SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Why are you not researching your home country, and why did you choose “elsewhere”? Would research in another country in the South be familiar to you? Assumptions and prompts are often posed to southern researchers when they select their fieldwork and case studies. This article dissects the rationale behind southern researchers based in Western academia choosing countries other than their home, the fieldwork experience, and the creation of post-fieldwork knowledge. Through a reflexive approach, we discuss pre-fieldwork training, moving positionalities, gender and religious identities during fieldwork encounters and the imposition of Western perspectives in knowledge creation. To do so, we interrogate the entrenched inequalities in global power dynamics within the architecture of knowledge creation, emphasising the need to decolonise knowledge and (re)evaluate research ethics and training. This article advocates for re-considering knowledge creation and power shifting as a process rather than the outcome, and fieldwork as an essential knowledge creation component enabling post-knowledge production and doing research differently.