We are excited to announce the re-launch of the Field Research Methods Lab for 2019, with the support of the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. The Lab is an open platform for blog contributions by researchers to share their personal fieldwork experiences. It is especially useful for reflective commentaries on messy experiences or unexpected problems faced during field research and how they were overcome (or not, as the case may be), as these are less commonly recounted in final publications emerging from a research project. Indeed such experiences are often buried in individual researchers’ private journals. The Field Research Methods Lab seeks to bring these experiences out in the open, as the lessons learned are invaluable for established and early career researchers alike.

You will see from our Call for Contributions page that the scope of subjects covered in the Lab is extremely diverse, as is the range of field sites (even though we are now supported by the LSE Southeast Asia Centre, there is of course no expectation about which geographical areas are covered). We welcome submissions of field research experiences of any kind; as a guide, here are some typical themes that would be of interest to our audience:

–       Practicalities associated with field research: field access; collaboration with local partners; language barriers, including dependence on translators

–       Constraints on data collection: sampling; access to government sources; credibility and contamination of field data

–       Relationship between the researcher and the researched: researcher’s positionality; power relations; insider-outsider dichotomy; boundary crossing

–       Constraints on international collaboration

–       Cultural encounters

–       Government censorship and data access

–       Research ethics