Creative writing as critical fieldwork methodology

Abstract

This article examines creative writing (CW) as a place-based methodology for doing and analysing fieldwork. Drawing insights from CW scholarship and workshops as part of a collaborative project, we contribute new empirically-informed insights from peer researchers about the significance of leveraging emotional connections, detailed attention to lived experiences, and the researcher's experiences in executing and reporting fieldwork. While attending to tensions between ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ writing, we examine how adopting different and alternative writing approaches can express diverse complexities of the field research process. We contribute to an understanding of CW as a dialectical catalyst, serving as a mode for reflecting on the relationships between the researcher and the researched within the field as well as a mode for analysing and disseminating fieldwork findings. By doing so, our study presents opportunities and limitations of CW as a critical methodology for generating situated knowledges about the field and for reimagining fieldwork.

Introduction

Creative writing (CW), according to Harper (2019), implies a ‘tautological silliness’, as ‘creative writing is recognizable because it is writing that is creative’, adding that ‘the more formal answer to the question [what is CW?] usually involves someone pointing to synonyms for creativity, words, such as invention, novelty, originality, innovation, vision, and making these the defining strokes with which to paint their picture of the practice of creative writing’ (1). Nevertheless, CW is recognised as a creative art form, with its own expertise and techniques, and can take the form of poetry, prose, and novels, among others (see Kaufman and Sternberg, 2019). This paper contributes new insights by examining the significance of incorporating CW into the context of field research, both in the process of conducting fieldwork and analysing and disseminating fieldwork findings. ¹

While CW might be individually regarded as a desk-based practice and fieldwork as a physical outdoor activity within ethnographic and geographical field research traditions (e.g. Phillips and Johns, 2012), we push the confines of CW and fieldwork and examine the two in a productive relationship to each other. Despite some recent growing interest in this topic (e.g. Bayes, 2023; Gariglio, 2024; Gullion, 2022; Smith and Delamont, 2023), the particular relationship between fieldwork and CW has received relatively little methodological attention hitherto; therefore, this article seeks to address this gap.

Although CW can be employed for grasping complex social phenomena, it may sometimes play a subordinate role in fieldwork rather than an outcome in its own right (see Richardson and St Pierre, 2008). What deserves further appreciation in fieldwork contexts is the pivotal value of presenting, talking about, and disseminating research findings through more creative modes of writing, allowing greater attention to how language impacts the communication of fieldwork (Burlingame, 2019; Gariglio, 2024).

The relative lack of recognition of CW as a distinct mode of presenting and analysing fieldwork findings may, as we shall discuss and challenge, arise from disciplinary and academic publishing conventions – where CW might be valued in the negative, as a catch-all term for written content considered to be not academic (enough) (Burlingame, 2019; Gariglio, 2024; O’Neill, 2020). Such conventions might place ‘creative’ and ‘academic’ writing in an alleged hierarchy or opposition (as challenged by Cain, 2009: 240; see also Antoniou and Moriarty, 2008). One such convention is the ‘show versus telling’ dichotomy (Anderson, 2006), where, according to Phillips and Kara (2021), ‘creative writers are told to “show” rather than “tell” whereas academic researchers are taught the opposite’ (8). This example relates to wider issues of CW's perceived lack of rigour and merit.

According to McVey (2008), the term creative writing emerged as a response to a literary and scholarly tradition overlooking the writer's creative role in producing works of literature. Myers (1994) regarded CW as a ‘historical effort’ to view literature as an act of creativity rather than a subject for interpretation alone (Myers, 1994: 12, cited in McVey, 2008: 289), and contended that the lens of CW allows us to conceive of all writing as inherently creative: ‘any writing, from the published instructions for using a power drill to the most esoteric literary poetry, uses the raw materials of language, experience, knowledge, textual sources and the author's own ideas and imaginings to bring something into existence that did not exist before’ (McVey, 2008: 289). Moreover, there are historical and disciplinary tensions around what constitutes the ‘creative’ and when the use of creative methodologies became ‘new’. As Inckle (2010: 28) observed, creative methodologies such as creative writing, poetry and reflexive dialogue were incorporated into feminist research in the early 1990s (Reinharz, 1992), while such forms became heralded as ‘the new writing’ (Denzin, 2003: 118) in sociology a decade later.

Further, McVey pointed (2008) out parallels between fiction and non-fiction writing, arguing that:

[…] I was struck by the similarity between the processes of writing fiction and writing learning texts, not the contrasts. I could cite the degree to which I brought my self to both tasks, and the fact that I could be as emotionally drained by a module about Reliability Engineering as I could by a short story that drew on painful childhood memories … I do not put my ‘creative’ writing on a pedestal; I really can’t see the join between it and my other writing work, the point where creativity flags and sheer craft takes over (McVey, 2008: 290).

We echo the view of creativity that Brace and Johns-Putra’s (2010) adopted in a project jointly conducted between literary and geography scholars engaging in CW for pleasure (Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010: 405). The authors imparted that creativity as a concept is ‘notoriously elusive … [characterised] as something lively and excessive, something unpredictable and emergent, which is both a product and process of the human imagination’ (400). Further, they proposed CW as a more-than-human assemblage: ‘a complex negotiation of self, character, place, imagery, thoughts, words and feelings’ (411).

In this sense, CW resonates with auto-ethnographic traditions that challenge boundaries between ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ writing (thereby making such boundaries less distinct), and pivot towards doing and representing research as an embodied practice where evocative language is employed to promote a closer connection with the reader (Ellis and Bochner, 2000). For example, Johnston (2020) traversed such boundaries in a study on the author's lived experiences of spaces of madness, aptly describing it as an ‘autoethnography of the mind’, allowing the author to creatively ‘recover the pieces [and perhaps ‘the places’] of a fragmented identity’ (137). Inckle (2010) applied ethnographic fiction to the issue of bodymarking/self-harm as a ‘methodology that would do ethical and representational justice to the knowledge we inhabited and which combined academic, personal and vocational aspects’ (36), thereby offering ‘an answer … to the struggle of how to bring lived experience into the academic realm’ (38).

