Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the relationship between a field that encompasses the everyday life of international peacekeepers, the city of Goma in and around which fieldwork is conducted, and the fieldworker herself. This reflection seeks to bring forth new understandings of the spatiality of the field.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to blend fieldwork experiences on peacekeeping camp space in eastern DRC with those of the researcher's everyday life in the city of Goma to challenge previous anthropological notions of where the field is and what it can be. Firstly, this paper theoretically dislodges the field of peacekeeping camps from traditional fields of inquiry in which these spaces would traditional enter (i.e. security studies, war and conflict, and peacebuilding). This theoretical maneuver is paralleled by the adoption of fieldwork strategies that productively challenge the spatiality of "being home," "being in the city," and "being in the field."

Secondly, I argue that "the field in between" can have theoretically and empirically generative power that enriches the research experience both at home and in the spaces that anthropologists work. Despite an overwhelmingly multi-sited approach to peacekeeper life in camp spaces, empirically relevant date infiltrates and collapses the space between the home, city, and field of the researcher. This paper concludes by considering the ways in which one can productively "lose the field" through integrated ways of living in the cities we study, informant mobility through the field sites, and through the narrowing of topical considerations to include in the research itself.

This paper is largely inspired by a current "return to the field" and reflects on the fundamental and ongoing transformations of what constitutes the researcher's field in a rapidly changing city and who the researcher herself can become amidst such changes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the multiple meanings and constructed imaginaries of 'the field' in my own experience of multi-sited, ethnographic research, as well as in the everyday life of my research participants: humanitarian workers with experience working in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the multiple meanings and constructed imaginaries of 'the field' in my own research, and how it reflected or diverged from understandings of 'the field' among my research participants: humanitarian workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

First, by drawing on my experience of researching, and geographically tracking, the everyday practices of a humanitarian organisation - from its 'head-quarters' in Paris, to the 'capital' in Goma, to 'the field' in rural DRC - this paper explores the ambiguous, spatial construction of 'the field' in multi-sited ethnographic enquiry, as process that comes to incorporate multiple settings and groups over time.

Second, this paper explores the diverse understandings of a space defined as 'the field' by both researchers and national and international humanitarian workers in Congo. Drawing on my own experience of living with and studying humanitarian workers, I explore how academics and humanitarians come to share and occupy a shared imagined space: 'the field'. Whereas it remains understood as an 'exotic' space, isolated from 'home,' by international workers and researchers, I explore how national humanitarians working in their own 'home' come to understand 'the field.'

Finally, given that the 'field' is not bounded spatially or temporally, this paper reflects on how one 'exits the field.' I argue that the artificial separation between the 'field' and 'normality' or 'home' becomes further problematized - with lasting relationships and ongoing discussion with 'participants' that alter conceptions of 'home' long after the end of 'fieldwork.'

Paper short abstract:

An arts center in inner city Johannesburg is currently also becoming a research center, particularly focused on the cultural heritage of fabric throughout the African continent and thus the migrant community. Working alongside my field on this, my role as fieldworker changed.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I firstly describe how an arts center is trying to obtain knowledge about itself and its others, seeking to connect with its surrounding neighborhoods, through research on and representation of African fabrics. I have come to understand this as a strategy and practice of weaving the arts center into the daily lives of the neighborhood and vice versa. Secondly, in considering the expression of "this side" and "that side" commonly used by Joburgers and often used as geographical markers both in terms of the city and the world, I discuss this strategy of weaving as a way of softening the logics of the post-apartheid city and xenophobia. And thirdly, in researching this strategy, I found myself increasingly relating to the arts center as both my field and a research partner.

I thus ask how the notion of field, fieldwork and research institution change when the field is understood 1) as a strategy of weaving and 2) through a practice of collaboration (rather than as a research object in a more classic sense). Inspired by their strategy, I seek to develop a heuristic of weaving to think through the relationship of another this and that side, namely the field and the institutions we report back to (my translation of the panel's "home" and "in between fieldwork"). The thissidedness of that side puts attention both to an empirical strategy and to my way of being in between this and that side. As such, empirics and theory are interwoven.

