This is less a commentary and more a query to academics whose scholarly practice has included and might continue to include long fieldwork trips.
The main researchers I am thinking of here are historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, qualitative sociologists, and other social scientists who have a significant fieldwork component to their practices. In addition, humanists (art historians, philosophers, literary critics, etc.) who have a significant archival component to their work where the archive in question is not digitized and only available on-site somewhere besides their home city, and artists and performers who are doing site-specific work or collaborating with other artists in another location. Also scientists whose work requires long stays in field sites—ecologists, geologists, climate scientists, physicists who are working with a data-collecting apparatus that has to be in a particular location far from any university. Essentially, where making knowledge requires being in situ, involves experiences that must be had elsewhere than your office or your library, and where that requires considerable time.
There are social scientists who can hire researchers at a site where they might visit for only a few days or a week to consult with the team—that’s not what I’m thinking about, though almost everybody benefits from some sense of physical experience of a place that is connected to your work. I’m also not thinking about being a visiting professor, institute member, or other affiliate for a term or a whole academic year. That’s a valuable experience for almost everybody, but it’s roughly the same kind of work that you might be doing while in your home institution.
The thing about a lot of fieldwork is that you’re responsible for carrying it out yourself in many cases, away from a supporting institutional infrastructure. Even research teams, say fieldwork ecologists or animal behavioralists, are working out the protocols and material requirements for their team’s work amongst themselves—they don’t bring chairs and deans and provosts along with them, they don’t have institutional administrators around the corner who will book spaces and cater meetings.
What I’m curious about is how your institution supports this work, if at all, and whether or not they offer support, how you pay for it. I’m going to open up this thread to anyone reading, either to offer answers or to ask questions, and there is a poll (see below).
I’m newly curious about this because I’ve noticed a lot of peer institutions suddenly becoming much more directive and constrictive about how institutional funds can be used to support this kind of work. (I’m aware also that many, many institutions offer no support for research of any kind that comes directly out of their operational budget, and put substantial pressure on faculty in disciplines that have a reasonable change of getting grants to underwrite their own work and provide income to the institution through overhead charges.)
It seems to me, but I may be wrong, that when institutions provide financial support for fieldwork, they class this work as business travel, governed by IRS rules on what is permissible and impermissible in business travel deductions. The IRS doesn’t really have a separate way to think about very long-term stays that are related to work that are not simply “working directly for the institution at another location”, much as they haven’t really come around to thinking clearly about workplaces paying for the maintenance of home offices in any fashion. The combination of the individual autonomy but also work-related nature of fieldwork doesn’t really mesh with existing regulation (and thus is harder for academic managers who don’t have much interest in faculty work to grasp).
Research practices that happen at an employing institution don’t require this kind of consideration, but that just shows you how oddly inequitable the landscape of cost burdens can be in academia. STEM research frequently has substantial materials and operations costs that institutions need to be offset by external grants (though not all of it) but any institution that isn’t teetering on the edge of financial failure will carry budgets for access to datasets, for journals and monographs (including ILL access to materials not in the local collection), for computers, for art supplies and performance props, etc. The budgets may be tight and getting tighter, but universities and colleges with some resources don’t run a meter on research conducted under their own roof with the intent of docking the researcher’s pay once a small budgetary allotment runs out, unless the institution has simply decided that it doesn’t support any research of any kind at any time. (Which, I know, a fair amount of universities and colleges effectively have.)
My curiosity runs deeper than just “what’s the local managerial strategy at your institution”. I’ve always wondered how my historian and anthropologist friends who do work in archives or communities that lasts for months have managed to pay for it. Quite a lot of it for me has come out of pocket (and thus became a source of debt early in my career), though I was fortunate for one long research stay to have Fulbright funding that offset a fair amount of it. My intuition is that this is the case for many faculty whose work requires long residential visits, that this work has never really been covered by any grant or institution. The position of the IRS and many universities and colleges seems to be “you’re just living somewhere else, that’s a lifestyle choice, it’s up to you to maintain two households if that’s what you’re into”, perhaps a consequence of the ascendancy of social science that is simply a consumer of datasets that are created by national and international institutions or that can be subcontracted to research assistants.
So without further ado, a poll:
Image credit: Photo by Catarina Carvalho on Unsplash
It is increasingly expected - just about everywhere - that you will raise external grants to do your research. In my 'official' discipline, people mine useless data endlessly and esp in Com Pols many never actually go to the countries that they are discussing. Makes for very precise but very useless research articles. I think your comments about resources of northern v southern scholars are very apt (obvs).
Caveat to my responses: Speaking of my former career as an anthropologist with historical leanings. Retirement, for me, includes retirement from long-term field studies.