Peter Hopkins

Fieldwork is an important component of research at higher education institutions (HEIs). Fieldworkers often find themselves in challenging physical or social environments, and those with marginalised characteristics or with intersecting marginalised characteristics can face additional vulnerabilities. As an employer, HEIs have a duty to ensure the safety and wellbeing of their employees, including fieldworkers. Yet institutions often responsibilise individual fieldworkers to take on safety and wellbeing responsibilities. This is exacerbated by the neoliberal context including precarious contracts and the ways staff in HEI are incentivised. In this article we use a case study approach to examine existing institutional provision for fieldworker safety and responsibility, and the experiences of marginalised fieldworkers, at one HEI in England, UK. We analysed internal documentation on fieldwork and conducted focus groups with fieldworkers and principal investigators. We adopted an intersectionally aware approach to analyse the accounts. We found that institutional documents were disconnected, failed to reflect or support the diverse and dynamic nature of fieldwork, and tended to be ambiguous and inconsistent about responsibilities for fieldworker safety and wellbeing. Participants expressed that there was a lack of clarity around institutional responsibilities for marginalised fieldworker safety; documents tended to allocate responsibilities to a ‘fieldwork leader’ which in practice meant the fieldworker and their supervisor as opposed to the institution. Participants also expressed that there is a prevailing ethos of ‘the research (rather than the researcher) comes first’, which reflects the neoliberal paradigm within HEIs. Based on our findings we provide five recommendations for HEIs that are targeted at improving how institutional responsibilities for fieldworker safety and wellbeing are communicated and managed.

This chapter spatialises the key characteristics of gendered Islamophobia using a scalar perspective to demonstrate the complex ways that Islamophobia functions within and across different geographical scales. We draw attention to the embodied and digital nature of gendered Islamophobia, its operation in neighbourhoods, communities and cities, and its presence in national and global contexts. We build upon two studies to do this. The first was a study of the political participation of young Muslims and the second was an inquiry into the issue of Islamophobia as part of the Scottish Parliament’s Cross-Party Group on Tackling Islamophobia. The findings of both studies highlighted that gendered Islamophobia remains a key issue when it comes to tackling Islamophobia. We conclude by considering the ways in which gendered Islamophobia is resisted and responded to in creative and engaging ways by those who experience it.