Research Beyond Borders

Anjana Narayan is an assistant professor at California State Polytechnic University Pomona. Her areas of interest include ethnicity, migration, and gender. She is the co-author of Living our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian-American Women Narrate Their Experiences (Kumarian Press 2009). She is a recipient of the American Sociological Association Section on Asia and Asian America 2010 ‘Early Career Award’. She also holds a postgraduate degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai (India). She has been associated with a range of innovative initiatives in the field of women and development in India.Lise-Hélène Smith is assistant professor of world literature at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her areas of interest include exile, hybridity, and migration as linked to race and gender in the Southeast Asian diaspora as well as in Francophone, and colonial/postcolonial literatures. She is currently working on a book project on the aesthetics of representation in Vietnamese diasporic literature from North America and France.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Onto the Frontlines Part I: DialoguesChapter 1: History Lessons from an Indochinese Diary David Del TestaChapter 2: Beyond the Archives: A Practical Guide for Ethical Research in Latin America Mark CareyChapter 3: Studying Wild Spotted Hyenas in Kenya: Challenges and Implications Wiline PanglePart II: InsecuritiesChapter 4: Methodological and Positional Considerations of Crisis Field Research: The Karen Struggle against the Military Regimes of BurmaJack FongChapter 5: Building Trust, Enhancing Research: Carrying out Fieldwork in Namibia Mónica Ruiz-CasaresChapter 6: Conducting Cross-Cultural Research on Turtles in Bolivia Implications for Quantitative Data Collection Kristen Conway-GomezPart III: EncumbrancesChapter 7: “You can’t bring a child in here, this is a place where people come to do serious research work!”: Negotiating Lone Motherhood And Fieldworker Identities Cecily JonesChapter 8: Serendipitous Treasures: Rethinking Archival Research in the 21st CenturyRebecca SammelChapter 9: Negotiating the Politics of Conducting Research On Widows in IndiaShweta MajumdarPart IV: CrossroadsChapter 10: Performative Approaches to Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural ResearchVirginie MagnatChapter 11: Counter-Movement: Reconfiguring the Location of Research with Researchers from AbroadSami Hanna and Mustafa SeverChapter 12: Back from the Field: Positionality, Methodology, and Practice Lise-Hélène Smith and Anjana NarayanBibliographyIndexAbout the Contributors

This wide-ranging collection of essays that spans behavioral ecology to feminist ethnography is an excellent contribution to the subject of transnational research diplomacy. Authors in the volume self-reflexively present the observer and the observed together showing how an ethics of methodology could dissolve the imperial gaze on the objectified other.