Paper short abstract:

My paper aims to discuss the challenges of approaching ethnographically the Esperanto-speaking community. This international auxiliary language is not spoken in any bounded location, which forces the ethnographer to include reflections on circulation and mobility at the core of his methodology.

Paper long abstract:

Faced with the decision of conducting field research among groups of people who speak the international auxiliary language Esperanto, my first thought was: where can I find Esperanto speakers in a reasonable number to approach them through a long-term fieldwork?

If Esperanto is aimed at building bridges and encouraging international understanding beyond national and language barriers, it is understandable that its speakers must be scattered over the world, rather than geographically bounded. However, if Esperanto can only be used meaningfully in contacts with national others, especially from other language backgrounds, what do these speakers do and where do they go to do so?

The configuration of this community, widespread by definition, entails a set of challenges and specificities. How can Esperantists build the Esperanto community they claim to build without counting on any sort of geographical boundedness that could enable regular contacts among this community members? And, analytically speaking, how can an anthropologist approach this community that counts on speakers/members potentially everywhere, but that is, at the same time, situated nowhere?

In this paper, I explore how Esperantists engage with spatiality and make sense of this language through practices of mobility and circulation, and how, as an anthropologist from Rio de Janeiro studying in Manchester and doing fieldwork in Paris, I also had to reconcile experiences of circulating and of being stuck. Furthermore, I analyse the use of ethnography to approach globalised issues, trying to consider to what extent can multi-sitedness and multilingualism be rendered feasible and desirable.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the productivity of thinking coffee in Seoul from changing perspectives—from within and "through elsewhere" (Robinson, 2016)—and discusses its methodological implications for studying the emerging fields of globalised practices and spaces of consumption.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to reimagine the geographic, discursive, and imagined distances by linking on-site fieldwork on coffee in Seoul with the researcher's everyday life 'back home' in Zurich. Engaging with anthropological notions of "doing nothing" (Ehn & Löfgren 2010) and the researcher's embeddedness in the field, the practice of fieldwork is understood as a fluid process (both in spatial and temporal terms) through the ongoing practices of tracing across geographic boundaries (through social media; by continuously keep thinking about the topic). I reflect on these strategies of tracing less in terms of a methodological charter, but rather as a more general research environment and everyday life condition, from which the ethnographer departs to perceive, intellectually engage with, and making new links to generate her fields.

Starting with an anecdote about an unplanned visit to a coffee event in Zurich and the subsequent research through the Internet, I discuss in what way this unexpected encounter off the site (away from Seoul) has challenged the localised understanding of practices surrounding coffee and opened up new perspectives on the spatiality of the field.

Paper short abstract:

Coming from a wide range of disciplines – Anthropology, Architecture, Psychology, Sociology, Geography, Political Science – how do urban ethnographers in Portugal refer to their interlocutors and to their fields?

Paper long abstract:

Coming from a wide range of disciplines – Anthropology, Architecture, Psychology, Sociology, Geography, Political Science – how do urban ethnographers in Portugal refer to their interlocutors and to their fields?

Urban ethnographies in Portugal were born only after the Revolution in 1974 (after 50 years of Dictatorshio) (Cordeiro and Afonso 2003). Slowly, a group of studies came to light, not only tracked by anthropologists, but also by other social science researchers. This presentation tells that story, a recent story with a small group of senior researchers and a big group of young researchers, from a diversity of scientific backgrounds.

Following a post-PhD project about Urban Ethnography in Portugal which included professional trajectories interviews analysed for this purpose, some interrogations are at stake in this presentation: considering Urban Ethnographers in Portugal, how do they conceive their fields? Coming from other social and human sciences, such as Sociologists, Architects, Geographers, what sort of considerations they make about familiarity/proximity with their fieldwork sites?