In this chapter I wish to expand on the fieldwork story through enhanced reflexive analysis of my practices in Kopčany. Beyond just reflecting on what I have done, a much more fragile account of what constituted the fieldwork is presented, that is, practices of mine and of others, and the ‘in-between’ and ‘additional’ that they formed. Against the coherence that the notion of ‘methodology’ might imply, this chapter is an unsettled process of reasoning about ‘what happened’ in the course of the research, in order to identify what findings such a reflection can provide, and how. I concur with Law’s (2004) argument that ‘[m]ethod is not … a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality. Rather it is performative. It helps to produces realities’ (2004, p.143). As I will argue in this chapter, the ‘production’ of realities by research method does not refer only to the knowledge about realities that different methods are responsible for, but also to the intersubjective practices of research that reshape different realities in the course of research.

As I aimed to render an account of the multiplicity of ways in which children’s practices are constituted, my strategy was to engage with the field, to step down from my original academic background and to be open to the field ‘coming to me’. By the effort to ‘divest [myself] of the theoretical and philosophical pretentions to attend the urgency of [my] participants’ context’ (Aitken, 2001a, p.125), I responded to the initial drive to explore the formation of the place by focusing on children’s lives, and, in turn, on what matters for them. Then again, as Von Eckartsberg (1986, p.98) notes, ‘we cannot [entirely] escape our theoretical presuppositions. All we can do is try to make our approaches as explicit as possible.’ In this chapter, I therefore focus on practices of the field as features that make up the social life of the research process. The ‘relative autonomy’ (Hitchings, 2010) of practices refers to how they often exceed understandings and discourses produced by social actors and unfold to a great extent through tacit propensities of particular social settings (Bourdieu, 1990).