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.