Doing Fieldwork in Social Sciences

Call for paper

In partnership with IRASEC, that is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the University of Văn Lang (HCM-city) is organizing on June 9 and 10, 2021 a methodology research seminar for young PhDs and PhD students working in and with Vietnam. The aim of the event is to support fieldwork training in social sciences, particularly in geography, anthropology, ethnology, sociology, economics, tourism and architecture.

This seminar will include a one-day presentation and exchange at Văn Lang followed by a documentary film in the evening and a field visit during which researchers will present their work on site. These two days will be guided by researchers’ fields, from construction and preparation to processing and dissemination in the context of scientific productions.

The seminar will focus on the following suggested topics:

• What does it involve to do fieldwork? What constitutes a field?
• How to (un)make a field notebook?
• What is a field survey in geography and architecture?
• From micro to macro: statistical and cartographic tools for objectivizing the field.
• Contributions and challenges of qualitative in situ methods.
• Reflexivity and field practices.
• Data is not given: construction and processing of information from the field.
• To be or not to be: field practices, activism and intimacy.
• To speak and to make speak: recording, translating, transcribing, interpreting.
• Participatory fields and action research: serious games, interactive mapping and theater.
• Individual practices and collective research projects, how to share a field?
• Between ethics and open source: how to disseminate field data?

Proposals should be no more than 250 words and should be adressed to the the organizers, Dr. Trần Cẩm Thi (Văn Lang) and Dr Emmanuelle Peyvel (IRASEC) at fieldworkSHS.seminar[at]gmail.com. The proposal can be written in Vietnamese, French or English and should also include a short biography of the author.

Deadline: Monday April 20, 2021

All details in the attached PDF document translated in 3 languages: Vietnamese, French and English.