The processual and relational understanding of CW reflects Harper’s (2010) call for CW to focus on ‘actions as part of our wider human landscape’ (Harper, 2010: ix, emphasis added). So, CW does not merely imply the production of static products or end results; Brace and Johns-Putra (2010) said it involves a dynamic ‘doing of writing’ (Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010: 400), where ‘writers are also engaged in ‘being’ a writer in a performative sense’ (411). Physical, immaterial, and imagined places are entangled in CW and interpreted by the reader (Bayes, 2023). As such, the reader acts as a co-creator of the ‘performance of geographical memory’ (Bayes, 2023: 48), a performance mediated by both human and non-human agencies (Daniels and Lorimer, 2012).

In this paper, we seek to analyse CW specifically as a critical fieldwork methodology. By critical we mean that it establishes scope for a combination of (i) an in-depth identification of experiences, emotions, and other lived aspects as observed in the field (which might sometimes be overlooked or under-addressed in field research and writing); (ii) a deeper questioning of the fieldwork's epistemological and empirical dimensions; and (iii) an imaginative evaluation of fieldwork findings.

We, two human geographers (Zebracki and Greatrick) in collaboration with a practising prose writer (Diamand) who has extensive experience in prose techniques and CW tutoring, provide a comprehensive reflection on the process and outcomes of our CW research project. We discuss our learnings from four collaborative CW workshops involving peer researchers, held in February and March 2022. Additionally, in August 2022, we organised a panel and workshop at the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG), the key learned society in UK geography, to stimulate broader interdisciplinary debate on CW in fieldwork.

We commence this article with a review of pertinent CW scholarship and place this in dialogue with our focus on CW as a critical fieldwork methodology. After conferring the context of the workshops, we present our methodological learnings based on the analysis of the workshop discussions. We highlight key perspectives that participants relayed regarding perceived opportunities and challenges of CW techniques in both doing and analysing fieldwork. We conclude the paper with a discussion of our findings and suggest some research directions.

Creative writing and field research

In this literature review, we unpack the term CW and subsequently engage it as a social-relational practice in the context of fieldwork, along with a discussion of the potentials of CW for pushing conventions around fieldwork writing. We conclude this section by proposing CW as a heuristic inquiry, which we regard as an investment in observing lived experiences in the field and centralising such experiences in the written output – in particular creative non-fiction to produce insightful, evocative accounts of research places and communities (see Richardson and St Pierre, 2008).

CW could become valuable to researchers as a study subject, study method, and study outcome across various stages of fieldwork – from fieldwork preparation to execution, analysis, and the dissemination of findings (Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010). Harper (2010) suggested a helpful distinction in CW between (i) a material manifestation – ‘the physical evidence that [CW] leaves behind’ – and CW as a metaphysical manifestation: ‘the memories, perceptions, ideals, responses, by which we understand it’ (x). The relationship between CW and fieldwork is complex, given the multifaceted geographical and temporal registers with varying potentials to be written about (see Cresswell, 2014; Ward, 2014). Also, CW can comprise a range of intentions – from conforming to subverting certain writing rules and tapping into conventional or unconventional topics – and different working practices, such as group fieldwork becoming the subject of individual CW-based reflection (see Gariglio, 2024).

McKnight et al. (2017) argued that CW should not just be ‘interpreted and translated into the language of analysis but as research art in its own right’ (315), echoing Harper's (2010) view that the communication of experience via CW entails an art form. We also conceive of CW as a creative practice, engaging matter and meaning and allowing experimentation with language to challenge conventional writing forms. We recognise CW as an effective method for emphasising personal experience and emotional affect, both in fieldwork practice and analysis. In a compelling example, John (2023) demonstrated that acknowledging auto-ethnographic experiences in the research process can be a means of empowerment, using poetry to convey personal navigations of vulnerability and displacement as experienced in a case study on a mixed martial arts club.

Burlingame (2019) argued for an early introduction of CW within (field) research training, which the author stated, ‘will help young academics foster their own narrative voices, and will ultimately contribute to more interesting, accessible, and affective research that (re)enchants geography and other fields in the social sciences’. The author used some CW examples produced by course participants to illustrate how reflective writing assisted in conveying their connection with the landscape. This involved senses that are typically not engaged in fieldwork writing (but which are more common in phenomenological research), including ‘the sense of satisfaction that can come from physically being in a place’ (Burlingame, 2019: 64).

The author cited an anonymous excerpt, illustrating both the material and metaphysical dimensions of CW – of which a shortened version reads: ‘The moment the cold moist air hits my lungs, I am instantly in a better mood. That wet air is home … There is something so satisfying about that squishing sound and watching my boots dirty. It makes me feel accomplished, like I am doing something, not just sitting inside of a classroom talking about nature’ (Burlingame, 2019: 64–65).

In this paper, we seek to contribute to the literature by expanding the debate beyond CW's material and metaphysical manifestations, as distinguished by Harper (2010). We add in, and foreground, the socio-spatial dimensions of fieldwork, aligned with Saunders’ (2010: 443) perspective of CW as ‘a social process of creativity which is rich in its own norms of spatial organisation and social interaction’ (cited in Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010: 411).

The social and spatial manifestations of fieldwork are multi-layered and should be comprehended via post-structuralist questioning of binaries often arising around fieldwork, for example, researcher versus researched, outdoor versus indoor (e.g. home, office), here versus there, and offline versus online (see Gariglio, 2024; Smith and Delamont, 2023; Zebracki and Greatrick, 2022). ‘Ethnographic exits’, as put by Smith and Delamont (2023), should not understand ‘the field’ as clearly bounded entities that a researcher simply enters, undertakes research in, and then departs from – as there might be ‘imperfect’ project ends, hard-to-leave situations, or planned fieldwork projects that never started (see also Smith and Delamont, 2019).

Furthermore, following relational materialist thought (e.g. Bennett, 2010), CW implicates a trialectic integration of humans, matter, and meaning where it can serve as an effective tool; not only for engaging the more-than-human assemblages of the area of research and communities of research, but also for disentangling the nuances, or messiness, of everyday lived experiences of such assemblages (see Harper, 2010: ix). For example, Sandford et al. (2024) engaged Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘writing as assemblage’ practices in response to the environmental crisis to demonstrate how ‘characters, language, and dialogue […] envision dynamic scenes of rich imagery that interrogate the boundaries and parameters of the Self and the more-than-human’ and how ‘fragmented, yet collected, writings facilitat[e] new ways of addressing and troubling the notion of “green”’ (19).

