This chapter presents ethnographic narratives on immersion in Chechen social life, reflections on the role of positionality and subjectivity in shaping the research, the ethics of the study, and grounded perspectives on the key elements of the argument: legal pluralism, conflict, and the foundations of social and political orders in Chechnya. The chapter starts with one extraordinary Chechen woman’s family history, which illustrates life in Chechnya during the time of the Soviet Union, the troubled times of de facto Chechen independence in the 1990s, and during the Chechen wars. The chapter then explores the roles of outsider status, language, religion, and gender in the co-production of knowledge between the researcher and study participants. In the following part, the chapter presents a thick description of the functioning of legal pluralism and the traps of orientalist romanticization and essentialization in studying it. Next comes a description of extended family as the principal social organization in contemporary Chechnya, which debunks the stereotypes of the all-powerful Chechen clans. The chapter documents the lived experiences of dictatorship and violent conflict and then turns to a discussion of the ethics of the study under these conditions.

This chapter explores skills and training in archaeology, especially university-level training opportunities. It includes pre-university and school-level training opportunities and fieldwork opportunities, and it addresses accessibility and equality issues in archaeology.

Chapter 2 explains the multidisciplinary nature of prehistoric archeology, providing an overview of many of the disciplines and explaining their basic applications in the field. It describes how archeological data is amassed and interpreted in ever-more efficient ways thanks to constantly evolving modern technologies.

The first chapter posits the book’s approach in the context of dominant ideas about civil society in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is widely considered an authoritarian state with little space for any civil initiative to maneuver in or to flourish. The rentier state paradigm, which has dominated much of the discussion of state–society relations in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, assumes that the oil-rich state buys its citizens’ acquiescence through the strategic investment of hydrocarbon revenues into welfare and high living standards. Yet Saudi Arabia’s growing wealth gap challenges these assumptions.

This book presents a different perspective from which to view and understand Saudi Arabian society, not from a top-down vantage point but "bottom-up," from the point of view of local civil society initiatives. The chapter introduces the four charity organizations that form the basis of the book’s analysis. Given the difficulties of field research in Saudi Arabia, the chapter discusses opportunities and challenges that this project faced and how these contributed to the research design and findings.

This chapter provides an introductory coverage of the major issues involved in designing and executing sociolinguistic research with a focus on spoken Arabic in natural settings. It explains the concept of the observer’s paradox and suggests methods to reduce its effects in sociolinguistic interviews. It covers ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative methods. The use of dependent and independent variables is explained in detail, with a focus on age as a social variable. The chapter ends with ethical considerations as an integral part of research and research conduct.

This fragment’s argument advocates for the epistemological significance of fieldwork in comparative law.

The chapter argues that fieldwork – specifically multi-sited, semi-structured interviews and participant observation – is uniquely suited for unpacking how the constraints of daily practice within national courts frustrate the subnational reach of the European Union's (EU) legal authority. Deriving methodological insights and practical lessons from fifteen months of fieldwork in Italian, French, and German courts, the author shows how fieldwork reveals judges to be neither solely driven by individual attitudes nor by strategic quests for power: they are also employees within a bureaucracy. Anchored by the demands of established practice, knowledge, and everyday work, judges can develop an institutionally rooted consciousness resisting disruptive confrontations with new and unfamiliar rules like EU law. Through on-site iteration and triangulation, field researchers can trace, unpack, and corroborate this consciousness in real time, with an eye to also hypothesizing the conditions under which resistances to Europeanizing change can be overcome. In so doing, the researcher can intercept what one judge referred to as a ‘bureaucratic silence’ within which EU law ‘dies’: A web of habitual institutional practices scarcely detectable via other modes of social inquiry.

Social science research on the aims and impacts of Chinese development finance remains in its infancy because Beijing shrouds its overseas portfolio of grants and loans in secrecy. This chapter introduces the Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF) methodology that the authors have developed to assemble a comprehensive dataset of Chinese aid and debt-financed development projects around the globe. It also provides an overview of previous attempts to quantify Chinese development finance, and explains how the authors’ methods and data are different from those of others. This chapter also tests whether an alternative approach—field-based data collection—might yield more useful and reliable re- sults. Drawing upon evidence from a “ground-truthing” exercise in Uganda and South Africa, the authors demonstrate that field-based and TUFF-based data collection methods produce similar results. However, the TUFF methodology is less vulnerable to detection bias and more readily scalable than field-based data collection.

