Overview
- The first collection focused on humanities fieldwork in the global south
- Offers tools, techniques, and critical insight into the impact and significance of fieldwork for scholars working in the humanities
- Brings into discussion a wide range of disciplinary fields, including Area Studies (Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, African), Communications, Performance Studies, Globalization, and Anthropology.
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (13 chapters)
-
Place, Performance, Practices
-
Institutions, Organizations, Collaborations
Keywords
About this book
This volume, the first of its kind, launches a conversation amongst humanities scholars doing fieldwork on the global south. It both offers indispensable tools and demonstrates the value of such work inside and outside of the academy. The contributors reflect upon their experiences of fieldwork, the methods they improvised, their dilemmas and insights, and the ways in which fieldwork shifted their frames of analysis. They explore how to make fieldwork legible to their disciplines and how fieldwork might extend the work of the humanities. The volume is for both those who are already deeply immersed in fieldwork in the humanities and those who are seeking ways to undertake it.
Reviews
“This volume offers timely intervention for a humanities in crisis. Fieldwork in the humanities is conceptualized in these essays as more than a methodology––it is an epistemology and an ethics. These absorbing accounts from expert practitioners in the field are sure to generate excitement and interest among a wide range of readers in the academy. Theorizing Fieldwork is required reading.” (Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Global Distinguished Professor of English, NYU, USA)
“This volume signals the ways that humanities scholars seeking connections between their work and the world might shift the mediums of encounter at that very boundary. Alive to the geopolitics of fieldwork, the contributors are determined to specify new methods for making visible the materialities of literature and culture—offering rigorous and vigorous redefinitions of ‘the field’ and its archives in the process.” (Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois, USA)
“This pioneering collection invites us to reflect on how fieldwork can ‘surprise’ humanistic scholarship by destabilizing theoretical givens and restoring a conceptual and very human thickness to texts, problematizing what we claim as literature and whom we claim as authors, as well as bridging the distances created by digitized sources and transnational scholarship. In the process, the authors also reveal how humanistic fieldwork has the potential to transcend traditional anthropological practice.” (Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown University, USA)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Shalini Puri is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She is the author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. Her edited collections include The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics, Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean, and (with Lara Putnam) Caribbean Military Encounters.
Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, USA. Her most recent books include Mexican Public Intellectuals (with Stuart Day) and Despite all Adversities: Spanish American Queer Cinema (with Andrés Lema Hincapié).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities
Book Subtitle: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South
Editors: Shalini Puri, Debra A. Castillo
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-60331-9Published: 15 December 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-92836-1Published: 15 December 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-1-349-92834-7Published: 13 December 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 267
Number of Illustrations: 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Literary Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Studies, Contemporary Literature