Demystifying Fieldwork in Peace&Conflict Studies – w/Birte Vogel & Roger Mac Ginty
“The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork” – recently published volume edited by Roger Mac Ginty, Roddy Brett, and Birte Vogel – takes a reader through a life cycle of fieldwork. Through 33 chapters written in the first person, the Companion offers honest, thought-provoking, and imbued with humility accounts of practical, emotional, and ethical aspects and dilemmas of fieldwork as “a corrective to the under-reporting of what might go wrong in fieldwork and the Indiana Jones syndrome”. The editors and the authors emphasize that research is a personal, sensory, emotional, and relational experience and the importance of writing the Researcher back into the fieldwork process.
In this episode, you’ll be hearing about:
- need to demystify the image of a lone researcher going on fieldwork in a faraway place;
- perfection is unattainable;
- weather or not we should do fieldwork;
- considerations about security, ethics, privilege, humility, the pressure to be successful;
- “Don’t be a dick!” in fieldwork and in life.
Dr. Birte Vogel is a Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Editor of the HCRI Policy Brief Series at the University of Manchester. Birte’s research focuses on the interplay between international actors and local peace initiatives and investigates the political space(s) available for non-state actors. She further investigates the impact of macro-economic reforms and economic peacebuilding initiatives on local realities.
Twitter: @birtevogel_
Dr. Roger Mac Ginty is a Professor at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. He is Director of the Durham Global Security Institute (DGSi). He is the founder of the Everyday Peace Indicators project (with Pamina Firchow) and edits the journal Peacebuilding (with Oliver Richmond). His main research interests are on the interaction between top-down and bottom-up approaches to peace.
Twitter: @rogermacginty Blog: https://rogermacginty.com/
Podcast host: Dr. Sladjana Lazic
Text and edits: Dr. Sladjana Lazic