Why ‘Being There’ is Not Enough – On the Entanglement of Theory and Practice When Researching International Relations Through Fieldwork

Over the last two decades, International Relations (IR) scholars have started to engage in ‘fieldwork’ to highlight how concrete behaviours and lived experiences produce international political life. Such studies are often clothed in the language of practice theory and/or ethnography, building broadly on the idea that knowledge can be produced on the basis of ‘being there’. While discussions in the literature are advancing on how to get (access) to IR’s various fields, they remain ambiguous about how the fieldworker sees what she sees once she gets ‘there’. Questioning the current partiality with which ethnographic debates are integrated into the IR ‘practice turn’, I argue in this paper that simply ‘being there’ is not enough. Rather, being there has to be seen as a process of ‘positioning’ that happens in relation to at least three other core practices of fieldwork: the practice of observing, the practice of recording and the practice of theorizing. To tackle the questions of positionality not as an issue of navel-gazing but as a question of epistemic importance, the paper starts from a ‘failed’ field observation exercise in which I managed to observe ‘all the wrong things’. This exercise was based on an assumption that it would be possible - and fun - to ‘add another pair of eyes’ into a field site to help make sense of what was going on. Yet, those eyes, my eyes, were looking at the site from a partial and ‘incompetent’ position that enabled me to look but not to see.