Published

Not just muddy and not always gleeful? Thinking about the physicality of fieldwork, mental health, and marginality

Chronicle of Higher education article with recommendations on centering accountability in DEI statements.

This paper acknowledges that geographical fieldwork and fieldtrips can be deeply stressful, anxiety-inducing, troubling, miserable, hard and exclusionary for many colleagues, students and pupils. This paper draws on on qualitative data from research with UK university-based Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES) academics who self-identify as having mental health conditions which substantially affect their daily lives. These data prompt reflection on the nature and experience of fieldwork in two ways. First, they require acknowledgment of fieldwork as not just ‘muddy’, widening disciplinary imaginaries of fieldwork accessibility to encompass marginalities in/of Human Geography fieldwork practice. Second, contrary to pervasive disciplinary idealisations, these data demand recognition that fieldwork and fieldtrips are not necessarily gleeful but can be sites of intense latent anxiety and intersectional marginality.

Chronicle of Higher education article with recommendations on centering accountability in DEI statements.