This collection draws insights from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who specialize in diverse methods ranging from ethnography, archival research, and oral histories, to quantitative data analysis and experiments used in the social sciences and humanities to reflect on the empirical, methodological, and practical implications of conducting research beyond one's national borders. The goal of this book is to help researchers contemplate existing orientations that dominate current research processes and consider the need for transnational multidisciplinary practices that remain aware of the inequalities which continually inform research practices. With this focus, this collection is also a resourceful initiative that seeks to share experiences as well as extract key ideas and approaches likely to overlap or resonate in different disciplines.
Research Beyond Borders : Multidisciplinary Reflections
Description
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Onto the Frontlines
Part I: Dialogues
Chapter 1: History Lessons from an Indochinese Diary
David Del Testa
Chapter 2: Beyond the Archives: A Practical Guide for Ethical Research in Latin America
Mark Carey
Chapter 3: Studying Wild Spotted Hyenas in Kenya: Challenges and Implications
Wiline Pangle
Part II: Insecurities
Chapter 4: Methodological and Positional Considerations of Crisis Field Research: The Karen Struggle against the Military Regimes of Burma
Jack Fong
Chapter 5: Building Trust, Enhancing Research: Carrying out Fieldwork in Namibia
Monica Ruiz-Casares
Chapter 6: Conducting Cross-Cultural Research on Turtles in Bolivia Implications for Quantitative Data Collection
Kristen Conway-Gomez
Part III: Encumbrances
Chapter 7: "You can't bring a child in here, this is a place where people come to do serious research work!": Negotiating Lone Motherhood And Fieldworker Identities
Cecily Jones
Chapter 8: Serendipitous Treasures: Rethinking Archival Research in the 21st Century
Rebecca Sammel
Chapter 9: Negotiating the Politics of Conducting Research On Widows in India
Shweta Majumdar
Part IV: Crossroads
Chapter 10: Performative Approaches to Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Research
Virginie Magnat
Chapter 11: Counter-Movement: Reconfiguring the Location of Research with Researchers from Abroad
Sami Hanna and Mustafa Sever
Chapter 12: Back from the Field: Positionality, Methodology, and Practice
Lise-Helene Smith and Anjana Narayan
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors
Author Description
Review quote
This wide-ranging collection of essays that spans behavioral ecology to feminist ethnography is an excellent contribution to the subject of transnational research diplomacy. Authors in the volume self-reflexively present the observer and the observed together showing how an ethics of methodology could dissolve the imperial gaze on the objectified other. -- Neela Bhattacharya Saxena, Nassau Community College We live in a globalized world. Many people now claim to be part of transnational networks of family, friends, scholars, corporations, diasporas, consumers, tourists, activists, humanitarians, and religions. Yet our research methods continue to reflect methodological frameworks we developed to study people within single nation-states. This timely and excellent collection challenges and addresses this methodological problem. It draws our attention to the ways in which research, mostly developed to reflect the cultures and institutional settings in northern countries, is uncritically extended to other socio-cultural-political settings. This excellent book challenges us to think outside the northern research box, and it provides many examples that we can fruitfully follow. A much-needed, thought-provoking collection. -- Bandana Purkayastha, University of Connecticut Concomitant with the increased globalization of contemporary society, research opportunities and requirements are now global too, and cross the entire spectrum of disciplines from the humanities to the sciences. Almost all such studies, however, have been lived by researchers as an individual field experience with few or no guidelines to help. Smith and Narayan's Research Beyond Borders is the first comprehensive attempt to study the challenges of research abroad as a generalized phenomenon. The essays included in the volume take on the specific issues of conducting archival or field work in foreign settings (as well as that of foreign researchers working in the American setting) with a stunning breadth of personal and professional experiences as well as unremitting critical reflection. An indispensable work for anyone undertaking research in a foreign location, this work also means no one has to learn these challenges alone ever again. -- Georges Van Den Abbeele, Northeastern University