Hence, the field can be rendered as an amalgam of geographical and social events that involve relations between humans and non-humans, including taken-for-granted and often understudied aspects of the everyday life (Smith and Delamont, 2019). CW in this regard, according to Bayes (2023), should be understood as sympoiesis, or the making-with others (after Haraway’s, 2016), which the author, aligned with the previous discussion on assemblage, defines as follows: ‘sympoiesis extends the idea of autopoiesis to consider systems as collectively produced. This can be further extended to posthumanist creative practices that recognise no one is alone in the making, and that the creative process gives rise to imaginaries through relationships with others including cultures, humans, non-humans and abiotic geographic features’ (Bayes, 2023: 48).

In the spirit of sympoiesis, we advocate for understanding fieldwork as inherently relational, shaped by how the field is experienced and articulated through the act of writing. Here, we want to bring in Brace and Johns-Putra (2010) to stress the fluid spaces through which CW is performed: ‘what does someone who takes up the subject position ‘writer’ do when he or she is not seated at a computer or at a desk, pen or mouse in hand, composing? This is to assert that being a writer goes on beyond the act of writing and also occupies spaces other than those in which the writing goes on’ (Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010: 411).

In their project, these authors explored the idea of composing with creative writers to unravel conscious acts and those that are metaphorically ‘beneath the surface’, which they referred to as a process of ‘fermentation’ (Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010: 404). In a similar vein, Shea (2021) used the example of the literary scholar Wong Leung-wo who argued that the feelings of the writer, need ‘brewing’, or ‘fermentation’, and thereby strengthening prior to the CW process (194). Moreover, Katz (2020) applied the idea of ‘fermentation’ as a metaphor to remind the reader that ‘the skin on each of us, which we think of as the boundary between ourselves and the world beyond, is home to many more microbes than there are humans on the Earth … and mediate much of our interaction with the world around us’ (3). This calls for ‘writing as assemblage’ (Sandford et al., 2024), as per a Deleuzo-Guattarian deconstruction of Self/Other categories

Based on the above discussion, we conclude by raising some ontological and epistemological questions about the ‘whats’, ‘whos’, ‘wheres’ and ‘whens’ of fieldwork in relation to CW, which may engender further methodological discussion:

What constitutes ‘the field’, who is involved, and where and when does fieldwork start and end?;

How can we capture the essence of the field and our feelings about it through writing?;

In what ways can CW help us to understand the researchers’ relationship with fieldwork and the nature of the ‘data’ gathered?

Disciplinary frontiers of creative writing

Probing questions like the above can engender refreshing insights into the content and process of fieldwork through CW; also, it can pave the way for reimaginations of the field. That said, multiple (sub-)disciplinary conventions, as well as expectations imposed by peers or researchers themselves, may complicate the practice, and recognition, of CW as a potential fieldwork methodology, which we shall discuss hereinafter. The act of writing, according to Menary (2007), flows from, and shapes, neural processing, suggesting a fundamental relationship between form, style, and the range of thoughts that can be expressed. The open format of CW holds a literary potential for exploring the phenomenological complexity of social relationships in research and using first-hand experience as a form of evidence (van Manen, 2014).

The fieldworker is continuously positioned in relation to the field in manifold ways – both enmeshed within it but also separate, which calls for a ‘writing-as-assemblage’ approach (Sandford et al., 2024). Although situated knowledges of researcher–field relations have been profoundly interrogated in fieldwork disciplines (e.g. Rose, 1997), (sub-)disciplinary conventions could appear to prioritise ‘academic’ writing and analysis that seek ‘facts’ or ‘truths’ through the interpretative lens of the researcher-as-the-author (Attia and Edge, 2017: 36). However, the boundaries between what constitutes ‘creative’ and ‘academic’ writing are fuzzy; for example, both ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ can be used in rendering arguments (Phillips and Kara, 2021). We therefore continue by considering how scholars have explored CW approaches to explore new and creative opportunities for pursuing fieldwork and challenging writing conventions.

Creative methods have seen growing popularity, especially within ethnographic research as indicated above (see also Boyd and Edwardes, 2019; Gariglio, 2024). Notwithstanding, as we shall also discuss in our workshop analysis, the academic writing process may encounter well-delineated expectations and text size and style restrictions from publishers, supervisors, collaborators, reviewing peers, and others. These expectations and restrictions are not necessarily receptive to the inclusion of character writing, poetry, and fiction as associated with CW (e.g. Burlingame, 2019; Gariglio, 2024).

Accordingly, writing decisions can be made that might leave little room for elements such as auto-ethnographic experiences and playing with content (see Burlingame, 2019; Kearns, 2009). That said, the reporting of lived experiences of being immersed in fieldwork might precisely benefit from experimental writing, and might also help in accentuating critical detail in the interpretation of findings (van Manen, 2014).

Seeing that fieldwork plays a crucial role in geographical disciplines, Brace and Johns-Putra (2010) asserted that geography has ‘much to offer a wider understanding of creative processes by foregrounding space as one of the key components in the practice of creative writing’ (399, emphasis added). They called for a stronger dialogue between literary studies and geographical fieldwork to bridge the gap between ‘words and spaces’ (Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010: 400). By embracing creative work more firmly in the academic writing process, some ethnographic observations about the field can be showcased that might otherwise go unseen (e.g. Bayes, 2023). But also, as suggested before, academic publishing guidelines that privilege a strong economy of expression and strict word counts might refrain authors from including evocative stories, poetry, and so on – which might result in the loss of valuable context and detail in the analysis (O’Neill, 2020).

