Abstract
Despite growing engagement with researchers’ positionalities and applications of reflexivity, considerations for researchers’ identities and experiences as parents remain under-developed. In particular, reflections about conducting research in the presence of one’s family continue to be a marginal topic in discussions about research methods, ethics and fieldwork. More recently, a small body of literature on the family dimensions of conducting fieldwork has begun to emerge. Most of this existing work relates specifically to the discipline of anthropology, and is often focused specifically on the experiences of mothers and motherhood. Significantly less has been written, however, about the experiences of fathers conducting fieldwork, and related questions about parenting, masculinity and field research. This article intends to counter these tendencies, by reflecting on my experiences of conducting field research in northern Uganda in the company of my wife and my two young children. I reflect on the practical and logistics aspects of this, and specifically on the methodological and ethical components of accompanied fieldwork, and the ways in which my family’s presence in the field impacted upon the knowledge production and research process. I specifically argue that conducting accompanied fieldwork carries immediate implications for researcher positionalities and relationalities with interlocutors. I specifically reflect on how my identity as a father shaped how I was perceived by my research participants, and how it enabled me to build new and different relationships with my interlocutors – thereby contributing to debates about positionality and reflexivity. Such transparent reflections, I hope, will be of interest for others embarking on field research within the presence of their families in the future, and seek to contribute towards a process of raising awareness, facilitating exchanges within the academy and increasing institutional support for accompanied fieldwork.
Introduction
“You know, this guy”, my friend said to my wife, laughingly pointing at me. “He first came here as a young boy. But now he has returned as a man.” We were seated under the mango trees by the swimming-pool of a popular hotel in Gulu, northern Uganda. His four children, aged four to eleven years, and our two daughters, five years and eighteen months old, were playing together in the water, under the watchful eyes of their nanny. During my first stay in northern Uganda in 2011–2012, I held his first-born daughter in my arms a few weeks after she was born. When I conducted research for my doctoral dissertation in 2016, I played with her younger sister. Now, in 2022, was the first time for my friends and colleagues to meet my family, and for my children to accompany me to Uganda for field research.
My friend’s comment about me having “returned as a man” is in many ways illustrative for this experience of conducting field research together with my family. In the eyes of many close interlocutors and friends, my identity and role as a married father has changed how my gender identity, as central parts of my subjectivity, were perceived by them. Drawing on these experiences, in this article I argue that conducting ‘accompanied fieldwork’ (Braukman et al., 2020) carries immediate implications not only for the dynamics of carrying out research, but crucially also for researchers’ positionalities and relationships with interlocutors.
Yet, honest and transparent reflections about the lived realities of conducting fieldwork in the presence of one’s family remain strikingly under-developed in debates about research methods. Indeed, when I set out to prepare for our joint field research trip to northern Uganda, I was surprised (and frustrated) about the general lack of discussions about these dimensions in the literature, despite a few recent exceptions (Alava and Robertson, 2022; Braukman et al., 2020). As Stolz et al. write, “accompanied fieldwork […] continues to be a surprisingly marginal topic within the discipline [of anthropology]” (2020, p. 9), and even more so in other fields.
For the most parts, the presence of field researchers’ family members is written out of field-based and ethnographic accounts (Korpela et al., 2016, p. 3). Instead, the image of fieldwork as a solitary and independent exercise persists, idealizing the “lone fieldworker” (Yates-Doerr, 2020, p. 234) as some type of Indiana Jones-like (Routley and Wright, 2020, p. 3) hero (Sontag, 1963). A good field researcher, according to such accounts, is “unencumbered by kinship” (Yates-Doerr, 2020, p. 234), leaves the company of friends and family behind and instead experiences “a maximal distance from intimate persons and from home in order […] to be able to completely immerse oneself into the field” (Krämer, 2020, p. 214). Conducting fieldwork while being accompanied by one’s family, however, is pretty much the opposite of these depictions and expectations.
