Fieldwork for Human Geography

Richard Phillips, Jennifer Johns

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857025876, 9780857025869
• eBook ISBN: 9781446290941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

"A highly readable and superbly fun guide to the why and how of doing fieldwork in human geography... I recommend it highly to any geographer-wannabes and practicing-geographers. The latter group, including myself, might well rediscover the fun of doing geography."
- Professor Henry Yeung, National University of Singapore

"An excellent introduction to the art and science of fieldwork. It makes clear that fieldwork is not just about getting out of the classroom and gaining first-hand experience of places, it is about instilling passion about those places."
- Professor Stuart C. Aitken, San Diego State University

"An indispensible guide to fieldwork that will enrich the practice of geography in a myriad of different ways. In particular, the diverse materials presented here will encourage students and academics alike to pursue new approaches to their work and instil a greater understanding of the conceptual and methodological breadth of their discipline."
- Professor Matthew Gandy, University College London

"If fieldwork is an indispensable component of geographical education then this book is equally essential to making the most of fieldwork...This book gives students the tools to realise the full potential of what, for many, is the highlight of their geography degree."
- Professor Noel Castree, Manchester University

Fieldwork is a core component of Human Geography degree courses. In this lively and engaging book, Richard Phillips and Jennifer Johns provide a practical guide to help every student get the most out of their fieldwork. This book:

• Encourages students to engage with fieldwork critically and imaginatively
• Explains methods and contexts
• Links the fieldwork with wider academic topics.

It looks beyond the contents of research projects and field visits to address the broader experiences of fieldwork: working in groups, understanding your ethical position, developing skills for learning and employment and opening your eyes, ears and minds to the wider possibilities of your trip. Throughout the book, the authors present first person descriptions of field experiences and predicaments, written by fieldtrip leaders and students from around the world including the UK, Canada, Singapore, Australia and Africa.

PART I

APPROACHING THE FIELD

1

GETTING THE MOST OUT OF FIELDWORK

OVERVIEW

This introductory chapter addresses the following questions:

• How can you get the most out of fieldwork?
• What is fieldwork and why is it important in university level geography?
• What is meant by ‘the field’ and how can you engage with it?
• What are the key concerns and criticisms of fieldwork? These encompass the intellectual relevance of fieldwork; its practical value to you as a student; its financial and environmental costs; and its ethics.

The chapter invites you, as a student, to enjoy fieldwork but also to take it seriously, asking challenging questions about and through the field.

INTRODUCTION: FIELDWORK AND GEOGRAPHY

Fieldwork is compulsory for many geography students and a recommended option for most others because it occupies an important place within academic and professional geography. It has been suggested that fieldwork is to geographers what clinical practice is to medicine. For better or worse, fieldwork is often treated as an ‘initiation ritual of the discipline’ (Rose 1993: 69) and the field is ‘depicted as the locus of becoming for the real geographer’ (Powell 2002: 267). This is as true of undergraduate geographers as of their professors. As Felix Driver has noted, this commitment to fieldwork reflects the ‘assumption … that that the complete geographer is one who can conduct fieldwork according to certain standards – in other words, safely, skilfully and effectively’ (2000: 268). Moreover, it is often suggested that fieldwork is what distinguishes genuine geographers from mere interlopers. Canadian geographer Cole Harris puts it this way:

There are geographers who do not enjoy fieldwork. One of my colleagues in the late 1960s, an eminent spatial theorist, could not abide the world as it presented itself to the senses. It was too cluttered. He liked to be driven, and he would sit in the back seat of a large car with the blinds down. At home he watched gangster films and adjusted his equations. But most of us are not such purists. We are more inclined to take the world as it is – or as it seems to be – to get out into it, look hard at it, ask questions about it, and grapple with the conundrums so presented. This usually means fieldwork … (2001: 329)

Having ‘been there’ is said to lend credibility not only to geographers themselves but also to their research findings and claims, even though these truth claims have increasingly been interrogated and contested as we explain in subsequent chapters.

The importance of fieldwork in the geographical tradition reflects the influence of foundational geographers and geographical institutions, who defined modern geography as a field-based discipline. Carl Sauer, who headed the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and is often regarded as the father of North American Geography, famously declared that ‘the principal training of the geographer should come, wherever possible, by doing fieldwork’ (Sauer 1956: 296). He practised what he preached: running weekend fieldtrips in the local area and spending his summers and sabbaticals further afield, particularly in Mexico (West 1979). In doing so he renewed a fieldwork tradition which he inherited from and shared with others, including fellow American geographers such as William Morris Davis (1850–1934) and institutions such as the Association of American Geographers (AAG), which cohered around a shared interest in fieldwork and field-based data and convened annual field conferences in the 1920s and 30s (Mathewson 2001; Rundstrom and Kenzer 1989). Fieldwork was also important to geographers and geographical institutions outside the United States. These included explorers: the most important geographical institution in the Victorian period, the London-based Royal Geographical Society (RGS), committed itself to carrying out ‘important Expeditions in every quarter of the Globe’ (as its royal charter of 1859 put it) (Times 2009: 2). Fieldwork was promoted by educators too, with a ‘cult of the field’ in the early years of British state schooling from 1870 onwards (Ploszajska 1998: 758). And when Geography had become established in British universities the commitment to fieldwork continued, both in the research activities of geographers and undergraduate curricula.

