Collaboration as Method: Field Lessons from South Sulawesi, Indonesia and Khon Kaen, Thailand

Abstract

Collaboration in the context of international fieldwork serves to elevate the skills of all members involved while simultaneously contributing to a robust body of observations. This paper reflects on methodological lessons from a Collaborative Southeast Asia Summer Field School where graduate and undergraduate students from Universitas Hasanuddin, Sulawesi, Indonesia (UNHAS), Khon Kaen University, Thailand (KKU), and University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, USA (UHM) came together to learn how to conduct research collaboratively. Guided by mentors from these three institutions, our multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural group participated in collaborative field schools at three field sites - two in South Sulawesi; and one in Khon Kaen, Thailand - where we continued, and built upon our local partners’ existing research projects and priorities in these areas. Each group focused on ‘following’ specific crops and commodities in different contexts, adopted and adapted multiple research methods, engaged with diverse team members and communities across various languages and landscapes, was guided by different fieldwork objectives and overarching questions, and yielded distinct findings. Despite these differences, all three groups shared a general aim to understand socio-economic and environmental transitions in Southeast Asian rural societies. Through collaborative and comparative reflections on challenges and adaptations before, during, and after fieldwork in both sites, this paper discusses how using collaboration as a research method has (re)shaped team members’ understandings of our research, Southeast Asia as a region, and ourselves. Importantly, we reflect on how this experience has shaped our future collaborative research in, and of Southeast Asia, and how we might apply these methodological lessons in our own research projects.

Keywords

• Collaborative research methods
• Field school
• Fieldwork
• Agrarian transformations
• Southeast Asia
• ⁠⁠Cross-cultural collaboration
• Political ecology