In this article, I contribute towards countering these tendencies, by reflecting on my experience of conducting field research in the company of my wife and my two young children, specifically from the perspectives of fatherhood and masculinity. While a small body of literature on the challenges of “being a parent in the field” (Braukman et al., 2020, p. 1) has slowly begun to emerge, much of this evolving work is written by mothers and focused on accounts of motherhood (Brown & de Casanova, 2009; Pessoa Cavalcanti, 2017; Yacob-Haliso, 2018). Reflections about fatherhood and masculinities, however, remain mostly absent from these debates (Krämer, 2020). What this paper adds to existing methodological knowledge are field-based empirical and reflexive considerations about my experiences of conducting field research, in a post-conflict setting, from the perspective of fatherhood and masculinity. These reflections, I argue, carry important implications for reflexivity and relationalities in research encounters.
Following feminist principles of reflexivity (England, 1994), I reflect on the methodological and ethical components of accompanied fieldwork, and the ways in which my family’s presence in the field had an impact on the research process. Drawing on my subjective experiences, I specifically focus on how my identity as a father shaped how my subjectivity was perceived by my research participants. Conducting fieldwork in the presence of my family involved multiple truths: It helped me build new and different relationships with interlocutors, but also involved different practical, ethical and methodological challenges, such as restrictions on my ability to fully immerse myself in my field site. Such transparent reflections, I hope, will be of interest for others embarking on field research in the presence of their families, and will hopefully contribute towards a process of raising awareness, facilitating exchanges within the academy (and beyond) and increasing institutional support for accompanied fieldwork.
Parenting and Field Research: A (Brief) Overview of Emerging Discussions
For the most part, considerations about parenting, parenthood and field research remain under-developed across intersecting discussions about qualitative research methods. Over the past years, reflections about researcher subjectivities (Wetherell, 2008), social locations and identities (Jacobson & Mustafa, 2019) or positionalities (Davies, 2023) have become ever more prominent in the literature on qualitative research methods (Joseph et al., 2021). Yet, this growing trend of critically reflecting on the social and cultural positionalities of researchers often does not thoroughly include the relational ties and connections of researchers, including their identities and subjectivities as parents (Brown and de Casanova, 2009).
Indeed, researchers rarely reflect on the intersections between parenting, parenthood and field research, which consequentially remain a marginal topic in the literature (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 9). In fact, there are several insightful pieces about the methods and ethics of conducting research on and with parents and parenthood (Adler et al., 2019), and discussions about general experiences of motherhood in academy are beginning to thrive (Dickson, 2018). Yet, to the best of my knowledge, there are no explicit articles about the experiences of conducting empirical field research as parents within the pages of this journal, the International Qualitative of Qualitative Methods, or in Qualitative Research – as leading forums for insights in qualitative methods studies.
The presence of a researcher’s family members also often remains written out of field-based accounts (Korpela et al., 2016). From time to time, the reader may find references to family members in the field in some (mostly feminist) methods reflections, or maybe more commonly in the acknowledgement section (Cornet & Blumenfield, 2016). Systematic and transparent reflections about the layered lived realities of being a parent in the field, however, remain an exception. As Stolz et al. argue in their insightful edited volume about accompanied fieldwork, there seems to be a concern that qualitative data “might either be compromised by the contingencies of the [researchers’] personal social life” 2020: 10), including their kinship and family relations. As a result, “reflections upon the fieldworker’s social identity […] are notably silent when it comes to the fieldworker’s family status” (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 10).
Yet, accompanied fieldwork has been, and continues to be, as widely practiced as it remains marginalized in the literature. Qualitative researchers, and anthropologists and ethnographers in particular, regularly take their children and/or other family members with them to the field (e.g. Butler & Turner, 1987; Cassell, 1987; Farrelly et al., 2014). Reflective of this reality, and in response to the corresponding silence surrounding these experiences, more recently, a small but slowly growing body of literature on the family dimensions of conducting accompanied field research has begun to emerge (e.g. Alava and Robertson, 2022; Ayeh, 2023; Braukman et al., 2020; Brown & Dreby, 2013; Starrs et al., 2001).
