17/06/2025, By Duha Ceylan
Introduction
I enrolled in the Spring School Fieldwork 2025 at Ghent University, co-organized by researchers at different stages of their academic lives. Before applying, I found myself wondering, and even asked my supervisor, What is fieldwork, really? Are interviews fieldwork? Is ethnography? Doesn’t the word “fieldwork” already imply extractive relations with participants? Eventually, I signed up. I cannot answer these questions alone, I thought.
I woke up that week early, tired and unaware that I was about to meet some of the kindest spirits. I expected another spring school, one of those spaces where critical researchers, often precariously positioned like myself, gather to name the failures of academia: the rigid scientification processes that get legitimized while those of us working outside dominant paradigms continue to struggle. This kind of reflection, naming harm while navigating it, is common among critical and anti-colonial scholars, who are often dismissed as “activists.” I include myself in that label. The tension lies in holding critique while still surviving the very systems we critique. At least, that’s how I’m usually labelled. But I was still excited to be in a space where I could collectively share struggles with others seeking different ways of being, knowing, and researching.
Why This Spring School Mattered
This four-day Spring School brought together PhD researchers to critically rethink fieldwork through creative, feminist, and anti-colonial lenses. Organized and facilitated by fellow doctoral students, it created space to unpack the emotional, political, and methodological tensions of being “in the field.” Through workshops, keynote sessions, and collective reflection, we challenged the figure of the neutral, extractive researcher and explored more ethical, collaborative, and situated practices. It was a rare space of vulnerability, peer learning, and imagining otherwise in research.
As someone working with my own community, I constantly notice how extractive academia is, not only toward the communities it claims to study, but also toward researchers like myself who are positioned within those communities. The violence is both structural and interpersonal. Academic elitism often shocks me, and the way people are dehumanized in the name of “objective” science unsettles me. As a community member, I couldn’t stand by this approach. Extraction doesn’t only happen at the level of participants; I myself was being extracted and reduced to my ‘insider’ knowledge.
What I needed were spaces and methods that allow for co-creation rather than extraction. I hoped to find others who share this refusal: a refusal of extraction, of objectifying the communities we come from or work with, of knowledge production as conquest. I was seeking research rooted in relationality, not exploitation. Most of all, I wanted to see what else is possible beyond the tools of Western, colonial, and traditional academia, even if we are still working within its walls.
Undoing the ‘Ideal’ Researcher
I’ve often wondered: who is the “ideal” researcher?
Is it the one who knows statistics inside out? Who follows every methodological step perfectly? Who can recite the entire canon and predict population behaviours with precision? Who is this person, and why did I never get the manual?
Eventually, I understood that the figure of the ‘ideal’ researcher is a colonial and capitalist trap. It’s a figure designed to keep us productive, in the sense of publishing, pumping out data and citations in service of systems that consume knowledge without care. I am far from being this “ideal” researcher because I refuse to be ideal, perfect, or endlessly productive. Still, I often feel alone in that refusal. Even now, I face pressure to perform the very structures I critique.
That’s why moments like this Spring School matter. It offered something academia rarely does: a feeling of community. A space where academic revolutionaries tried to reimagine the “field” itself. The group was diverse in methods, histories, and desires. Through that collective mix, we didn’t just talk about deconstructing the ideal researcher; we did it. We practiced it.
It wasn’t just in the lectures or workshops but in what we voiced, felt, and held for each other. We laughed, got angry, got motivated. There was a sense of aliveness in the room that didn’t apologize for being emotional, imperfect, or in process. We didn’t stop at critique, and we moved beyond it. For those four days, we created the figure of a real researcher: contradictory, unfinished, grounded, and honest.
Carolina Alonso Bejarano: Keynote and Praxis
Seeing and listening to Carolina’s keynote lecture was comforting and energizing all at once. A brilliant, quirky researcher with a sharp mind and an impeccable sense of fashion, she entered the room with presence. While I was already familiar with many of the frameworks she engaged with, it was inspiring to see how radically different we can approach genealogies and collective memory. Carolina did not confine herself to academic form; her presentation included stories, sketches, and poems. She was not simply analyzing participants; she was in the research, entangled with it.
We went on a journey from U.S. settler histories to present-day struggles over citizenship and belonging. What moved me most was that Carolina embodied the possibility of research done otherwise. Their work reminded me that we are not alone in our resistance to academic opacity.
A beautiful practice they modelled was to open or close each talk with poetry. One that especially stayed with me was Andrea Abi-Karam’s line: “I want a better apocalypse. This one sucks.”
Reflections on Methodologies
The Spring School offered a range of creative methodologies, from autoethnography and activist ethnography to curatorial anthropology, oral history, archives, and audiovisual methods. While we had to choose just two workshops (and I understood the logistical need), I wished we could have attended more. Each session was facilitated with care, and each participant brought something unique to the room.
I chose Auto-Ethnography and Anthropology as Curatorial Work. What surprised me was realizing I had already been practising both, even without naming them. So often, the knowledge we carry becomes invisible when we’re taught to centre only on “validated” methods.
In Farah Hallaba’s workshop, we created a sofra, an Arabic word for a shared table of food. We reflected on what the sofra can tell us about migration, displacement, and memory. A family’s sofra before migration, filled with joy and warmth, might look and feel very different from one after migration, surrounded by empty walls. If a dining table can carry that much knowledge, then surely data isn’t limited to interviews and transcripts. Knowledge is everywhere. The question is: how do we listen for it?
Loving Critique and Future Possibilities
I offer the following reflections not as an external critique but from within the experience, out of care and hope for what this space might continue becoming.
First, I would have loved to see more creative practices, especially writing or speculative methods. While I value ethnography, three workshops on different forms of it felt slightly repetitive. Second, the program could easily stretch to a full week. The energy and intimacy it fostered deserved more time. And finally, I hope future editions might include researchers embedded in community spaces or civil society, though I recognize how difficult it is to make this happen.
These aren’t complaints. They are desires for more, not less. Desires that make me consider helping organize next year’s edition myself.
Closing: The Field as Relationship
We closed the school by creating together, sitting in a circle with markers, scissors, and paper, crafting what we had lived. There was no competition in the room—only appreciation, care, and presence.
Another moment that stayed with me was when a Palestinian participant Bana Madi asked, “How do you do fieldwork when you’re pushed out of your field? How can you research Palestine if you’re not allowed to be there?”
Then you have to roam the field.
On this note, I came to understand that the “field” itself is a colonial construction built to divide, exclude, and establish hierarchies between institutions and communities. But the field isn’t fixed. It’s flexible, relational, and context-dependent. It becomes whatever we need it to be, together or alone.
I now see the field as a never-ending relationship without clear beginnings or ends. A co-created space. Critical praxis reminds us to use education as a form of freedom, which also means mapping out how it can harm and oppress.
Thanks to all the beautiful souls who shared this space. Thank you for your knowledge, I wrote this post with all of your voices echoing through my writing, this was not a piece I wrote in isolation. I extend my care and recognition and only hope this post reflected you with some justice. You reminded me that academia does not have to be isolating or oppressive. It can be alive.
Links of importance:
https://fieldwork2025.org/
www.carolinaalonsobejarano.com
https://www.instagram.com/anthropology_bel3araby/
