Not just muddy and not always gleeful? Thinking about the physicality of fieldwork, mental health, and marginality

Abstract

This paper acknowledges that geographical fieldwork and fieldtrips can be deeply stressful, anxiety‐inducing, troubling, miserable, hard and exclusionary for many colleagues, students and pupils. Building on the critical insights of Bracken and Mawdsley's (Area, 36, 2004) ‘Muddy Glee’ we empirically extend disciplinary reflections on fieldwork, drawing on qualitative data from research with UK university‐based Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES) academics who self‐identify as having mental health conditions which substantially affect their daily lives. These data prompt reflection on the nature and experience of fieldwork in two ways. First, they require acknowledgment of fieldwork as not just ‘muddy’, widening disciplinary imaginaries of fieldwork accessibility to encompass marginalities in/of Human Geography fieldwork practice. Second, contrary to pervasive disciplinary idealisations, these data demand recognition that fieldwork and fieldtrips are not necessarily gleeful but can be sites of intense latent anxiety and intersectional marginality. They evidence how fieldwork can often be experienced as sites of anxiety, isolation, marginalisation, and often silent or hidden distress. These data are not easy to read, and we argue that they require us to widen our disciplinary senses of what fieldwork is like. In conclusion we offer some prompts for reflection to think‐with this unease.

Classics Revisited: ‘Muddy glee’ ‐ What geography fieldwork means in the current moment

“…This Classics Revisited collection was borne from the various authors contributing to a thought‐provoking workshop organised by the RGS‐IBG and Area editorial team. Herein, we have contributions reflecting on ‘Muddy glee’ from a broad range of intersectional perspectives, ranging from ‘women in tropical peatlands’ (Thornton et al, 2022), disabilities (Bhakta, 2022; Rose, 2022), those with intersectional identities (Lawrence, 2022), LGBTQ+ (Mackay & Bishop, 2022; Zebracki & Greatrick, 2022), race‐related (Hughes, 2022), mental health (Tucker et al, 2022), those with childcare responsibilities (Bastia et al, 2022) and gendered access to the field for children (Parsons & Halstead, 2022). Each contributor has reflected on ‘Muddy glee’ from their own perspective, some engaging deeply with the original piece, others using it only as a springboard for broadening the debate.…”