« Embrasser les temps de l’enquête »

Abstract

This article aims to provide a first-person account of my own field experience in Venezuela (2011-2013) as a young doctoral student woman in geography with the Wayúu, a matrilineal indigenous people, to explore the temporal, epistemic and methodological conditions that drive researchers and shape their research. More specifically, it argues that all times involved in research contributes in producing scientific knowledge: the time spend on the study's object definition, the time to access the field, the time of others in the field, the "dead" times, the times of expectations, the times spend on methodological "tinkering", the back and forth, the times for reflexivity, for doubts, for restitution, etc. These times, which are more or less long and constraining for researchers, are intertwined with their personal trajectory and their subjectivity, which influence the way they live, think, or interpret the field. In the same way, they can be affected by a plurality of external factors relating to the contexts and conditions in which their research take place (geopolitical, socio-cultural, linguistic, sensitivity of the subject studied, etc.), as well as by the expectations and injunctions of the academic system, that cannot always accommodate to the time of the investigation. Therefore, how can we tell the field's backstage and its experienced temporality – often overlooked – which inevitably integrates the research results? Therefore, how to tell the story of the backstage and the experiences of the field temporalities − often passed under silence − which inevitably impregnate the research results?

Keywords

• gender
• experiences
• field
• temporalities
• tinkering