more people doing field research, & not just early career scholars. Here, funders like @ERC_Research have helped support projects doing fieldwork in places known for being hard to collect data. We need to expand our geographical breadth + theoretical scope.
(5) In taking fieldwork seriously, we then need to consider major ethical questions raised in order to "do no harm" especially in authoritarian societies. We have a moral responsibility on protection of our respondents, reflecting on our positionality as foreign researchers too.
(6) The crucial part of fieldwork is navigating "red lines" to ensure security of researcher & respondents. Red lines are both hard (topics central to regime stability & legitimating narratives of state) and fluid (changing based on circumstances). Fluid lines NOT easy to know.
We will have more discussion on practices on field research in tomorrow's session. I am also organizing a workshop on this theme in the autumn! Stay tune. /End/
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