After Fieldwork
Elżbieta Goździak and Katarzyna Byłów reflect on what becomes visible when ethnographers return to their fieldwork materials.
When does fieldwork end?
Research grants have dates and deadlines and they dictate not only when reports to the funder need to be submitted but when the last interview or school visit should take place. Although we might want to interview one more person or conduct one more site visit, at some point we say, “Fieldwork is finished.”
But ethnographically, the boundary is much less clear. We leave the field long before the field leaves our thinking. Sometimes it even finds its way back to us. A teen we interviewed sends a text message because they got into their favorite high school. A parent tells us what has happened to a child since we last spoke. A former interlocutor sends a photograph or a link to something they think we might find interesting. Are these simply communications from people with whom we established relationships during fieldwork, or are they still part of the fieldwork?
Years ago, one of my doctoral students conducted ethnographic research with Afghan refugees in India. Long after the formal fieldwork had ended, she remained in contact with some of the people she had interviewed. One day, someone sent her a video showing the refugee camp burning. She came to me with a question: Was this still data? And if she continued to hear from and communicate with former research participants, had her fieldwork actually ended?
Her question was not only methodological. It was also ethical. Research ethics approvals have end dates, too. I have written elsewhere about the importance of keeping an ethics protocol open because we may return to our data long after formal fieldwork has ended. But there is another reason. The people we met during fieldwork may return to us.
A former interviewee may send a text, a voice message, a photograph, or, in this case, a video of a refugee camp burning. Does that communication automatically become research material because the relationship originated in the field? Surely not. But neither is it always easy to separate an ongoing relationship from the research encounter that produced it.
But continuing contact with research participants is only one way in which fieldwork refuses to end neatly. More often, it is we who return—to transcripts, fieldnotes, recordings, photographs, drawings, and other materials we thought we already knew.
Analytical Distance
Seemingly nothing in the materials we accumulated during fieldwork has changed, but we have. During fieldwork, we're immersed in logistics, relationships, immediate impressions, the next interview, the next school visit. Later, something that barely registered at the time can suddenly become significant.
Returning to fieldwork material is not simply rereading it. Time has passed. We have read other things, had other conversations, begun writing, perhaps presented preliminary ideas to colleagues. Questions that had not occurred to us during fieldwork begin to emerge
I asked members of our research team what had happened when they returned to their fieldwork materials. Katarzyna Byłów reflected on what she calls the “maturation of ideas”:
"Maturation of ideas is a curious part of the analytical process. Ethnographic inquiry is fuelled by attention to the details of everyday life—the minutiae of interactions, utterances, gestures, but also pauses and silences—and by openness to new interpretations. There are moments in fieldwork when we suddenly sense that we are onto something: an intuition that a particular piece of ethnographic material may help us connect the dots in a new way. But such fieldwork epiphanies are often only the beginning of a much longer process of understanding what we have learned.
I experienced this when I returned, months later, to material from seven collaborative workshops we conducted with young people in one of the high schools in our study. The workshops had generated audio recordings, writing, drawings, and ethnographic notes. Only on revisiting this material did I begin to appreciate the significance of the students' code-switching between languages and alphabets, their mixing of writing and drawing, and their use of symbolic representations. What I had initially encountered as part of the richness of the workshops began to look like something more: a glimpse into the multilingual, multisemiotic and multimodal ways in which young people make meaning in increasingly diverse classrooms."
Katarzyna's experience is familiar to anyone who has returned to ethnographic material after some time has passed. We bring something new to each return: something we have read, a conversation with a colleague, a question raised at a conference, or an argument we are struggling to make in writing. Writing itself often sends us back to the material. An interview we thought we understood looks different beside another interview; a fieldnote suddenly connects with something we had barely noticed at the time.
The Unasked Question
Returning to fieldwork materials can also reveal something less satisfying: the question we didn't ask, the observation we didn't make.
I have my own list of questions I wish I had asked. Children in our study talked surprisingly often about bullying and conflicts, both at school and online. Again and again, they told me there was nobody at school they could turn to—or at least that was how they experienced it. When I raised these issues with teachers, their answers tended to be evasive. Looking back, I wish I had pushed harder. What procedures actually existed? How were conflicts handled when they arose? Whom did teachers expect students to approach, and why did at least some of the children seem not to know that?
I also wish I had asked parents more about their responses. Several dealt with serious problems by moving their children to another school. At the time, I was interested primarily in what the move meant for the child. Now I find myself asking a different question: why was leaving the school the solution? Why didn't parents challenge the school collectively or organize around problems they believed were affecting their children?
I can imagine several possible answers, but that is precisely the problem. I didn't ask. Returning to the material cannot supply an answer that the fieldwork did not produce.
During fieldwork, we can't know everything that will eventually become analytically important. Sometimes we can go back. Our project included repeat visits and interviews, so a new question could sometimes be pursued in a later encounter. But sometimes the opportunity has passed: a family has moved, the school year has ended, access has closed, or the project itself has ended. The absence becomes part of the limits of what we can claim.
As I wrote in an earlier post, absence can itself be analytically revealing. But it does not give us permission to fill the gap with what we imagine might have been there.
After Fieldwork
So what happens after fieldwork? Sometimes the people we met stay in touch, sending us news about their lives long after the last formal interview. Sometimes we return to the materials we collected and discover things we did not recognize when we were immersed in the field. And sometimes we discover the opposite: questions we now wish we had asked but can no longer answer.
None of this means that fieldwork never ends. Projects have to end. We have to stop collecting material, write reports, finish articles and books, and make arguments based on what we know at a particular moment. But finishing fieldwork does not mean that we have exhausted what the fieldwork can teach us.
Perhaps “after fieldwork” is not simply a period that begins when the last interview is completed. It is a different relationship to the field. We are no longer there every day, but the people, encounters, and materials continue to find their way into our thinking.
The fieldwork may be finished, but we are not finished with the field.
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