ABSTRACT
This chapter considers whether fieldwork is something that stitches the sometimes loose fabric of the contemporary subject together, something that connects the circuits of physical and human geography. Geographical knowledge needs to be understood as something that is constituted through a range of embodied practice. The chapter also considers the heritage of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of research-focused exploration in contemporary Geography and describes fieldwork, and the field as a place where research is undertaken, where knowledge is created and recorded through specific activities. In the 1960s, the transformation of Geography by the Quantitative Revolution changed the place of the field for both human and physical geography. Geography was part and parcel of the bold and acquisitive colonial imagination, in the British and the French empires. Fieldwork has an important place in the development of Geography, particularly in the development in the nineteenth century in response to travel, natural history, imperial governance, natural science and education.