Some of this work reflects on the impact of accompanied fieldwork on ethnographic encounters and processes of knowledge production (e.g. Korpela et al., 2016), focused on how “being a parent in the field […] heightens a reflexive awareness of the relational dimensions of ethnographic knowledge, for a variety of reasons” (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 18). Some texts have begun to tease out how taking children to the field has implications for the researchers’ capacities to immerse themselves (Krämer, 2020). This work points out how on-going caring responsibilities might make it more difficult to practice full and unconditional immersion (Haug, 2020); while at the same time, the presence of children may help in opening up new field sites (Korpela et al., 2016) and building rapport with interlocutors, particularly those who are parents themselves (Yacob-Haliso, 2018).
At the same time, “being a parent in the field implies various highly emotional issues and ethical concerns” (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 23). Such dimensions, however, are rarely addressed in the growing literature on ethical research criteria (Cronin-Furman & Lake, 2018), but are hinted to in some of the emerging writing on accompanied fieldwork (Alava & Robertson, 2022; Yates-Doerr, 2020). For instance, some researchers have pointed out that taken a family to the field may imply potential exposure to possible physical, emotional or psychosocial threats (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 23). Others have reflected on the ethical dimensions of different ideas surrounding child raising and educational practices, health care, or security that become more apparent when children are taken to the field (Cornet & Blumenfield, 2016) – an aspect I also reflect on further below.
Much of this existing work, however, specifically relates to, and emerges from, the discipline of anthropology (Cornet & Blumenfield, 2016; Flinn et al., 1998), where prolonged and deeply immersed fieldwork is much more common and expected than in other fields, including the fields my work is situated in: international relations (Routley & Wright, 2020) and peace and conflict research (Moss et al., 2019).
At the same time, much of this emerging work is often focused specifically on the experiences of mothers, written from a perspective of motherhood (Brown and de Casanova, 2009; Yacob-Haliso, 2018), in line with a growing body of scholarship on the challenges of motherhood in academia generally (Black & Garvis, 2018; Dickson, 2018; Huopalainen & Satama, 2018; Tripp, 2002). Significantly less has been written, however, about the experiences of fathers and related questions about fatherhood, masculinity and field research (Cornet & Blumenfield, 2016, pp. 8–10), with only very few exceptions (Krämer, 2020). As ever so often, it appears that the care-work of raising awareness about the lived realities of parenthood during fieldwork is shouldered by women, reflecting unequal distributions of caring responsibilities within the academy (Conesa, 2018).
The reflections offered in this article build on these emerging insights and complement them in terms of perspective, both with regards to disciplinary positioning, and with regards to gender identity and positionality – focused specifically on fatherhood and masculinities.
Context, Logistics and Preparation of Accompanied Fieldwork
Before proceeding with my own reflections of taking my family to the field, I want to offer some context for my research engagement in Uganda, and about the logistics of preparing for accompanied fieldwork. I have been conducting research with conflict-affected communities in northern Uganda since 2011. In 2011 and 2012, for a period of twelve months, my partner and I both worked with local peacebuilding organizations in Gulu, which was the first time for me to conduct field-research, under the guidance of my colleagues. Following two shorter trips in 2013 and 2015, I again spent seven months conducting in-depth research for my dissertation on wartime sexual violence against men from January to July 2016. Between 2018 and 2022, I returned to northern Uganda three times, for a month each. As such, the insights and data that form the basis of my research endeavours are not solely based on this joint fieldwork trip in 2022 that I reflect upon here, but also derive from previous research visits and will further be complemented by future encounters.
Anyone who has travelled longer distances with two small children knows that this requires careful planning. Likewise, conducting fieldwork in distant locations requires extensive preparation as well. Needless to say, then, embarking on fieldwork in a post-conflict setting in the Global South together with two small children involved a whole array of preparatory responsibilities. Amongst others, this included travel arrangements for the entire family. My research was funded through a three-year project by the German Research Council (DFG), and so my travel costs and research-related expenditures were covered through the project. The additional travel-related costs for my wife and my two children, however, were not covered by this, and instead had to be paid out of our own pocket. While some funding provisions are made available for breastfeeding mothers (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 15), these policies do not apply for all parents of small children more widely. As I inquired about the possibility of obtaining additional funding to support my family’s travel, or to use existing research funding towards these purposes, I was told that “you do not need to bring them along, you know”, and that “no man has ever asked about this before.” I cannot help but wonder how many mothers who would want to take their children with them on fieldwork would hear such a response; and to me, the assumptions behind such statements and policies reflect and reproduce unequal caring responsibilities within and beyond the academy. Given that “the costs involved in bringing families along are often prohibitive” (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 14), it would be recommendable if funding policies would more flexibly support parent researchers travelling with children to the field to, to lessen the financial demands of accompanied fieldwork.
