Embodied Fieldwork

Learning Desert Geomorphology Virtually versus in the Field

“…Nairn, 1999;Hall et al, 2004), although they may be less effective in linking process and place. By providing evidence for the validity of virtual learning, this study supports Taylor's (2000) call for studies on web-based educational methods to help dissolve "a division forming between technological optimists and skeptics of corporate powers, technology and 'radical' higher educational reform".…”

When bodies do not fit: an analysis of postgraduate fieldwork

“…As both Nairn (1999) and Maguire (1998) report in their studies of female students' accounts of fieldwork, Martina realized that she was lacking the physical fitness that would ensure the completion of fieldwork and, eventually, of her doctoral degree. While her friends and colleagues had never talked to her about body size being a limitation, she decided on her own to lose weight through a controlled eating and exercise regimen.…”

“…Maguire (1998) shows how female and mature students more often describe themselves as having inadequate fitness level for fieldwork activities. Nairn (1999) considers in more general terms how typical fieldwork activities of walking and climbing limits the participation of students having invisible disabilities, for instance asthma and lack of physical fitness. Hall, Healey and Harrison (2002) explore how disabled students, including visible disabilities such as mobility and visual impairment, are in various ways excluded in geographical fieldwork.…”

“…As well, emotional connections with communities, through for example marriage and family, can leave researchers exposed in their personal lives because of what they do in the field (Behar 2013;Smith 2014). Disabled bodies in the field are less talked about in the literature; however, ableism, that is, the oppression resulting from the ideal that everyone is able-bodied (Anderson 2001), has been problematized in relation to undergraduate students' capabilities to participate in field activities (Nairn 1999;Hall, Healey, and Harrison 2002;Hall and Healey 2005). Demands of fieldwork, in terms of the physicality of carrying out field tasks, have been discussed in terms of female bodies in physical geography (Bracken and Mawdsley 2004).…”

“…When conducting ethnographic fieldwork, the field comprises all senses and bodily activities (GilliatRay 2010), which illustrates the argument that even field researchers understand places through their bodies (Nast 1998). Although the practice of 'being in the field' has profoundly changed since feminist geography's early days, many fieldwork activities such as walking and climbing are considered as excluding tasks requiring a fit and able body (Nairn 1999;Hall, Healey, and Harrison 2002). While the able-bodied requirements of field activities have been questioned in the literature on higher education pedagogy Gilley et al 2015), the fact that the researcher's sick and fatigued body represent a limiting factor of fieldwork also has been recognized by feminist geographers (Maguire 1998;Punch 2012).…”