This chapter brings central elements of the book to the fore, reflects the need for critical thinking, and problematizes the future of agreement-making and the study thereof. In doing so, it addresses critical questions that run through all chapters of the book: Why does it matter to “be there”? How do I navigate closeness and emotions? Is my data ever complete? What will “being there” mean in the future? Global environmental agreement-making is in constant flux, adapting to changing institutional circumstances, power relations, and new emerging environmental problems. Although the multilateral setting with its “old-fashioned” diplomatic practices and formalities creates the impression of stability, routine, and immutability, there is change and the possibility to do global environmental relations differently. We understand critical scholarship to have a vital role in illuminating enduring power relations and revealing potential openings for change and transformation to ensure agreement-making enables better collective stewardship of the Earth. This aspiration nourished the objective of this book to problematize how and why we conduct research at and on global environmental negotiations and to evaluate and expand the concepts and methods available to further this study. The chapter closes with a reflection on future research questions and themes.

This chapter understands the Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a flow of discourse in time. LL units are structured as texts, materials, and discourse, but the LL only unfolds when these units engage the sign instigator and the sign viewer in discourse in the public eye. Using the foodscape as a focal point, the boundaries between the LL and other social practices are examined. A review of LL research methodology examines the role of photographs and the photographer’s point of view, fieldwork approaches that include interviews and reflexive ethnography, and the position of quantitative analysis. The chapter discusses relationships between the material LL and online linguistic landscapes (OLL), examining language displays in the OLL and ways in which users transcend the apparent boundaries between the two. Pointing out the long history of representing the LL in literature, the chapter discusses James Joyce’s Ulysses for its portrayal of the outer forms of the LL and its representation of the inner world of characters who move through the LL. Recommendations are made for further expansion of the field geographically, temporally, materially, and ethnographically.

This chapter illustrates how law and society scholars conduct empirical research to pursue questions and build theory about law in Asian societies. It is not a manual for how to use various research methods or for asking and answering research questions. Rather, its purpose is to provide examples of how Asian law and society scholars go about their work, what challenges they encounter, and how they address them. It features both classic and new and innovative approaches. One set of readings illustrates how researchers obtained access to their subjects and how they collected data. A second set of readings shows how researchers wrestled with aspects of their own identities in relation to the research site and the people whom they study. A third set illustrates law and society researchers practicing their craft in the digital age, using social media and other advancements in technologies to pursue their research questions. All the readings are drawn from studies that appear in earlier chapters. In this way, readers get a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, and gain a better understanding of how the authors featured in this book struggled with the challenges faced by all researchers—and how they overcame them.

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.