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The Future of Fieldwork (RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025)
August 28 @ 11:10 am – 12:50 pm
This event is part of the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025
Panel:
- Convenor: Joanna Southworth, University of Birmingham
- Convenor: Lesley Batty, University of Birmingham
- Convenor: Surindar Dhesi, University of Birmingham
Description:
Fieldwork is an integral part of Geography as a discipline, whether as human or physical geographer, a student or researcher. This session will explore the challenges that we face in conducting fieldwork in a rapidly changing financial, political, social and technological world. Employability is one important and increasingly more crucial area that fieldwork feeds into. The practical side of ‘being a Geographer’ can enable students to gain transferable skills not accessible in the classroom, and there is a case to be made for fieldwork in these terms. However, as sustainability rightly makes it way up the agenda of many Universities, the need and necessity for overseas fieldwork, in particular undergraduate trips abroad, is a question that is worthy of serious consideration. This is coupled with concerns of rising financial pressures for both students and universities, access to suitable sites, and safety concerns associated with a number of countries. The advent of technology means that both quantitative and qualitative research could in some part take place remotely (big data, remote sensing or utilising Zoom or Teams for interviews/focus groups). Similarly, technology has enabled virtual fieldwork on the physical side to be a viable alternative. Yet in a discipline that stresses the importance of place, what is lost by not conducting research in situ? There are also questions of a more ethical nature regarding helicopter science and perhaps a way forward might be greater collaboration with local researchers who could perform the data collection. The advent of AI opens up even more possibilities and also threats to how we currently conceive fieldwork, the student or researchers role in it and the need for it to happen ‘in place’. This session will explore these questions as well as considering creative ways in which we can take fieldwork forward into the future.