Gateways, Gaps, and Queer Fieldwork: Reflections on Researching LGBTQ+ Lives in Rural Scotland

This research note explores methodological dimensions of conducting queer research in rural Scotland. Drawing on long-term engagement with LGBTQ+ communities in the Highlands, I reflect on the complexities of fieldwork, particularly around presence, participation, and absence. In organising a Queer Social Justice workshop, I interrogate the epistemic weight of the ‘non-event’ and question models of success in field-based research. My reflections are grounded in an ongoing interrogation of my own positionality as a queer, urban-based academic whose movement through Scottish geographies and institutions continually shapes what I can know and how I am known. I explore the productive potential of failure, absence, and improvisation in queer research and how these moments can offer meaningful sociological insight. In doing so, the piece contributes to key debates in qualitative and feminist-queer methodologies about how reflexivity, affect, and non-events can constitute sociological knowledge. The piece calls for a renewed attention to the politics of location, queer rurality, and the methodological potential of failure, silence, and the unplanned.