Returning-home fieldwork in China with a dear friend: Friendship, personal safety, and diversity

Abstract

Drawing on my accompanied returning-home fieldwork in China with a dear friend, Yun, this paper critically reflects on the ideas of friendship in fieldwork and its enabling and enhancing role in managing safety concerns and negotiating data collection. The contribution is two-fold. First, it advances current fieldwork scholarship in Humanities and Social Sciences that predominantly focuses on the researcher–informant friendship formed in the field by engaging with the companionship of pre-existing friends. This diversifies our understandings of fieldwork friendship in individually, socially and culturally unsettling ways. Second, this study furthers ongoing conversations calling for greater visibility and support of different forms of accompanied fieldwork by focusing on the accompaniment of pre-existing friends. Three potential directions are outlined to normalise the model of accompanied fieldwork in efforts to promote equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in geography fieldwork.