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.
IntroductionAs graduate students embarking on our own research projects we spend significant time thinking about the theories that underpin our research, designing suitable methods to get at whatever question we're posing, and writing (and rewriting) grants to get us to where we want to be. We work to learn the local language. We read carefully the political, economic and socio-cultural histories of our chosen field sites. We seek advice from others who have worked there about logistics such as where to stay, who to connect with, possible challenges, and where and what to eat. Yet, we cannot predict the mundane, complex, rich and fraught realities and relationships that we will go on to develop 'in the field', nor how these realities might reshape our understanding of our projects once the period of data collection is over. This is to be expected of course. However conscientious we are before we begin work, we are unlikely to know how it will really feel to be there unless, perhaps, it is somewhere we know intimately well already. And even if our field site is also one with which we have some measure of familiarity, particularly in the case of African scholars working within their home regions, we will certainly find that our repositioning as researchers and scholars shifts our