Chapter 2 sets the descriptive, theoretical, and methodological stage for revisiting the behavior of national courts in the process of European integration. It describes the central institutional mechanism through which national courts can partner with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to apply European law, exercise de facto judicial review, and promote integration: the “preliminary reference procedure.” It summarizes how national courts’ use of this procedure has been theorized by the prevailing account of the judicial construction of Europe: the “judicial empowerment thesis.” And it highlights suggestive qualitative and quantitative evidence that this thesis may conceal as much as it reveals. The chapter concludes by outlining the fieldwork strategy deployed to revisit the judicial empowerment thesis in Chapters 3 and 4 and probe whether national judges have harbored more diffuse and persistent resistances to European law, the ECJ, and institutional change than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Chapter 3 reflects on the unintended consequences of fieldwork in polarized societies, which may affect the autonomy of both the researcher and the researched. In a context of past violence and intractable conflict, research participants often have concerns about how the research impacts the autonomy of their daily life by potentially compromising their safety. On the other hand, research participants may try to make use of the researcher for their own political and economic objectives, compromising the autonomy of the project. In analyzing the simultaneous empowerment and disempowerment of research participants, the chapter discusses the methodological and ethical challenges of power and neutrality during fieldwork and joins others in showing that conflict research needs to be understood as a form of intervention in local affairs.

This chapter examines skills developed by, and brought to play in, fieldwork. Progressing from generic skills used and refined through fieldwork, the discussion focuses on the geographical nature of skills used across all fieldwork activities, to the key geographical skills and tools that can be drawn upon to construct authentic fieldwork experiences for students. Fieldwork has always been an important facet of geography, helping to inform, validate, and consolidate the study of people and place. Fieldwork remains, to this day, rather simple and straightforward. It involves the gathering of primary data in the field. The ‘process’ of fieldwork occurs through the use and application of a wide variety of geographic and generic skills. The following discussion of fieldwork skills will examine the place of: • fieldwork skills in students wider learning, • fieldwork skills for thinking geographically, • specific geographic fieldwork skills, • geographic fieldwork tools and technology.

Once presented the interactional perspective on sensoriality proposed by this book (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 offers a methodology able to document and to analyze embodied sensory engagements in social interaction. It discusses fieldwork, video-recordings, and multimodal transcriptions, as well as alternate approaches, showing the coherence and adequacy of a video and multimodal methodology for studying multisensoriality. It also presents the empirical case that will be developed in the book, focusing on food as an exemplary field in which all the senses play a crucial role. It presents the field of study, an exemplary activity in which participants sensorially engage with food: practices of looking, touching, smelling, and tasting cheese in gourmet shops. The empirical data on which the remaining of the book is based are video-recordings of shop encounters between cheese sellers and customers, gathered in a dozen of cities in Europe, drawing on a dozen of different languages. This unique and rich corpus of video data enables to develop a systematic analysis of the detailed way in which it is possible, within a praxeological, interactional, multimodal approach, to study multisensoriality in action.

In much of the developing world, legal titling – the registration of land ownership through a formal, judicial process – is viewed as a path to economic development and political order. The introductory chapter explains why legal titling is unlikely to fulfill this promise. It begins by making a case that the new institutional economics and public choice, which were developed and applied to date in mostly Western contexts, are useful in understanding political, economic, and social institutions in the Islamic world. We then introduce our theory of emergence and change in property rights, which explains the situations when we expect the government to define and enforce property rights, when self-governance of property rights can work, and why it is unlikely that legal titling will be feasible as a development strategy in a typical fragile state. We conclude by introducing our empirical study of Afghanistan. The highlights of the empirical study include fieldwork conducted by one of the authors in thirty villages in rural Afghanistan, which resulted in hundreds of interviews with ordinary villagers, customary village leaders, and local government officials.

Chapter 3 describes the fundamental research questions, empirical approaches and findings of language documentation and descriptive linguistics. These are two closely interrelated linguistic subfields concentrating on the collection and/or analysis of primary data for the purposes of documenting and describing languages (corpora and grammars). Methodological issues include considerations on research objects, fieldwork, as well as techniques and procedures of data collection, editing, and analysis such as transcription, annotation, and elicitation. The chapter ends with recommendations for further reading and a list of short exercises and ideas for small research projects.

Chapter 1 lays out the main argument of the book, asserting that insurgent groups’ dependence on their support networks ensures that to a certain extent they are obliged to respect their supportive constituencies’ ideological preferences and normative expectations. Relationships between armed groups and their constituencies are not stable and change over time as conflicts develop, ensuring that insurgent groups can also lose popular support. This chapter argues that this important dimension of insurgency is sometimes overlooked in favour of structural, ideological or resource-oriented analyses of conflict. It specifies how the book uses (or not) specific terminology and concepts like terrorism and Kurdistan. The chapter proceeds to discuss the difficulties in working with data in research on insurgencies. It argues that all forms of data – quantitative and qualitative – have inconsistencies and it backs the call for greater data transparency in conflict studies. It elaborates on some of the specific challenges related to data reliability on the conflict in Turkey. It describes the interview process, discusses the representativeness of the interview sample and the challenges of fieldwork. It finishes by outlining the structure of the book.