This commitment to fieldwork has been reaffirmed, both by geographers working broadly in the tradition established by Sauer and by others with very different perspectives. Cole Harris has reflected that for him, and indeed for ‘many a geographer’ he has known, ‘the high points of a working geographical life have been exhilarating experiences in the field’ (2001: 329). His commitment to fieldwork is echoed by geographers from other traditions for whom ‘the field’ and fieldwork mean very different things. William Bunge, whose radical and creative geographies both emerged from and challenged quantitative and analytical work within the discipline in the 1960s, criticised what he saw as an emerging tendency to ‘cite not sight’ (Bunge 1979: 171). He encouraged geographers to get into the field and find things out for themselves, and he set an example for how they might do so that would involve members of the public in the process (Chapter 9 explains how). More recently, others have reaffirmed the commitment to fieldwork and the geographical tradition in which the field is accorded a central place. David Stoddart introduced his inspired history of the discipline, On Geography (1986), as ‘a book written from the field and not from the armchair’ (p. xi), and fieldwork in all its forms is central to that book, which celebrates a world ‘of great beauty and diversity, waiting for exploration’ (p. x).

Fieldwork is not just an Anglo-American geographical tradition. It has also been important to geographical research and teaching in other parts of the world too. In Singapore, for example, it has flourished in the context of wider efforts by educators, supported by the Ministry of Education, to encourage independent, creative and critical learning (Chuan and Poh 2000). Similarly, in other countries from Argentina to Hong Kong, geographers have stressed the ‘irreplaceable’ role of fieldwork and successfully campaigned for its place on the curriculum (Kwan 2000; Ostuni 2000). So, to an extent, there seems to be a broad international consensus on the value and purpose of geographical fieldwork today.

Finally, we should add that the fieldwork tradition has not just been inherited and shaped by foundational figures – who were once called ‘fathers of the discipline’ and now increasingly will include ‘mothers’ too. Fieldwork also relies upon those who participate in and support it. These include workers who provide transportation and accommodation, ranging from guides and porters in nineteenth-century expeditions to flight attendants, drivers and cooks today. Ultimately, undergraduate fieldwork sinks or swims as a result of the ways in which students themselves engage with it. Pedagogical articles about fieldwork often quote favourable feedback from students, explaining how trips to the field brought course material to life – ‘seeing how it mattered’, as one student put it in a course evaluation (Hope 2009: 175) – and sometimes tracing forms and degrees of learning from and engagement with field projects. These surveys suggest – and when published are intended to suggest – that it is not only academic geographers who believe in fieldwork, willingly participating in the fieldwork tradition, but students as well. It will be necessary to revisit glossy claims such as these. For now, though, the point is that on some level the fieldwork tradition is alive and well and that students are playing their part in making it so.

On the other hand, fieldwork means different things in different times and places. The fieldwork tradition in geography is marked not only by continuity but also by change and diversity. Not just one tradition, it is comprised of a series of traditions which are variously performed and contested. We should not do fieldwork simply because others have done it. Rather, we must ask challenging questions about what fieldwork is and what it should be, and also about what the field in fieldwork is and should be.

WHAT IS FIELDWORK?

As noted in the introductory chapter, fieldwork means different things in different times and places, though it is usually understood as supervised learning that involves first-hand experience outside the classroom (Lonergan and Andersen 1988: 1; Gold et al. 1991: 23). This is not as straightforward as it first appears because different people have different understandings of ‘geographical issues’. One textbook on fieldwork advises geography students not to ‘become too interested in historical facts about towns or buildings’ and to ‘avoid biological information about the animals and plants you find’ (Glynn 1988: 3). We prefer to define the geographical more inclusively however – not to exclude the historical or biological, for instance, but to regard these and other phenomena through geographical perspectives. We would also note that, while this book is concerned with fieldwork for human geographers, and while fieldwork is important in defining geography as a discipline – making it ‘an identifiable subject in university and national academic regimes’ (Pawson and Teather 2002: 275) – geographical fieldwork is closely related to and informed by fieldwork in other disciplines, such as anthropology and cultural studies.

