Research Notes: Fieldwork Vertigo

There’s a special kind of vertigo when starting fieldwork.

There have been months of preparation, a literature review, a theoretical framework, recruiting team members, briefing them as well as we can. There’s been travel to the field site, bedding down and furnishing the accommodation.

Then one day, you have breakfast, double check you have working pens, a note pad and the voice recorder. Maybe you travel for a while to a village, or just to another part of the city.

You step into the road, and then it hits you.

All around you, people just getting on with their lives. If you did nothing apart from stand and watch, they wouldn’t care. No-one asked you to come here; you could immediately turn around and go back the way you came without triggering so much as the batting of a single eye lid. At most, right now you are an interesting curiosity, but nothing more.

So you stand there, disinterest and ambivalence to your front while at your back you feel the force of the research question, of grant deliverables and the careful plan mapped out on a Gantt chart or an excel spreadsheet, pushing you forward, to purposefully interpose yourself in between some of these people and whatever life course they had mapped out for themselves on this chilly Tuesday.

What plans did they have for today? What routine was in their head when they got dressed and opened their door? What stresses are they under? Children, jobs, illness, debt?

What were they looking forward to?

We are engaged in the business of importuning strangers, soliciting a gift of their time in order to ask them questions about their lives, some of them deeply personal.

For a moment I am there, gripped by the special kind of vertigo, and not for the first time I think to myself: “it is a strange, strange thing we do.”

Then my translator Shamshagor turns to me and says “so? What will we do now?”