ABSTRACT
It has been almost 20 years since the Geographical Review’s special issue on “Doing Fieldwork,” edited by Dydia DeLyser and Paul F. Starr. That 2001 double-volume broke new ground, offering 56 highly personal, candid, and often moving vignettes of fieldwork as it was being practiced by geographers in the late twentieth century. The special issue became a staple of seminars, and within the United States if not more broadly, it signaled a definitive end to the notion that fieldwork could be an objective, detached accounting of the world. No contributor relies on a single method alone—the field approaches they describe are refreshingly hybrid and pluralistic. Much to the delight, many of the authors are junior scholars, including doctoral students. Many of the contributors situate their fieldwork efforts explicitly in relation to neoliberalized forms of university governance—a marked difference from two decades ago, when these pressures, if present, seemed less well recognized.