The past decade has seen an increasing scholarly appetite for CW as a method for understanding and communicating ‘the field’ in fieldwork (e.g. Bayes, 2023; Jacobson and Larsen, 2014; Peterle, 2019). CW has been serving as a conversation starter for multidisciplinary collaboration (Fitzgerald et al., 2019) and this type of writing has appeared in dedicated creative sections in journals such as Geography Compass, Migration and Society, and cultural geographies (see DeLyser and Hawkins, 2014). The growth of publication space might indicate greater recognition of the emotional labour of the fieldworker and the role of CW in processing everyday lived fieldwork experiences.

Scholars like Burlingame (2019) and Bayes (2023) signalled the potential of CW for re-enchanting the researcher's relationship with fieldwork, thereby suggesting that it could contribute to greater transparency about the fieldwork process – moving away from views of CW as decorative seasoning (e.g. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al., 2021; Gariglio, 2024). Simultaneously, CW techniques may heighten a form of reflexivity in fieldwork to avoid distant and mono-perspectival narratives (Burlingame, 2019), as we discuss further hereinafter.

Creative writing in fieldwork: a heuristic inquiry

In this section, we delve into the role of lived experiences in writing creatively about fieldwork. In ethnographic thick descriptions, some researchers have experimented with CW to explore how ‘characters’ are situated within everyday contexts of the social world (van Maanen, 2011). Through employing literary techniques such as CW in the processing of fieldwork notes, researchers can develop important emotional nuances that surpass mere descriptive observations (Narayan, 1999; cited by Berry, 2021: 239). CW techniques are not about constructing a fiction as much as they are about accounting for the complexity of the field and the research communities in it (Berry, 2021), the place of emotions (Bondi, 2016), as well as the role of introspection and inspiration (Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010) – which is sometimes about overcoming writer's block (Gullion, 2022).

Reflexive turns in ethnographic research have challenged normative conceptions of the field as a geographically bounded site as allegedly observed by a detached, ‘objective’ researcher. These turns, instead, encouraged researchers to investigate how the field is constructed through heuristic inquiry which lays an emphasis on individual experiential knowledge of the relationships between place and community (Cresswell, 2014; Richardson and St Pierre, 2008; Ward, 2014). Hence, heuristic inquiry foregrounds the researcher's experiential interrogation. Leahy (2016) conveyed that as CW is undertaken through such experiential interrogation, it bears ‘a responsibility to add [to], expand, and invigorate the academic discourse rather than merely sneak into the conversation wearing the traditional scholars’ outfit’ (2). This suggests that CW might serve as a powerful complement to conventional research approaches typically known as realist or positivist (see also Johnston, 2020).

Moustakas (1990) formulated experiential interrogation as a straightforward imperative: ‘the investigator must have had a direct, personal encounter with the phenomenon being investigated’ (14, emphasis added). So, the researcher's primary experiences are vital to both connecting with and fathoming the fieldwork spaces. Drawing on Moustakas (1990), O’Hora (2021) rendered heuristic inquiry as an inductive method that involves self-discovery and emic (from-within) approaches to exploring ‘what a particular moment or phenomenon means to the experiencer’ (O’Hora, 2021: 249; see also Denzin, 1989).

O’Hora (2021) promoted an enlivening writing style ensuring that ‘the individual voice and encounter is not to be lost in the texts that are reported’, while raising the challenge of translating lived experiences via textual representation (249). CW can be used to complement conventional ethnographic fieldwork methods to recreate lived experiences of the manifold relationships between researchers, research communities, and research localities beyond those captured by interviews and observations (Burlingame, 2019; O’Hora, 2021).

For example, Bayes (2023) supplemented walking interviews with marginalised communities in the Gardens of Hamilton, New Zealand with CW exercises to produce environmental counter-imaginations of Global North urban parks, concluding that: ‘as a migrant-settler living in Australia, ecocritical analysis of texts written by diverse voices allowed me to attend to experiences of gardens that do not just reproduce normative and colonial ideas that can cause violence to marginalised others (both human and nonhuman)’ (56). Berry (2021) applied CW in exploring creative digital content co-created by social media users, arguing that ‘the more than textual, more than representational, material and corporeal experiences are important to how we imagine and theorise art-making practices with mobile media’ (244).

While many examples of CW involve solo fieldwork, CW has also been engaged in collaborative and participatory fieldwork settings. For instance, Mahoney (2007) interrogated participants’ experiences of everyday student gay life in UK cities through storytelling methods. This included a CW style that the author called ‘three voices, several locations’ (584), which involved the author's own reflection and ‘location’ in conveying the narrative of an interviewed gay couple; for example: ‘during our conversation in the kitchen, I was trying to make sense of why we had not yet broached the subject of love in our discussions. Was there some relationship between the absence of sex in their relationship and the absence of the word “love” in their storied past? Maybe “being in love” wasn’t an enduring feature of this long-term relationship?’ (Mahoney, 2007).

Stickley et al. (2019) analysed how refugees and asylum seekers used CW workshop skills to explore their wellbeing and struggles of living, belonging, and alienation as experienced on the urban margins across the UK, citing a participant who stated: ‘… when I am on my own, I feel like my life doesn’t make sense, but when I am in the creative group, I feel like I still got hope that I can do something better in the future’ (258). In this sense, CW could help in revealing multiple positionalities, as well as presences and absences in perspectives (Smith and Delamont, 2019). As Karjula (2022) argued, CW can ‘help us ask whose stories we are telling and how, where our voices as researchers and writers are coming from, and what voices we are not yet hearing’ (7), calling researchers to ask ethical questions around agency and authorship in knowledge production.

Furthermore, CW can serve as a heuristic inquiry into multiple fieldwork locations, illuminating social relations within but also between study sites. For example, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al. (2021) involved refugees and host communities across Lebanon and Jordan in project workshops using CW experiments to produce stories and poems about their lived realities of displacement. The researchers adopted these creative pieces as knowledge in their own right and formed what the project's writer in residence, Qasmiyeh (2017), referred to as the ‘camp-archive’. The collaborative stories revealed what Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al. (2021) described as the multifarious connections within and between seemingly separate sites, allowing an insightful traversing of emic (insider) and etic (outsider) positionalities of both researchers and research participants. According to McKnight (2017), such processes can foster a new collective identity while simultaneously ‘blurring [traditional] boundaries of creativity and analysis’ (315).

