The importance of everyday encounters: young scholars reflect on fieldwork in Africa

Abstract

This edited series explores the experiences of conducting field-based geographic research in an African setting with a particular focus on the importance of everyday encounters and relationships. As graduate students preparing for fieldwork, we spend much time thinking about and planning our research methods, yet it is often only when we begin our work that we realize the ways in which seemingly mundane acts, encounters and events shape and influence the kinds of knowledge we produce. With this mini-special issue we aim firstly to make space for the rich and valuable methodological reflections of graduate students who have recently returned from the field, voices we less frequently hear in the pages of scholarly journals. Secondly, we aim to contribute to the well-established work on critical methodologies in Geography and to prompt wider debate, discussion and collaboration within African Geographies in particular. The series includes three pieces from young scholars working in a diverse range of geographic sub-fields, using varied methodological approaches, and writing on differing aspects of the research process. Through a focus on movement, mindfulness and the seemingly mundane, they each highlight the ways in which a thoughtful attention to the everyday has enriched their work on the African continent.

Keywords:

• fieldwork
• graduate studies
• feminist methodology
• Africa