1: Doing fieldwork in interpretive research: encounters online, offline, and in the spaces in-between

Overview & Synopsis

Interpretive fieldwork benefits from arts-based and other material methods, which can be employed together with more standard social-scientific methods such as interviews, conversations, and observations to explore meaning-making beyond, or to expand, linguistic representation. The authors draw on their experiences of conducting in-person fieldwork with former guerrilla fighters in Colombia and fieldwork ‘by proxy’ with research assistants among conflict-affected communities in Myanmar, as well as online research with practitioners of unarmed civilian protection in different countries, respectively. They used conversational and narrative interviews, as well as textile-making, drawing, photography, and objects as methods of interpretive research. This chapter explores the role of fieldwork in interpretive research, considering offline (in-person and ‘proxy’) as well as online fieldwork forms and settings. The authors discuss the possibilities, limitations, and challenges of these different forms of interpretive fieldwork and give advice on how to navigate them in practice.