The above illustrations indicate how CW can operate as a form of heuristic fieldwork inquiry, providing opportunities for exploring and questioning the epistemologies and methodological approaches to doing fieldwork differently. CW can open up multiple entry points (and points of closure) for thinking about and describing the field, understanding what constitutes the field, its boundaries (where it begins and ends), where it is located, and the individuals and communities (and their experiences) it encompasses. We explored these matters further in our collaborative workshops with peers and we will discuss the context of the workshops and our methodological learnings next.

Putting creative writing into workshop practice

In this section, we clarify the use of the workshop model to collaboratively explore the value of CW in and for fieldwork – which formed part of our CW research project, which received institutional ethics approval and was supported by a grant from the learned geographical society RGS-IBG. Meacham (2009: 59) regarded the workshop as the ‘signature element of creative writing pedagogy’, deemed conducive to knowledge exchange, peer-to-peer learning, problem-solving skills, and developing a personal CW style (Stukenberg, 2017). Summerby-Murray (2010: 231) argued that such ‘first-person creative writing’ can serve as an innovative pedagogy ‘encouraging [participants] to internalize concepts, reflect on experiences or create applications for theoretical ideas’. We accordingly recognise the workshop as an appropriate model for the joint reflection on – and practising of – CW as a fieldwork method.

We circulated an email call for participants through key human geography listservs in January 2022. This call targeted peers across scholarly backgrounds and career stages. Their prior experience with fieldwork (no matter how varied) was the basis for self-selection, involving informed consent and voluntary participation. The geographical location of the participants was no inclusion criterion due to the online delivery of the workshops during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We received 61 statements of interest, which our team qualitatively reviewed for motivation and prior fieldwork experience and we communicated the process and outcome of the selection process to the candidates. In addition to the three project team members, 31 unique participants took part in the project: 12 people joined all four workshops, 11 people participated in two workshops, 6 people attended one workshop, 1 person took part in three workshops, and 1 person attended a single workshop. Each workshop involved 20 participants per workshop, based on their fit with the workshop themes (specified below) and availability, while ensuring a gender-balanced participation and a variety of fieldwork locations. Each group included participants with diverse experiences of fieldworking in different regions and their respective language contexts, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Jordan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, South Africa, the UK, and the US, where English was the workshops’ lingua franca.

We convened four 2-hour online CW workshops via the videoconferencing platform Zoom at the lead author’s home institution, which were audiorecorded for internal analysis purposes only. The online format provided adequate opportunities for audiovisual interaction (see McKnight et al., 2017). Considering the co-presence of participants and their preferred name display in the workshops, the participants’ identities might have been naturally known to other participants. Whilst anonymity could not be guaranteed in the group encounters, we have ensured the confidentiality of participants by not revealing any personal identifiers in the analysis.

Informed by the author team's broader understanding of CW scholarship and practice, we derived the below key CW workshop themes in fieldwork context, respectively:

Disclosing new perspectives: how can CW reveal new content and promote different ways of thinking about fieldwork?;

Attentive observation: how can descriptive writing serve as a route to gain insights into fieldwork?;

Shifting narratives: who is the subject? Using character-driven writing to examine how we write about, and as such represent, subjects in fieldwork;

Embracing emotion: how can the complex emotional dimensions within fieldwork be explored through the language of CW?

The workshops introduced peers to CW techniques and took an open and relaxed approach that encouraged participants to think and write differently about their existing fieldwork and reimagine their research practice through CW. Two overarching questions underpinned the workshops: (i) how do the form and style of writing impact how you think about your fieldwork?; and (ii) how do you integrate CW practices into your field research process?

Hence, we employed the workshops as a space for interaction and reflection on CW as a critical, situated methodology for already-undertaken, ongoing or planned fieldwork. Given that participants were not physically co-located at the time of COVID-19 travel restrictions, our project relied on online participation as much as most participants were necessitated to ‘do’ or think of their fieldwork ‘through a Zoom lens’ (Howlett, 2022: 387). In a sense, the online workshops performed as a kind of home-but-away-in-the-field method, allowing participants to remotely establish, or re-establish, connections with both the research field and research communities.

The professional creative writer introduced the workshop participants to key ideas on creativity and cognition (e.g. Kaufman and Sternberg, 2019) along with techniques that guided them through the world of CW. The workshops involved creative ideation exercises (through writing and some sketching) and visual elicitation to support a discussion about how CW could offer alternative avenues for doing fieldwork. We used an online collaborative wallboard, Google Jamboard, for sharing ideas and discussing the participants’ CW experiments. The workshops harnessed the power of literary craft to redefine fieldwork boundaries and the dissemination of fieldwork findings, while ensuring opportunities for forging emotional connections and breaking conventions (see Howe, 2016; Peary and Hunley, 2015). After Brace and Johns-Putra (2010), the workshops, as such, sought to establish a respectful and supportive space for CW and centralise a pedagogy that was open to playing with ideas and words.

We pursued the CW workshop model as an aesthetic hermeneutic, which Howe (2016: 493) defined as ‘a collaborative space in which texts are interpreted and reimagined according to agree-upon contexts and languages of discovery’. Howe (2016) argued that ‘the creative writing workshop offers extraordinary phenomenological aesthetic opportunities as a conduit of shared essence that we so often locate in poetry and borrow from fiction’ (493). The author suggested two key hermeneutic principles of the workshop model: ‘bildung’, which is the formation of a community of learning in mutual respect, and ‘cultura’: the integration of different social backgrounds and identities, which makes the workshop a ‘culturally responsive pedagogy’ (Howe, 2016: 499). However, we feel that Howe (2016) under-addressed potential openings for participants to ‘agree to disagree’; therefore, we would rather render the workshop as an antagonistic space (than a consensus-based one), which precisely provides room for disagreement and contestation.

We integrated the above key hermeneutic principles into the workshops by encouraging participants to explore and reflect on their different positionalities, privileges, and affective relations with the fieldwork site, research communities, collaborating organisations, practitioners, and so on. We felt that this environment of trust aided in exchanging fieldwork challenges and the potential fallouts of working in different spaces; as well as in examining alternative approaches to fieldwork activities and forms of communicating about fieldwork findings.