Another planning challenge concerned health implications. While preparing for our trip, Uganda reported yet another Ebola outbreak, resulting in over 140 cases and 55 deaths. If I would have travelled by myself, I certainly would have carefully monitored the situation, but probably would not have been too concerned. Travelling with two young children, however, we had to monitor the health and safety regulations in Uganda much more closely, and requiring me to reflect upon not only the potential implications of these challenges and dangers on myself but also my family. Ultimately, these examples show us that “with family along, fieldwork is no longer just about the researcher […]. Suddenly, logistics become far more complex” (Starrs et al., 2001, p. 75). These more complicated logistics, then, require reflexivity and navigation, about how fieldwork can practically be carried out, in what ways, and with what effects – as I will explore further throughout this article.
Being a Parent in the Field
Overall, my experience of taking my family to the field was characterized by a certain degree of ambiguity, holding multiple truths at once. In many ways, the presence of my children positively influenced my abilities to (re-)build and to strengthen my rapport with different groups of interlocutors, and to build new relationships. It also shaped the direction of my research topic, and helped me to (re- and un-)learn certain things about socio-cultural and political developments that I have previously taken for granted, such as for instance culturally dominant gender relations, as I tease out further below. These processes, then, imply direct impacts on the construction of my field-site and my own understandings and knowledge production. At the same time, the presence of my children also had effects on my ability to fully immerse myself in the field, while also unearthing certain frictions and potentially conflicting views on different socio-cultural aspects between me and my interlocutors. As such, taking my children family with me to conduct field research was as much a door-opener, by facilitating new contacts, opening up new field sites, and building trust and relationships with (new and old) interlocutors; as much as it may at times have been a door-closer, for instance by restricting my mobility for research.
While others have offered vulnerable writing (Page, 2017) accounts of ‘fieldwork hurts’ (Alava and Robertson, 2020, p. 101), reflecting on often far-reaching impacts of fieldwork on their families’ health or well-being (Yates-Doerr, 2020), our subjective experience on the whole has been less challenging, and more positive – perhaps because we were only able to spent a relatively short amount of time in the field.
In the following section, I reflect on how the presence of my children influenced my research focus, field-immersion and mobility. In the section thereafter, I reflect on the impact of accompanied research on my positionality, subjectivity and identity. I specifically discuss how the presence of my family in the field has re-shaped and -constructed my relationships with research participants in different ways.
Research Focus and Immersion
Unlike others, who have written about experiences of motherhood in the field while doing research with mothers or on motherhood themselves (Brown and de Casanova, 2009), my experience of fatherhood has no immediate linkages to the focus of my research curiosities or the ‘recruitment’ of my interlocutors. My work was not focused on my interlocutors’ experiences of parenthood (or fatherhood, for that matter), and while many of my respondents were parents themselves, this was no criteria for their involvement in my research.
Yet, being a parent can come “into play during every phase of research, from conceptualizing the project, to entering the field and gaining access to participants, to writing up the results” (Brown and de Casanova, 2009, p. 54), and often starts “to have an impact when it [comes] to the choice of the research topic” (Korpela et al., 2016, p. 5). We travelled to northern Uganda at a point where I was wrapping up a research project on the experiences of male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (Schulz, 2020), while simultaneously planning a new research project on love and care in the wake of violence (Krystalli & Schulz, 2022; Schulz et al., 2024). I had initially planned to focus primarily on my study with male sexual violence survivors, in part because I was in the process of finalizing that study. Very early on, however, I realized that I found it extremely difficult, and nearly impossible, to reconcile these two realities, of the intense emotional and psychological impact of listening to experiences of sexual violence, while simultaneously caring for my children.
