Producing knowledge about ‘Third World women’: The politics of fieldwork in a Zimbabwean secondary school

Abstract

Fieldwork is a project in which ‘researcher, researched and research make each other’ (Rose, 1997, p. 316), yet far more attention has been given to the making of the research and researcher than to the researched. Focusing on three aspects of the research process (the researcher’s presence in the field, research topic and choice of methods), this paper uses examples from the author’s own fieldwork to debate whether it is possible to shape fieldwork such that the knowledges created and consumed in the field by the researched serve to destabilise dominant discourses of race, gender and age.