Fieldwork 2007

Ksenia Tenisheva and Natalya Mudrova: 2007 Fieldwork.

Ksenia Tenisheva and Natalya Mudrova: 2007 Fieldwork

Last year at the beginning of June we (1st year students) were invited to a meeting devoted to the spring fieldwork. However, not so many students were interested Ч only about 15; the rest had left after lectures. At the meeting we were told in brief about the fieldwork and were invited to join the participants. To be honest, we were a bit frightened by the prospect of spending at least two weeks doing fieldwork. We could hardly imagine the reality of a 2006 fieldwork participantТs description. This participant said that, УYou come to do fieldwork for five days but stay for two months.Ф

Less than a month later we were at the railway station of the settlement where we were supposed to do fieldwork. A 2006 fieldwork participant, Anna Agafonova, met us and tried to tell us more about the work. However, to be honest, the task had become no clearer even after that. The problem was that we could hardly imagine what fieldwork really was, what a field researcher should do, and most importantly, how to interview a stranger! Our knowledge was not enough.

We stayed in a two-story wooden house. According to a hierarchical idea of social structure, the research leaders and 2006 fieldwork participants had rooms on the second floor, and we lived in two rooms on the first floor. The first thing that made us happy was the settlementТs location: it was situated in a resort area, our house was not far from two picturesque lakes, and the best beach was there as well. Nevertheless, these summer joys soon lost their interest for us.

On the very first day we went Уto the fieldФ with a task. The first fieldwork experience was a shock for the majority of us. Fieldwork was a kind of alternative reality, it seemed like its laws were far from our usual lives. The boundaries of Уdecent,Ф УindecentФ and УvulgarФ were very ambiguous; however, the situation was similar to the one we had got used to: the same Leningrad region, the same lack of Уexotics.Ф We had to interview strangers, which was hard at the beginning: we had to find them ourselves Ц in the street, in the stores etc. Certainly, not all of them agreed to speak to us Ц some were not interested, some were shy like us. However, after a couple of weeks we realized that the majority of the inhabitants were eager to tell us about their lives, and we in our turn learned to be attentive listeners. As a result, we understood that conducting an interview was not a false kind of communication at all, but very often a sincere intercourse.

In addition, we gained experience of group work and understood the difficulty of getting on with each other. It was not so easy to get on with 10 or even 15 people we did not know well. We made friends, and realized what we were interested in and what we were good at. Some came back happy and pleased, some were successful in interviewing newly arrived workers, and some found an individual approach in communicating with teenage pupils. There were also some tasks that required Уespionage qualitiesФ from us. These were not interesting for most of us: for example, we had to stand for hours on a busy square, near a shop or dormitory, Уspying onФ peopleТs behavior in public places. The aim of the work was usually to determine the level of integration of the newly arrived workers. The difficulties typical of field research were inevitable: it wasnТt so easy to explain what we were doing to watchful inhabitants.

Certainly, the beginning was not easy, but soon we got used to getting up as early as 9 a.m. and working all day long, and writing field reports in the evening. The expediency of writing reports was at the beginning a source of argument, but very soon we understood their importance to the fieldwork. Despite our intensive routine, there was always some time left for leisure: almost every evening we met up, discussed our work informally, and went for a walk or swam in the lake.

We faced unforeseen circumstances in our everyday life as well. Every day one of us stayed on duty at home and did the washing, cleaning, and cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner. It emerged that not all of us could cook, and so during the first week we tried various variants of oatmeal, chicken soup and rice. We soon discovered the advantages of staying on duty though Ц it enabled us to finish our reports and gave us unlimited access to the fridge.

Communication was, of course, the most important thing for us. We socialized not only with our fieldwork colleagues, but also with some guests. Maftuna Khakimova from the Institute of Economic Researches (Economic and Trade Ministry, Tajikistan) not only helped us to get in touch with newly arrived workers, but cooked a delicious plov! Bob, a 3rd year student from St. Petersburg University of Civilian Aviation, also helped us. Bob was born and lived for some time in Uzbekistan, and he explained some peculiarities of Uzbek culture to us, which helped us in our work. With Aleksei Bessudnov, an Oxford University graduate and expert on qualitative sociology, we made friends immediately. In the course of our fieldwork we had the opportunity not only to assess our abilities in fieldwork, but also to discuss and analyze theoretical ideas we were interested in (mostly modern works by western sociologists) at seminars.

Quite often the organizer of the whole project, Daniel Alexandrov, came to visit us. To be honest, at the beginning it was uneasy to communicate with the lecturer outside of university, but soon we realized how important his advice could be, how it could help us with our work, and the Уtea chatsФ with our leaders were always interesting both in themselves and from a professional point of view as well.

We have learned to make decisions working in a group and not to lose heart if something goes wrong. The theories and methods we studied at university are no longer abstract for us, because now we realize how they are applied in fieldwork methodology. To sum it up, the summer fieldwork has become one of the most important steps for us in understanding the profession of a sociologist Ч our profession.


2007 Fieldwork Participants:

Anna Agafonova
Anna Alekseeva
Anastasia Bogdanova
Elena Bichkovskaya
Dilala Valeeva
Olga Vasilyeva
Evgenii Kochkin
Dmitrii Layus
Natalya Mudrova
Aleksandrov Strelzov
Ksenia Tenisheva
Irina Fedorova
Alena Ediger
Daniil Khavrin