I remember coming home one day after an emotionally-charging conversation with a male survivor, and my daughter asking me what I did, whom I met, and what we spoke about – and me being completely unable to have an honest answer and to bring these two worlds together. As a result, then, I quickly switched my research focus 1 and directed my attention to my newly starting project on love and care in the lives of conflict-affected community. This way, I was able to centre care both in my scholarship and in my personal domain while in the field. This re-directed choice of research focus, influenced by my experience of being a parent in the field, thereby carried implications for what type of knowledge I sought to produce, showing us how the family dimensions of field research relate to knowledge production practices.
Yet, despite this changed research focus, the contrast of conducting research in a post-conflict setting and with violence-affected communities while also caring for my children nevertheless persisted. Even though I directed my research attention to people’s experiences of love and care – which was much more in line with my daily routines of childcaring responsibilities – I nevertheless still spent most of my research time with conflict-affected communities, including people who were involved in armed groups. There were moments where my children and I would, by chance, meet interlocutors on the street or in town, including former rebel commanders, who are known for gruesome human rights violations and atrocities, and who would enthusiastically chat with us. “Who was this, papa?”, my older daughter asked once after we met a former high-ranking rebel commander in front of his house, who was delighted to greet my children and gifted them some oranges, “and how do you know him?” To be honest, explaining truthfully to her who this elderly man was, how I know him and why he stopped to speak with us was something I struggled with. In moments like this, the proximity between these usually two separated spheres of research and family caused for unexpected encounters, and required reflexive inspection and navigation with regards to the entanglements between professional and personal lives and between family and research relations.
My dual role as a father and researcher not only carried implications for what I focused my work on, but also how I was able to conduct my research, specifically in relation to questions of ‘immersion’ in field research. This reality becomes particularly visible when contrasting the ways in which I conducted my research on previous trips to Uganda, without my children, vis-à-vis this experience of accompanied fieldwork. In my subjective experience, my family responsibilities, and the fact that I wanted to spend as much time with them as possible, made it more difficult for me to fully ‘immerse’ myself in the field to the extent I have done so on previous trips, and would have if I travelled alone. Previously, I was eager to attend all sorts of events that my research collaborators told me about, however loosely (or not at all) related they were to my specific research topic. For the most part, attending these activities would yield incredibly interesting and unexpected insights that fostered my understanding of certain social and cultural dynamics, and at times proved to be much more insightful than scheduled interviews. On previous trips, I also typically travelled to more remote field sites with one of my research collaborators, or accompany the local organizations that I was affiliated with for multiple days on end.
This time, however, I chose much more carefully if and for how long to travel. For instance, I limited myself to only a few full working days away in the field, instead scheduling only one interview a day and thereby arranging for shorter working days. I was also much more restrictive in terms of what activities to attend that were not related to my project. At some point, for instance, one of my collaborators invited me to accompany him on a two-day trip to Kitgum, another town 100 km north, where he led a cultural mediation meeting related to a case of intra-family sexual abuse. Typically, I would have joined him enthusiastically. With my family being present in the field, however, I decided not to join him for this trip, instead making sure to not leave my wife and children alone in a relatively unfamiliar context, which thus limited my mobility (see Krämer, 2020).
When I conducted dissertation research in 2016 over a period of seven months, by myself, I often accompanied my interlocutors on similar missions and trips. Even if they had no direct connection to my research focus, they would always yield relevant insights for better understanding different cultural, social and/or political phenomena, and thus indirectly informed my understanding of socio-cultural dynamics in the region. In particular my frequent trips with two colleagues of the organization I was affiliated with in 2016 equipped me with a much more grounded understanding of gender and sexuality relations from a masculinities’ perspective, which in turn was instrumental for my research on sexual and gender-based violence (see Schulz, 2020).
