BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR
INTERNATIONAL & COMPARATIVE EDUCATION
Fieldwork, Frictions, and Fabrications: Making Sense on Uneven Ground
As a PhD student who has spent long months engrossed in literature and theoretical frameworks, stepping out ‘into the field’ feels like embarking on a journey of discovery. Having received the BAICE Student Fieldwork Grant and recently concluded my fieldwork, I can confidently say that fieldwork is perhaps the most transformative part of the research process. It unfolds you. It pushes theory into the realm of the tangible. It brings abstraction to life. As you encounter fragments of knowledge with evidence scattered everywhere and engage in illuminating conversations with people, you begin piecing together ‘truths’.
It was during my MA at Loyola University Chicago that I remember reading Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World,which left a lasting impression on the intricacies of fieldwork, and more recently, I encountered her Friction. Her work, often surfacing in conversations with my friend and fellow researcher Aizuddin Anuar, has deeply shaped how I think about research. Tsing’s concept of friction resonates with me. The messiness, the generative encounters that occur when different worlds meet. And nowhere is that more present than in fieldwork.
That sense of friction became acutely real when I returned to Malaysia for fieldwork just weeks after losing my father in late February. I had to fly home suddenly to say goodbye. The grief had already been mounting. My niece had passed away just as I was beginning the PhD in 2023, my aunt the following year, and then, in the middle of 2024, my brother died suddenly. It was only right to return, and it was only possible with the support of the BAICE Student Fieldwork Grant. After a brief visit home for my father’s funeral, I flew back to the UK for my upgrade viva in early March, and then finally made my way back to Malaysia again. This time with quiet sadness, but also with a heightened sensitivity. In many ways, grief made the fieldwork feel spiritual. It was not only a journey into schools and communities, but also an inward journey – one into myself, as a researcher.
As I travelled across Malaysia, from the urban centre engaging with elites in the Ministry of Education and nonprofit organisations, to rural teachers working with students on the ground, I often asked myself – how do we hold the fragments of the field, conversations, contradictions, observations, and weave them into something coherent, something meaningful? Over dinner one evening, my colleague Roné McFarlane, now in the writing-up stage, asked: “How do I make it all coherent?” That question lingered. It reminded me again of Tsing – that fieldwork and writing are not about extracting neat truths, but about making: negotiating meaning, finding patterns in friction, and fabricating coherence. Fabricating here is not in the sense of lying or faking, but in the sense of assembling. In fieldwork, as an education researcher, you are not passively absorbing data. We are fabricating knowledge: we interpret gestures, stitch together narratives, and co-construct meanings with others. The field is not a warehouse of facts; it’s a site of ongoing fabrication shaped by relationships, contexts, and histories.
So, for those who are preparing to go into the field: what if we did not treat fieldwork as a search for clarity, but as a process of composing? Of crafting stories and insights from the tensions and encounters that resist easy explanations? What if fieldwork were not just about finding data, but about becoming, through the very act of navigating its frictions?
This is the lens through which I approached my own fieldwork. Not just to gather information, but to understand how stories are told, how roles are shaped, and how futures are imagined. My research focuses on how global education agendas, particularly those tied to technology and efficiency, are shaping the professional identities of teachers in Malaysia. To explore this, I used a range of approaches rooted in dialogue, imagination, and reflection.
I conducted interviews with what we often call ‘elites’—policymakers, ministry officials, and other actors shaping the global agenda. These conversations helped surface the official narratives, logics, and ambitions underpinning Malaysia’s push towards adopting these global agendas in its local education system. But I also wanted to understand how these agendas are lived, interpreted, and negotiated in classrooms, so I turned to teachers.
Alongside traditional interviews with teachers, I designed and facilitated a series of futures-based workshops with two teacher communities. This method, inspired by Lauttamäki’s futures workshop model and adapted through speculative and critical design literature, became a space where teachers could play, reflect, and imagine. At the heart of this method was a custom-designed set of “futures cards”, which categorised scenarios as possible, plausible, probable, desirable, and undesirable.
These cards weren’t just props; in actuality, they were provocations. Teachers used them to build timelines, imagine dystopias and utopias, and reflect on the pathways that might lead to each. In one phase, they created a “Timeline of Disaster” and a “Timeline of Desire”, sketching key events that could shape those imagined futures. In another, they debated what kinds of futures they wanted, which ones were tolerable, and which must be avoided at all costs.
What emerged from these workshops was more than data. There was laughter, frustration, moments of silence. There were expressions of fatigue and resistance. Some teachers articulated, for the first time, a discomfort with how digital tools were being imposed upon them, not as helpful supports, but as mandates tied to performance and compliance. Many began to question the subtle forms of “nudging” they had previously accepted without pause. In other words, the workshop became a space not just for speaking, but for thinking differently.
This, I now realise, is the kind of fabrication I mentioned earlier – not in the sense of inventing something false, but in the creative, careful work of piecing together fragments of lived experience, institutional discourse, and speculative futures. It is a process of negotiating what it means to teach, care, and act with agency in a world increasingly shaped by technological imperatives. As I reflect on this fieldwork journey, marked by grief, friction, and moments of deep connection, I am reminded that research is not a path to certainty, but an ongoing negotiation with the world’s complexity. The field does not give us answers. Rather, it invites us to listen, to imagine, and to assemble meaning in ways that are necessarily incomplete.
In the words of Anna Tsing:
“Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. To listen is to become vulnerable.” — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World
It is in this spirit of vulnerability, of listening, making, and becoming that I continue to think with my fieldwork. Perhaps this is what it truly means to do research: to stay with the friction and let it change us.
References:
Tsing, A.L., 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. In The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
