Microcredential ekomex Doing Fieldwork in Challenging Contexts

This interactive five-day online course covers the entire ethnographic research journey, from ethics and methods to data analysis and interpretation, with an empirical focus on complex and challenging fieldwork sites and a methodological focus on experimental and creative methods.

What Is This Course About?
This intensive five-day online course is designed for PhD and early career researchers who take an ethnographic approach to the study of politics in challenging contexts, such as closed or authoritarian polities, post-conflict societies, or organisations with high levels of surveillance and control.  It covers the entire ethnographic research journey, from ethics and methods to data analysis and interpretation, with a highlight on experimental and creative research methods in fieldwork. Throughout the week, participants write daily blogs that encourage the sharing of best practices and provision of peer support, with a final assessment tailored to their own research project. Your instructors are experienced ethnographers with a range of geographical expertise, who pair theoretical discussions of epistemology, positionality and interpretation with practical guidance on gathering empirical data in a variety of challenging contexts.

Learning Goals

• Identify the challenges posed in different fieldwork contexts and learn how to mitigate them
• Recognize the power dynamics between researchers and research participants, and how they map onto research ethics and safety
• Understand the relationship between different epistemological orientations and qualitative methodological choices
• Evaluate different fieldwork methods in ethnographic research and select the most appropriate ones for your research questions
• Co-create a sustainable learning community in which participants can share ideas, problems and best practices, building lasting connections that can live on beyond the course

Recommended Readings for the Course

• Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.
• Glasius, Marlies, Meta de Lange, Jos Bartman, Emanuela Dalmasso, Aofei Lv, Adele Del Sordi, Marcus Michaelson and Kris Ruijgrok (2018) (eds.) Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field, (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-68966-1 (open source)
• Elizabeth Tilley & Marc Kalina (2021) “My Flight Arrives at 5 am, Can You Pick Me Up?”: The Gatekeeping Burden of the African Academic, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 33:4, 538-548, DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2021.1884972

Assignments for the Course

• Formative: Daily blogs, reading and reflecting on the readings and additional materials
• Summative: Annotated fieldwork plan OR Critical reflection after the field

Schedule

Day 1
Locating the ‘challenges’ in Fieldwork Contexts: Positionality, Reflexivity and Ethics
Day 2
Epistemology: Interpretivism and Conceptual Development
Day 3
Doing Ethnography: From Traditional to Experimental Methods
Day 4
Practicalities: Researcher and Research Participant Safety
Day 5
Analysis: Interpreting Ethnographically Gathered Data

Indicative daily schedule (UK time)

09:00-10.30h Asynchronous learning
10.30-11:00h Break
11:00-12.30h Lecture/discussion
12:30-13.30h Lunch
13:30-14:30h Independent small group learning
14:30-15:30h Office hour

Who are Your Instructors?
Xianan Jin is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus. She is interested in the representation and resistance of gendered subjects in post-conflict societies, and how gendered subjects from rich and poor backgrounds experience politics differently. For her first book project, she spent one year in Rwanda studying the everyday political economy of women’s political engagement after the 1994 genocide. She is committed to developing experimental ethnographic approaches that amplify the multiple voices of research participants.

https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/39566-xianan-jin

@xiananj.bsky.social

Catherine Owen is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus. Between 2023 and 2025 she was Visiting Professor at the Institute of International and Area Studies, Tsinghua University. Catherine has lived, worked and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Russia, China and Kyrgyzstan, and is passionate about building sustainable research partnerships across national and cultural contexts. Her primary research interests are participatory governance in authoritarian contexts and the global dynamics of knowledge production in International Relations.

https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/24315-catherine-owen

@catherineowen.bsky.social