Today I met someone who just picked up an email I sent months ago when I was looking for somewhere to stay in Svalbard. We are, hopefully, going to help each other out on our respective research projects, and it’s going to be great 🙂 These are the kind of things that often get left out of our research proposals, methodologies, write-ups, articles. Unless everyone else out there doing research are some kinds of research-bots following a strict plan, and I don’t think that’s the case, then there are a lot of these kind of chance encounters that happen along the way. It’s certainly not the first time in this project that one of my pleas to the ether have led to good things. So, when I spent another day sending out many more of them, it was an excellent reminder not to stop doing it! I read an really inspiring article yesterday about stories which get left untold from research [1] and I hope I can bring some of these kinds of encounters into my writing in some way when it comes to it….
[1] Smith, A.-M. (2014) ‘Old Fieldwork, New Ethnography Taking the Stories Out of the Bag’, Qualitative Inquiry, 20(5), pp.699–708. http://qix.sagepub.com/content/20/5/699
In other news, the sun has come out again at last – hooray mountains are back in sight!
The almost-midnight sun on the fjord 🙂
samsaville.org 