Making a Case for Serendipity in Architectural Fieldwork

Surrounded by war, racial violence, injustice, climate catastrophe, and health disasters, I search for that little ray of hope that could make my work as an architectural historian meaningful. As Mariame Kaba prophetically declares, hope is not an abstract ideal we move toward, but a scrupulous mode of living and working. I remember a question that architectural historian Abigail Van Slyck once posed: “How can we make history do work” for the dream of a better future?2 The answer to that query is to create a history committed to social and environmental justice. Can fieldwork and fieldbased research go beyond collection, interpretation, and description of the material world, toward an expanded mode where one aspires to change minds and dreams and strives to act in order to build a more equitable future? That kind of fieldwork is timeconsuming and is driven by an ethical framework that goes beyond mere data collection.3 As vernacular architecture historians, we can collect information in an intense month of fieldwork, but to use that information toward change and action we must develop a deeper and longer commitment to the communities we engage. Collaborative fieldwork is aimed at transforming “the space of fieldwork from one of data collection to one of coconceptualization.”4 It takes time to gain trust. Cocreating knowledge with the people whose world we study requires myriad forms of engagement and conversations that exceed the measurements, documentation, and formal analysis of buildings.5 One way to expand the scope of fieldwork beyond an examination of material culture is to include oral histories and ethnographic methods.6 Appending such techniques to a historian’s toolkit is necessary, but not adequate. A scholar of the built environment needs to carefully examine how knowledge is produced in the academy versus how it is constructed in the everyday world. These processes are different and therefore our objective should go beyond adding new methods to focus on modes of discernment and how we construct knowledge. In this article I argue for a praxisbased fieldwork that produces transformative social actions.7 Central to this process is a commitment of time and a willingness to be open to fortuity. When we return to the community repeatedly in order to cocreate knowledge with residents, we open up opportunities and experience unexpected situations that offer us new ways of knowing that we never presumed in the first place. Serendipity offers new avenues, new stories, and new ways to act. Asking field researchers to pivot and allow for unexpected turns in their work can seem like an unwelcome challenge, but this is exactly how community members operate and how they produce knowledge in their world. ARIJIT SEN