Writing the Field: Situational Strategies in Multi‐Sited Research

ABSTRACT How might travel for research conducted slowly across dispersed places unlock insights and find its way into our writing? Concomitantly, how can our writing respond practically to ethical concerns to situate knowledge beyond rhetorical or ritualistic performances of ‘positionality’? We respond by outlining a methodological approach to open‐ended, multi‐sited research that foregrounds ‘situations’ as analytic and writerly anchors for reflexive inquiry. Beyond traditional data gathering within neatly bounded, singular field sites, open‐ended mobilities and their accompanying situations enable researchers to engage critical faculties and sensory capacities, embrace serendipity, write reflexively and imagine modes of explanation that engage wider theories and reach ambivalent conclusions, and in consequence are more convincingly situated in time and place. Reflecting on a long‐term, gradual collaborative research and writing project, we describe three phases of such research and accompanying writerly techniques. These are: (1) travelling through situations in the field (techniques: following, shadowing, snowballing, wayfinding, piggybacking, bowerbirding, witnessing, curating, revisiting); (2) analysing emerging situations (sensing, documenting, reasoning, becoming, positioning, failing, reevaluating); and (3) writing situations (structuring, placing, meeting, explaining, admitting). Notwithstanding the institutional, intersectional and ecological challenges to research mobility, many academics will continue to travel for fieldwork, conferences and collaborations. Where such travel takes place over a longer timeframe and involves multiple places, unique opportunities present themselves to anticipate and analyse situations, reflect on journeys undertaken and write those situations, and ourselves, into resulting stories.