Professor Jesse Driscoll's book Doing Global Fieldwork: A Social Scientist's Guide to Mixed-Methods Research Far from Home (Columbia University Press, 2021), provides a practical and honest how-to guide for new and seasoned researchers alike. Drawing on years of his own field research in political science across several countries, he suggests improvisational pluralism as a key to successful fieldwork. Ana Arjona provided remarks and comments on the book.
About the Speakers
Jesse Driscoll is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California at San Diego. His main area of research is comparative state-building dynamics. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and he has conducted fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Somalia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Ana Arjona is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Her academic interests include violence and conflict, organized crime, drug policy, the foundations of political order, state building, local governance, and the links between crime and politics. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Colombia and Kosovo. Her award-winning book, Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), proposes a theory to explain order and disorder in war zones, as well as the form order takes when it emerges, giving place to different forms of rebel governance.