In some ways, these different approaches – of previously having joined my interlocutors for frequent trips, and this time restricting myself – led to some confusion and frustration on the part of my research collaborators, and brought into vision certain frictions, as I will touch upon in more detail below. To me, these experiences illustrate the challenges of trying to balance the demands of parenting and academia in general, which get further exacerbated in contexts of field research, and often had me “wracked with guilt if I spend too much time doing either one at the expense of the other” (Ghodsee, 2009, p. 4). In sharing these dynamics, I do not want to blame my family for limiting my mobility – which often seems to be the tone in some of the existing writing (Krämer, 2020) – but rather want to openly reflect on how different kinship, family and relationality constellations shape our fieldwork experiences and impact how we choose to carry out our research.
A practical implication of this restricted ability to fully immerse myself is that my fieldwork, during this particular trip, was more limited and thus incomplete. While it may be true that all qualitative research is always and necessarily incomplete – as we cannot possibly be everywhere, and capture everything – I have come to learn that this becomes more exacerbated for those who conduct accompanied fieldwork. To partly compensate for this, and to avoid that my research would suffer from the restricted character of this fieldwork encounter, I also conducted additional research trips prior to and after this joint trip, which made it possible for me to access some of these field sites and conduct some of this work I have not been able to do with my family being present.
Subjectivities, Positionalities and Relationships
As illustrated by the vignette in the Introduction, my now visible identity as a married father also had an immediate impact on my subjectivity and positionality, and on how my interlocutors saw and perceived me and my gender identity.
By reflecting on these perceptions of my gendered self, and inspired by Wetherell (2008), I draw closely on conceptualizations of identity and subjectivity, being mindful of their potential differences and similarities (Wetherell, 2008, p. 75). Thinking about ‘identity’ constructions, I draw on post-colonial thought by Venn, according to whom identity “refers to the relational aspects that qualify subjects in terms of categories such as race, gender, class, national, sexuality, work and occupation, and thus in terms of acknowledged social relations and affiliations to groups – teachers, miners, parents, and so on” (2006, p. 79) [emphasis added]. Subjectivity, on the other hand, “evokes the set of processes by which a subject or self is constituted” (Wetherell, 2008, p. 75; see Taylor, 1989). Thinking about my experience of being a parent in the field, and of how this impacted my positionality, needs to involve reflections about both identity and subjectivity (Wetherell, 2008, p. 75).
When I first met many of my interlocutors, I was a student (first as an undergraduate, then as a postgraduate), not yet married, and therefore not considered as a ‘real’ man in the hegemonic sense of Acholi masculinity (Onyango, 2012). In this context, and as I have come to learn through my research over the years, masculinity constructions are very much centred around being married, fathering children, and having a stable income to provide for and protect your family – all of which I did not yet fulfil during my initial research endeavours. However, having previously returned with a PhD degree, and now as a married father of two children, many of my interlocutors now saw me differently, as a ‘real man’, as my friend remarked that day at the pool.
These dynamics of my differently perceived gender identity were visible amongst my research collaborators, but particularly so in relation to the group of male sexual violence survivors that I have worked with closely since 2015. These men all live in rural settings, are elderly and socialized to live up to certain ideals of hegemonic masculinity, which in their eyes I now fulfil. For instance, one of the survivors I know particularly well remarked on this by calling me ‘Ladit’ (a term referred to an elder or ‘respectable’ man), in front of my family, and by telling my research assistant that “as a father, Philipp is now a proper Acholi man.” The statement made by my friend towards my wife, as shared in the introduction, is similarily illustrate of these sentiments, and in particular of the changes over time.
Related to this, for some of my interlocutors, the fact that I have taken my children with me to Uganda, and have made sure that they got to know one another, was interpreted as a sign of my real commitment and signalled to them the extent to which I care about the place and the people I have spent most of my professional life with. In the words of one of my interlocutors: “You have brought your children, now you are only left with constructing a home here.”