Despite the immediate digital interaction, the online delivery mode inevitably limited personal contact and body language communication as compared with in-person workshops (see Ostergaard and Kitchens, 2021; Rein, 2015). When travel and social gathering became commonplace again, we used the opportunity to reflect on the workshop series at our in-person conference session at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in 2022. This activity involved an interdisciplinary discussion about CW's value as a critical fieldwork methodology, which helped us in the conceptual development of this paper. Also, the conference discussion supported the widely shared sentiment among the workshop participants of the importance of providing hands-on opportunities in a bespoke laidback space for the joint examination of being or becoming a creative writer. As Brace and Johns-Putra (2010: 412) remind us, it is the workshop's context that allows the creative writer to be performed via ‘acts of reading aloud to other writers, sharing writing and giving and receiving criticism’. In the next section, we attend to the methodological learnings from our workshops, where we specifically zero in on key opportunities and challenges of CW as a heuristic fieldwork inquiry.

Methodological learnings

This study contributes new empirically-informed insights from peers regarding the roles and values of CW in the particular context of (human geography) fieldwork. In this section, we critically draw on the insights gained from the workshops regarding how CW as a place-based methodology can impact the ways scholars conceive and conduct their fieldwork. We thematically sifted the workshop conversations and selected statements from the participants to illustrate, support, or challenge points made in the respective analysis. Per institutional research ethics guidance, we maintain the confidentiality of workshop participants by not disclosing their personal identities or fieldwork specifics (such as details of their research locations and their study participants, to which workshop participants might be traced back).

Two key threads emerged from the opportunities and challenges highlighted by the workshop participants during discussions about incorporating CW into the data collection and analysis stages of fieldwork: (i) the writing politics around CW for fieldwork, and (ii) the interpretative translations of fieldwork experience (as a form of data) into the language of CW (as data analysis).

Before we examine these threads, we would like to reflect on the role of the creative writer in our workshops. The creative writer aimed to provide a peer-to-peer environment for experimentation, inspiration, and encouragement of CW in the research practice of the participants. Notwithstanding, the dual role of the professional creative writer as both the expert and guide may have impacted the workshops’ dynamic, depending on the backgrounds and prior CW experiences of participants. Example impacts could include participants deferring to the authority of – and thereby relying on the suggestions of – the professional, along with the potential experience of self-doubt around meeting perceived standards. Some participants might have sought validation while others might have taken creative ‘risks’ in their writing, feeling supported by the creative writer. The presence of the professional might have also motivated workshop participants to share work more openly, with the expectation of receiving feedback from an expert.

Politics around creative writing for fieldwork

Workshop discussions echoed concerns and tensions in the literature around the place and value of CW within the fieldwork process and academic dissemination, as part of (sub-)disciplinary practices and conventions. We categorise our learnings from the workshops into writing politics as experienced in the broader disciplinary environment, the fieldwork environment, the immediate peer environment, and the publication environment – acknowledging that these four environments may overlap.

Regarding disciplinary writing politics, a participant argued that ‘feminist geographies and autoethnography have done some of the legwork for us’ (which echoes Inckle, 2010), while another participant contended that ‘creative writing as a method is often not given weight or is seen as [just] a nice add on, to add flavour to the research’, and wondered: ‘how can the value of creative writing be more meaningfully centralised in research?’ Another participant related to CW's absence in fieldwork analysis: ‘I wrote a poem summarising my research for the presentation of a friend's book, and that was the most honest bit of writing in relation to my research I have done to date’.

Another participant conveyed that ‘the academic writing structure and form makes me think in terms of theory, methods, and results, thus excluding many of the beautiful spaces in between and beyond’. Some participants expressed frustration with perceived disciplinary obligations to prioritise abstract notions over lived experiences. Instead, they called for formats encouraging greater use of CW in engaging primary observation in fieldnote taking, the discussion of fieldwork methods, and in the analysis. A participant found conventional writing guidance often ‘suffocating’, leaving the author (as the researcher) at a distance:

Academic writing excludes my thinking by filtering out the emotions being conveyed by participants. I also feel sometimes that it disassociates me from the experience in the field so what I write is not an accurate depiction of the lived experiences of my research participants.

While workshop participants expressed a desire for greater scope and visibility of emotive content in the fieldworker's writing about fieldwork (in conceptual, methodological, and empirical terms), they shared their struggles over coordinating such content with material that is considered more factual or reasoned. A participant stressed a tension in this regard between so-called ‘scientific’ and ‘personal’ writing, stating that ‘it can be difficult to synthesise what feels like two different registers in an academic writing context’. The latter recalls Brace and Johns-Putra's point (2010) that ‘the writer is not disconnected from the codes that structure the writing’. While writing conventions in some disciplinary areas have been loosening, providing more space for creatively reawakening the relationship between researchers and their data (see Burlingame, 2019), one participant stressed a perceived conflict in the ‘relationship between writing in an accessible way’ and the perception of it being ‘not academic enough’.

In this context, a participant made a plea for greater recognition of creativity in (their) academic writing, especially regarding how the craft of research is perceived: ‘it is interesting to think about how creative conceptualising and theorising is as a process, but how this is often not seen as creative writing’. Nevertheless, another participant vocally expressed not feeling constrained by writing conventions and, instead, suggested CW as a form of catharsis, a natural and unforced means of discovering fieldwork: ‘there has been an assumption in my head that I need to apply creative writing in my academic writing. There's value in creative writing practice for its own sake – and for your own sake, too; in the same way we do all sorts of other activities to relax and get away from our work’.

Regarding the politics of the fieldwork environment, workshop participants repeatedly cast criticism of a perceived dominant reliance on the fieldworker's standpoint and interpretations. On that note, a participant asked a criticial reflective question: ‘how to honour fieldwork participants and their stories fully as knowledge co-producers, beyond simply putting short, out-of-context quotes in an academic paper?’ This participant intimated that CW should be employed as a situated fieldwork methodology that reflects on positionalities beyond the researcher and provides more rounded knowledges of the field and its communities.