Having started with a simple, general definition of fieldwork, it is now necessary to acknowledge that this has been conceived in many different ways: for example, as a means of teaching and learning specifically geographical concepts such as scale; of appreciating the ‘glories of God’s creation’ (Marsden 2000: 17); of exchanging the stuffy and formal atmosphere of the classroom for the healthy and stimulating world outdoors (Geikie 1887; Knapp 1990); of inculcating values of patriotism and citizenship (Layton and White 1948); and even of advancing international peace and understanding (Marsden 2000). So fieldwork means different things to different people in different times and places. Gold et al. (1991) identify three distinct traditions of or approaches to fieldwork, which have their own histories but have also overlapped: ‘the exploration tradition’ which responds to ‘the desire to go and see new places’; ‘the regional tradition’ which examines ‘the interrelationship of physical and human phenomena in regional associations’ (1991: 22); and ‘observation and empiricism’ which started from ‘observable facts’ and ‘also contributed to an emphasis on active learning through fieldwork’ (1991: 23). These traditions are not simply different; they are frequently at odds, with their visions of fieldwork contrasting and often conflicting. Fieldwork, they collectively suggest, is a diverse and contested set of practices: views are expressed about which kinds of fieldwork are better and the reasons for this.

The definition of fieldwork as learning out of doors is often qualified with reference to a distinction between fieldwork and tourism. The chapter on fieldwork in a manual on teaching geography in higher education begins with a dour warning: ‘One should not … confuse a fieldtrip in geography with picnics, outings or senior class excursions’ (Field Training in Geography by P.F. Lewis, quoted by Gold et al. 1991: 21). Critics have dismissed fieldwork as ‘academic tourism’ (Mowforth and Munt 1998: 101) and condemned fieldwork that smacks of tourism, which is often presumed to be uncritical and neo-colonial. Indeed student fieldwork may sometimes be guilty of this. Dina Abbott (2006) felt uneasy about a fieldtrip to the Gambia in which British students were taken on a tour, which introduced to them the small West African country’s history as a slave trading post. Tourists, and students among them, ‘are welcomed with a potted history of enslavement and after they feel they have “done Gambia”, return to the boat’ (2006: 330). Her pessimistic conclusion is that these students are ‘indistinguishable by local people from another set of “white” tourists’ (2006: 335). More lighthearted, but otherwise similar claims are often made by the colleagues, friends and relatives of fieldworkers, who jokingly or otherwise accuse us of taking holidays at the expense of others.

Fieldtrip leaders reply to these charges by making a distinction between fieldwork and tourism, and also between more and less credible forms of fieldwork, by asserting that ‘this is not a Cook’s Tour’. Neil Coe and Fiona Smyth (2010: 126) put it this way:

Many [geographers] will have had first-hand experience of a certain mode of field teaching in which the teacher/lecturer assumes the familiar role of knowledgeable expert. In this mode, students are treated to a carefully planned tour with the lecturer offering commentary, explanation, interpretation and leading discussion at, and between, the various sites of interest. In some instances local experts are also enrolled to offer their privileged knowledge on the topic at hand. Students are largely passive recipients, responding only to direct questions and taking notes on what is being said. The lecturer, in effect, assumes the role of ‘tour guide’.

Coe and Smyth go on to describe more progressive, student-led fieldwork. Others have drawn similar distinctions. Yi Fu Tuan (2001: 42) expressed scepticism about fieldwork that may be ‘little different from the rounds that tourists make’, but suggested another model of fieldwork in which students played a more creative and active role. These distinctions between passive and active fieldwork are not always fair. On the one hand, it can be helpful to begin a fieldtrip with an orientation, in which students are given their bearings and introduced to the basics of life in a place that is new to them before they embark upon independent projects and explorations (Herrick 2010). On the other hand, student-centred fieldwork is not new. Previous generations of fieldworkers also tried to design fieldwork that was exciting and engaging for students. This commitment to active learning is widely accepted and has been for some time. As S.W. Wooldridge put it in more than half a century ago, ‘proper fieldwork’ was about ‘doing’ and not about students being told (1955: 79; quoted by Marsden 2000: 31). Bill Marsden generalises that ‘fieldwork has always been associated with what might be called the progressive educational front of geography’ (2000: 33).

The difference between tourism and fieldwork, and between passive and active forms of fieldwork, is not just something for the fieldtrip leaders to think about. As a student you can also take responsibility for your own learning, ensuring you play an active part in the field. When we asked students who had been with us on a fieldtrip to Vancouver to reflect on ‘the difference between fieldwork and tourism’, these were some of the things they said (in a survey conducted after the fieldtrip ended):

Fieldwork incorporates a different level of interaction, as we studied areas and issues that most tourism would not fully understand or even want to engage with. (Hannah)

You have to make sure that although you can have fun on the field trip, the primary reason is to work and gain skills. (Anthony)

Tourism is visiting a destination for recreational, leisure or business purposes and creates money for that destination, whereas fieldwork is research in that particular destination with a goal for ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Other Contributors
• Introduction: Fieldwork for human geographers
• Part I Approaching the Field
• Part II Methods and Contexts
• Bibliography
• Index