What do these dynamics and perceptions mean with regards to power relations between me and the research participants? Perhaps naively, I had assumed and hoped that taking my children with me, building (new/different) relationships and, in the process, embrace relational research practices (Fujii, 2016) would somehow break down some of the uneven power discrepancies that persist between me and my interlocutors, in terms of social class and race, even if they can never be undone (see Schulz, 2023). In contrast, however, and somewhat ironically, the fact that my gender identity was now being perceived in terms of hegemonic masculinities, with all the privileges that accompany this, may invertedly (and unintendedly) be seen as further manifesting some of these unequal classed, raced and gendered hierarchies, whereby I can be seen to have gained additional gendered privilege and power. This, in turn, requires heightened reflexivity.
In many ways, these changing subjectivities and how they are perceived by my interlocutors illustrate that researcher and interlocutor positionalities are never static, but rather evolve in fluid terms. I quickly came to realize that any positionality statements I may have formulated a few years prior were not fully capturing all of these evolving dynamics. In this particular case, while many aspects of my positionality remained stable and intact over time, how my gender identity was perceived by my interlocutors changed over time and further added to socio-cultural privilege. Typically, however, dominant approaches of practicing reflexivity do not take into account these fluidities and how our subjectivities evolve over time and space (Schulz, 2021); and how these changes, and the perceptions therefore, are impacted by our relationalities.
Rather than simply relying on positionality statements (Secules et al., 2021), the concept of ‘positioning’, as articulated by feminist scholar Davies, may be more helpful in recognizing how these processes of positioning ourselves are relational, fluid, dynamic, and tied in assemblages of power (Davies, 2023, p. 473). This process of ‘positioning’ is particularly important for reflecting on and accounting for unequal power relations in terms of gender, class, or race, and their ensuring privileges and differences. “The positioning of the self in relation to another is not simply or only an act that reveals who that individual has invested [themselves] in being”, Davies writes (Ibid.), but also entails the recognition that “we are the thick tangles of our relationality […]” (Ibid.).
Besides these dynamics, my new role of fatherhood also helped to build new relationships with research participants, or to put existing relations to another level, thereby strengthening my social ties with interlocutors and contributing to the creation of a sense of rapport, trust and mutuality (Brown and de Casanova, 2009). For instance, I recall an interview with a friend, who is the chairperson of a local women’s organization: While we were seated in the lush compound of a local coffee-shop to talk about culturally-specific understandings of ‘love’ and ‘care’, my wife and children were playing together with her daughter on the grass in front of us. “Philipp, look at our children”, my friend said: “I do not need to tell you what care means. We both now know it better because of them.” This interlocutor and others alike also remarked that they feel like they have gotten to know me better, by seeing me together with my family. This, I believe, contributed towards more grounded and trustful relationships. “Seeing you care for your children, I have now even seen another side of you”, my research assistant commented.
My identity as a father also influenced my engagement with interlocutors who were fathers themselves. For instance, one research collaborator with whom I have worked very closely since 2016 has two children of the same age. Our shared experience of fatherhood added yet another dimension to our relationship, characterized by mutual sympathy, a trusted understanding and a common shared experience, as well as yet another topic of conversation to talk about (see Krämer, 2020, p. 218), beyond our usual chatter about politics, work and, in particular, football. I am mindful, however, not to over-state these apparent similarities, and acknowledge that despite these new and heightened levels of mutuality, power inequalities in terms social class, race, or economic privilege persisted and certainly also hindered the development of rapport in numerous ways (Brown and de Casanova, 2009, p. 47).
At the same time, the presence of my children in the field and my responsibility as a father stirred up certain tensions in this particular relationship, with regards to child raising practices and expectations but also regarding my now restricted availability for shared activities. For instance, on my previous field trips, we spent much more time together beyond our research-related activities – playing football, having dinner or spending the evening in a bar. This time, however, I chose to spend most of my free-time with my family, influenced by my subjective and culturally-specific interpretation of what involved fatherhood entails, and how I like to spend my time. Sometimes, I felt that this led to my friend’s disappointment. Under no circumstances would I want to suggest that my approach to fatherhood was ‘right’ and ‘involved’ and his was less so; but it did reveal certain socio-cultural and gendered differences of our respective understandings of the roles, responsibilities and tasks of fathers respectively. “Why do you have to be there, is your wife not putting them to sleep?”, my friend asked one evening, when I declined an invitation to join him in a bar, to bring my children to bed instead. I explained to him that in fact I do not have to be there, but would like to; and the next time we met, we joked about how difficult it can be to bring an over-stimulated toddler to bed, and to resist the temptation of falling asleep ourselves when doing so. At times I was worried that me declining such invitations would mean I am not invited in the future; yet this did not seem to be the case, as there were plenty of other opportunities for me to join (or to have to decline again) such gatherings.