Collaborative CW would particularly allow study participants to be treated as equal thought partners, moving beyond extractivist research, and promoting ethical principles of co-creation and horizontal knowledge production among researchers and research participants. A workshop member conveyed this concern as follows:

I hope that allowing a level of creative writing will help me do justice to participants as dialectic interlocutors and knowledge producers in their own right, as well as to include the rich emotional landscapes that developed alongside the creation of self-organised communities and politics of resistance.

This view suggests using CW as a multiple vehicle: for bearing witness, educating peers, impacting thinking, imagining alternatives, challenging oppressions, and advocating social change. This also implies CW as a way to enhance participatory research, community empowerment, and the relationship between researchers and research participants.

The CW workshops provided their participants with some pause-and-reflect exercises to approach fieldwork from different positionalities, offering more room for capturing the emotional nuances of fieldwork experiences. The discussions revealed the feeling that stepping aside from what has factually happened in the field through semi-fictional content could allow non-linear explorations of the spatial and temporal dimensions of fieldwork – as well as the shifting of positionalities, or ‘the speaking on behalf of others’.

Working with semi-fictional content might help both the writer and reader to embody and empathise with multiple characters in fieldwork. In the words of a workshop participant, it can ‘rais[e] the possibility of the amalgam characterisation’, who illustrated this with their ‘verbatim theatre piece [that] was written about three men from one family’, which reportedly had an all-round impact on those who took part in this piece: ‘many other participants thanked me for telling “their story”’.

To facilitate a more horizontal fieldwork environment, some participants felt strongly that fieldwork requires establishing a strong rapport with research communities, enabling the collection of deeper and more nuanced insights as input for CW. Although CW can honour the complexity, and interrelatedness, of lived experiences and emotions, some struggle to do so. Here, a participant reverberated the abovementioned concern and suggested that CW is required to provide depth: ‘despite the subjectiveness of creative writing in research, it is necessary to achieve the kind of depth necessary to do justice to participants’ stories’.

Regarding the politics within the immediate peer environment, some workshop participants relayed that certain colleagues or supervisors viewed the use of CW content in academic output as unsuitable. This may lead to self-censorship, or a perception among peers of CW as a hobby or a less serious form of academic achievement. Participants frequently admitted that they decided to omit creative and emotional aspects when writing about their fieldwork findings. Some refrained from covering personally sensitive or ethically charged issues: ‘based on my personal experience in the refugee camp, I struggle with a balance in my writing with words and phrases that are too emotional or too political’.

Expectations arising from peers and disciplinary conventions sometimes weigh heavily on the choice of the publication outlet. Relatedly, workshop participants experienced varying degrees of freedoms provided by the publication environment for incorporating CW into their fieldwork writing. Participants seemed to be generally unaware of established, high-impact journal outlets that offer scope for publishing CW. A participant argued: ‘I have felt drawn to write descriptive summaries of my research participants and enjoyed this as a creative process. But I can’t see a place for this work within the papers that I need to produce’. This response was echoed by another participant: ‘in academic publications, I’m often asked to actually cut out my descriptions of situations’. They went on to ask: ‘how would you recommend negotiating this publication tradition?’

Moreover, some participants suggested how expectations from project team leaders, project supervisors, institutional research ethics committees, and the like can influence the perceived value of CW. This includes concerns about the ‘objectivity’ of CW content: ‘I’ve never used creative writing to write about research participants. I fear my supervisors would want me to stick to quotes, and even exact quotes taken from recordings, in order not to “betray” them’. Such reluctance to use CW among peers and publishing environments echoes some criticism in scholarship of how hegemonic conventions around academic format and style may underplay the creative potentials of writing (e.g. Burlingame, 2019; McVey, 2008).

To conclude, several workshop participants felt that certain outlets limit opportunities for CW, which they regarded as a missed opportunity. They expressed a desire to be enabled by colleagues to adopt a less distant writing style, providing room for a more detailed picture of how study participants emotionally engaged with complex topics and tricky questions in the field, and making the message more relatable to the reader. A workshop member imparted that CW can help to flesh out idiosyncratic experiences without a need to foreground the background context: ‘when writing about other people's experiences, including the researcher's own, it is sometimes not desirable to translate it into the stereotype of complex academic thick description’.

Interpretative translations of fieldwork in creative writing

This section engages two key complicating factors highlighted in the workshop discussions regarding the interpretative translations of fieldwork experience into CW content: (i) the practice of working across multiple cultures and languages and (ii) the representation of lived observations in a textual form. Hereinafter, we shall discuss these important issues, which have been under-addressed in the reviewed scholarship on CW.

Workshop participants indicated that fieldworking, especially across international and different cultural and linguistic contexts, can help them to expand the empirical applicability of region-specific theory to multisite practices and, as such, stimulate the thought process in unexpected real-world contexts. Different research and community cultures (e.g. conventions, values, languages) can influence the field research process and shape CW practices to express nuances to this process. In this respect, a participant acknowledged employing CW ‘as a research methodology to explore inhabitants’ emotional perceptions of different spaces and places’.

However, some participants said they experience difficulties in translating their initial interpretation of observation from one language or cultural context to another. A participant ambiguously expressed that ‘doing research in one or several languages and writing about it in another one, could be confusing, frustrating and stimulating!’ Some found their native language best equipped for expressing emotive content through CW; another participant challenged this notion, using CW to alternate and play with different languages during the fieldwork process: ‘I tend to separate academic and creative writing by languages: when working in French, I will tend to write creatively in English, and vice versa’.

To avoid experiences getting lost in translation in multi-lingual and -cultural fieldwork contexts, some participants suggested using a creative notebook to track observations via scribbling, sketching, and so on, using CW as a form of metadata to compose a fuller picture of the fieldwork experience. For example, a participant found such a creative notebook particularly helpful for poetry writing in auto-ethnographic descriptions of fieldwork, especially when working across different language contexts. Another participant shared: ‘I use creative writing in a separate feeling notebook where […] I try to write down what happened that day beyond the observation data’. A fellow participant elaborated on this, commenting that ‘description is not exactly about what happened but how people reflected on it, everything that has been happening around it, how they felt, and so on’.

