Distance

This chapter puts the practice of problematising at the centre of methodological enquiry. In the first part of the chapter, we point to the force that particular problematics or objects of interest exert upon thinking within a disciplinary field, and how we’ve grappled with these forces in our own research trajectories. We suggest that “security” can be particularly powerful in this regard because as a concept it is deployed both to identify an empirical field of practices and as a central category for the definition of problematics within a field of study. “Security” is readily reified, an “obligatory grid of intelligibility” (Foucault 2008: 3) which sets limits to what – and how much – we can call into question. Turning from the thinking tools of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to the sorts of scholarly ethos these thinkers embodied, we indicate how this may offer at least as much inspiration as the methods that have been appropriated from their work. Indeed, the way in which the concepts of Bourdieu and Foucault have been inserted within the discipline is often counter to such an ethos, in that they effectively serve to strengthen – rather than diminish – security’s hold on and over the problematisation of politics. With this in mind, in the second part of the chapter we set out to explore how greater space may be cultivated between ourselves and our objects of study through the practice of fieldwork. We suggest that in the process of moving between sites, problem-spaces and parameters of intelligibility space may be created from which to reflect upon ready-made objects of study. Rather than approaching fieldwork as a method then, we explore it as an exercise in space-making, examining how the practice of fieldwork as such provides a reference point from which to call into question some of the more readily-available categories used in constructing the research problematic. Finally, we conclude the conversation with some reflections on the struggles over recognition at stake in this sort of intervention. ... "