Related to of these dynamics, my children and their own observations also helped me to see and re-evaluate certain things I may have grown accustomed to over the years through their eyes, including with regards to gender relations. As others have noted, “bringing children to the field might put one’s cherished cultural relativistic attitudes to the test” (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 11; see Sutton, 1998). This certainly applies to gender relations or to conflicting views on raising and caring for children, which may “actualise vividly, and often harshly, ontological viewpoints on both sides” (Stolz et al., 2020, p. 19; Korpela et al., 2016, pp. 8–11). For example, I recall instances when the mother of the family that we lived with made sure that her daughters and our older daughter helped with different household chores, all the while the boy of the family could sit on the sofa, eat his food and play video-games. Our daughter of course noticed this, and pointed out what she rightly perceived as a form of injustice and uneven treatment, asking us (and our host) for explanations, which I, to be honest, struggled to provide. Of course, these observations and dynamics were not new to me, as I have often been exposed to and made to think about them. But seeing them through the eyes of my daughter, I suddenly had to position myself differently to them, and could not negate as easily anymore some of these obvious socio-cultural differences.
Concluding Thoughts
In this article, I have offered reflexive and field-based insights of my experience of conducting accompanied fieldwork, in the presence of my wife and my two young children, in a post-conflict context in northern Uganda. Drawing on the overall experience of ‘being a parent in the field’, I focused specifically on the impact of this work on identity, subjectivity and positionality constructions, and how my role as a father in the field shaped how my interlocutors perceived me, specifically with regards to gender and masculinity. While the challenges and implications of accompanied fieldwork have recently begun to receive some attention, most of this work is focused on motherhood. The reflections offered here thus seek to complement these discussions in terms of perspective and focus.
It is my hope that these reflections will add to emerging conversations about accompanied field research, particularly so from the perspective of fatherhood. My reflections and experiences have shown that research in the presence of one’s family carries immediate implication for the logistics and dynamics of conducting research, and in particular with regards to researchers’ positionalities. Indeed, accompanied fieldwork has an impact on the research process and encounter at every step of the way – from conception and research design, and including preparation and the dynamics and logistics of fieldwork, and in particular in relation to immersion in the field or researcher mobility. In particular, conducting field research in the presence of one’s family carries immediate implications for how we, as researchers, are perceived by our interlocutors, and thus refines and (re-)shapes our identities, subjectivities, positionalities and our relationships with research participants.
Ultimately, these reflections illustrate that researcher’s positionalities are never constant or fixed (Schulz, 2020), as it is often made out to be, but are rather constantly changing and evolving, depending inter alia on researchers’ evolving family and kinship relations (Brown and de Casanova, 2009). As such, engagement with research subjectivities and relationalities requires constant examination and re-evaluation (Davies, 2023), forbidding any singular and universal positionality statements (Joseph et al., 2021), as it too often remains the norm in qualitative research. What is required instead are careful and continuous reflections on the dynamics, implications and challenges of what it means to position ourselves, within the counters of our relationalities.
We enter our research and field sites not only as gendered, raced and classed individuals, but also as relational parts of broader family, community and kinship structures, and sometimes as parents. All of these relationalities play a role in how we conduct our research, how we are perceived by interlocutors, and how we make sense of the knowledge we (jointly) seek to produce. In the feminist interest of reflexivity, it is thus fundamentally important that we do not exclude or hide these multiple relations and their ensuing positionalities, but that we acknowledge and write them in. This, I maintain, contributes towards more personal, transparent and potentially vulnerable reflections with important implications for qualitative research and especially field-based research methods, ethics and knowledge production processes.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (508062692).
