Bumbling through fieldwork activities
02/06/20MAASTRICHT, 2 June 2020—We are pleased to announce another Making Clinical Sense (MCS) co-authored publication, a methodological piece that explores some of the ways in which bumbling through ethnographic collaboration helped bolster accountability within our research team. The chapter is titled ‘Bumbling Along Together: Producing Collaborative Fieldnotes’, and has been published in the edited collection Fieldnotes in Qualitative Education and Social Science Research: Approaches, Practices, and Ethical Considerations, edited by Casey Burkholder and Jennifer Thompson.
This Logbook post serves to visually complement the chapter and shares some additional information about how we made collaborative fieldnotes.
Like all of our MCS publications, this chapter is open access, and we will post a link here shortly.
Below you can find the chapter’s abstract and, following this, figures that can be found in the published chapter, along with those which could not be included in the final publication, but which help to illustrate what the instructions for our activities looked like. We include these here to serve both as inspiration for those visiting this website, and also as a companion to the published chapter.
Abstract
Bumbling along Together: Producing Collaborative Fieldnotes.
Authors: Andrea Wojcik, Rachel Vaden Allison, and Anna Harris.
With shifting scientific research practices, team ethnography is becoming more common and visible, partly due to changes in technological infrastructures and funding schemes that support collaborative work. In many ways, the rise of team ethnography also challenges ethnographic practices built around the ideal of a “lone ranger” in the field. In this chapter, we explore one aspect of ethnographic fieldwork that changes in team ethnography – producing and sharing fieldnotes. Specifically, we reflect on our experiences producing “collaborative fieldnotes” across three geographically distant medical schools. Like the anthropologist Janelle Taylor (2014), we recognize the value of sometimes being able to “bumble” – allowing ourselves to be flexible and responsive to our experiences in the field – through ethnography. We suggest that producing collaborative fieldnotes within team ethnography is generative for bumbling along together within what Taylor refers to as “regimes of accountability.” In addition, allowing ourselves to bumble through producing collaborative fieldnotes helped shape our accountability to each other as members of a team. We draw upon examples of instructing, sharing, and discussing our collaborative fieldnotes to illustrate this formative relationship between bumbling, collaboration, and accountability.
Chapter figures
Producing collaborative fieldnotes
Instructing fieldnote production
Sharing multisensory snapshots
Discussing bumbling
References cited:
Culhane, D. (2016). Sensing. In D. Elliott & D. Culhane (Eds.), A different kind of ethnography: Imaginative practices and creative methodologies (pp. 45-67). New York, NY: University of Toronto Press.
Taylor, J. S. (2014). The demise of the bumbler and the crock: From experience to accountability in medical education and ethnography. American Anthropologist, 116(3), 523-534. doi:10.1111/aman.12124