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Being Indiana Jones in IR: The Pressure to Do ‘Real’ Fieldwork

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The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork

Abstract

This chapter critiques how fieldwork is often portrayed in peace and conflict studies as ‘war stories’ which valorise masculine western explorer/adventurer tropes. These narratives serve to undermine the valuable new avenues of enquiry fieldwork can open up, obscure the plethora of tensions within fieldwork and overlook that this kind of research is far from the only way to build knowledge. This chapter calls for a recognition of the frequently mundane nature of ‘fieldwork’ and how fieldwork itself does not necessarily obtain the more emancipatory aims sometimes envisioned for it. We highlight that power of these tropes is often felt at a personal level, and this perpetuates a narrow and exclusionary understanding of what ‘fieldwork’ is or can be in peace and conflict studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Whilst we acknowledge that both men and women can and do tell this type of fieldwork stories, in our experiences more often than not they come from men and are performative of a masculine protection logic.

  2. 2.

    The particular experiences of those whose research subjects are from the same ‘group’ as they are is an interesting valuable discussion but not one that we have the space to explore here but please see, Abu-Lughod (2006) and Weston (1997) as starting points.

  3. 3.

    This is not her real name but the same pseudonym I used in my book.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Laura Routley & Katharine A. M. Wright

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  1. Laura Routley
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  2. Katharine A. M. Wright
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Correspondence to Laura Routley .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Roger Mac Ginty

  2. School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Roddy Brett

  3. Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Birte Vogel

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Routley, L., Wright, K.A.M. (2021). Being Indiana Jones in IR: The Pressure to Do ‘Real’ Fieldwork. In: Mac Ginty, R., Brett, R., Vogel, B. (eds) The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46433-2_6

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