During the COVID-19 pandemic, three former PhD students at the Geography Department of the University of Sheffield, Ana Laura Zavala Guillen, Itzel San Roman Pineda, and Jenny Veenstra, founded the Network of Women Doing Fieldwork. What started as an online and informal safe space for mutual support against gender-based violence experienced during research became a women's activist movement across social and environmental sciences and arts based on five continents.
The Network of Women Doing Fieldwork (NWDF) envisions a world where women researchers can conduct fieldwork free from
violence, with dignity and joy, and with the right support from their
institutions and funders. With this vision, the NWDF collaborates with academic
institutions and funding bodies to improve well-being and safety in the field
from a gender-based approach.
For example, in 2021, the Bartlett Development Planning Unit
(DPU) from the University College London partnered with the NWDF to produce a
report to assess and improve mechanisms that prevent and mitigate the risk of
gender-based violence against PhD researchers who are collecting data away from
their home institutions. The report, Confronting
Gender-Based Violence in Fieldwork: Potential Sites of Intervention within
DPU’s PhD Programme, can be found here.
Furthermore, in 2023, the NWDF delivered a series of
workshops, Feeling the Field, for the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network. These
workshops delved into the connections between bodies and research to explore
how researchers navigate the ubiquitous risk of violence in the field. The
workshops used an artistic and geographical method known as cuerpo
territorio, or body-mapping. This method, based on Latin-American feminist
decolonial theory, enabled researchers working across disciplines in field
sites worldwide to reflect on the emotions they experienced whilst collecting
data.
The NWDF is currently designing workshops in decolonising
the curricula for Kings College London and writing book chapters for manuals in
fieldwork research and feminist geography.
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