Another translational point is that most participants relayed they encountered major challenges around ‘representing the non-representational’. Since the 2000s, the so-called affective turn in the geographical humanities has advocated creative methods, including CW, as a sound method for spotlighting sensory experiences, but it has also signalled the paradox of representation (e.g. Boyd and Edwardes, 2019; Daniels and Lorimer, 2012). A participant emphasised that ‘it's important to try to capture the non-representational when writing about affect and emotion’. However, we learnt from the discussions, as well as from the experience of the professional creative writer on our project team, that the dominant focus of academic writing on what ‘is in the world’ may complicate writing about what ‘feels in the world’.

Part of the difficulty, as discussed during the workshops, was the expression of lived experiences through emotive content via the typical academic writing form about (human geographical) fieldwork – where CW techniques are often not part of standard skills training. Another confounding factor occurs when the relayed, second-hand experiences of study participants are presented and analysed, rather than the first-hand experiences of the researcher alone. A workshop member considered this an inevitable task: ‘sometimes it is hard to bring subjective experiences of other people or species when you haven’t experienced them yourself, but I guess it's part of a writer's job?’

Workshop participants addressed the retrospective writing about fieldwork experiences, including emotional responses and nuances from study participants, to contribute to the dilemma of representation. These experiences can be difficult to recall, let alone to be written down with careful precision (particularly when research events are unrecorded). As one of the workshop participants articulated while conducting a CW task during the workshop:

This exercise is really making me think differently about the times I have assumed different emotional responses from participants … Like that kid on the rollercoaster, I feel I often reinterpret how I was feeling ‘in the field’ long after the research has taken place!

Some participants suggested using a logbook that chronologically orders and distinguishes between first-hand and second-hand experiences. While such a careful strategy might minimise the risk of the over-interpretation of primary experience after fieldwork, a participant commented: ‘it gets tricky when researchers try to go beyond declared emotions of their participants because of the hierarchical power of interpretation of something hidden’. At the same time, this participant added that ‘we always interpret what is declared by people in everyday situations and compare [this] with our imagination of their daily spaces’.

The workshops discussed various in situ and post hoc uses of CW as an imaginative method for connecting with, and reimagining, fieldwork. While some participants used CW as a key method for generating experiential data during the fieldwork, others used CW after the fieldwork in support of the data analysis. A participant explained how they endeavoured to integrate various creative methods into their suite of fieldwork methods to generate data that might inspire follow-on CW: ‘I’ve been doing more creative practice such as walking workshops, activism, conversations, photography, sound recording, and film making, to support creative writing in future’. Relatedly, some workshop participants suggested that augmenting CW with imaginative elements, such as poetry, and extra details in the written word can make fieldwork analysis more empowering for the researcher and more relatable for the reader, too. As a participant said: ‘something helpful for me is trying to get away from writing in pure prose. It takes away some of the self-consciousness of descriptive character writing’.

In conclusion, aspects of reduction and fictionalisation are part and parcel of any textual interpretation of lived experiences, whether in CW or conventional narrative ‘academic’ writing about fieldwork. It is ethically crucial to avoid misrepresentations and provide context and transparency about fictional elements introduced into the writing, especially when argumentative claims are inferred from the fieldwork (Jacobson and Larsen, 2014; Wilson, 2022).

An attempt to capture the sense and essence of field encounters as attentively as possible requires time and bodily investments into situated fieldwork approaches. While CW can make fieldwork more accessible and engaging, as one participant pointed out, ‘because it can increase readability and get different understanding across through metaphors and feelings’, it is essential to consider the target audiences of CW output at all times. There was a prevailing sentiment welcoming more concrete guidance for CW in geographical fieldwork – both as a method and type of writing to bridge fieldwork and real-world engagement, demonstrating benefits to communicating fieldwork findings among wider research-user audiences.

Discussion and conclusion

The workshops have shown how CW can serve as a critical fieldwork methodology, shaping the language, thinking, writing, and expression of affective connections of researchers with fieldwork, both on-site and remotely. Our workshops discussed the potential of CW for peers to immerse, or write themselves into, their spaces of fieldwork while engaging with intended research communities. We view CW as a dialectical catalyst: it can simultaneously serve as a mode for reflecting on researcher–researched relationships and a mode for fieldwork analysis and reporting. We suggest that more weight should be given to CW as a fieldwork methodology and for its firmer integration into the fieldwork process, output, and guidance.

Our workshops examined opportunities and challenges of CW practice for fieldworkers to process experiences in the field and communicate fieldwork findings. As overarching workshop threads, we inferred writing politics and the interpretative translation of fieldwork experience (as data) into the language of CW (as data analysis). Hereinafter, we discuss our main learnings, along with contributions and some directions for further research. We revisit CW as a critical fieldwork methodology in terms of how it allows for (i) an in-depth identification of lived experiences as observed in the field; (ii) a deeper questioning of the fieldwork's epistemological and empirical dimensions, and (iii) an imaginative evaluation of fieldwork findings.

Regarding the first point, our study has contributed insights into the particular uses of creative (non-)fiction to produce evocative, and insightful accounts of research places and communities. Accordingly, it has provided perspectives of using CW to consider creative dimensions around topical geographical issues (for example, around migration, housing, and sustainability) and co-produce narratives of the lived experiences of research participants. The workshop deliberations revealed CW as a potentially valuable method for accessing different ways of thinking about the topic, the field, and the experiences of researchers and research participants. As well as heightening the researcher's awareness of the interpretative and (non-)fictional aspects intrinsic to any narrative form, CW could also help to externalise complexities and contradictions of fieldwork experiences (see also van Manen, 2014).

The workshop discussions indicated that some institutional writing politics and publication conventions may lead fieldworkers to limit or exclude emotive content in their writing. This includes both the primary lived experiences of their own and those relayed to them by research participants. A disconnection from such lived experiences could result in incomplete depictions of field observations. As a heuristic inquiry, CW seeks to surface authentic experiences and ‘recreate the lived encounters of the participants through complete depictions’ (O’Hora, 2021: 249). That said, peer discussions signalled inevitable limitations to representing the non-representational nature of lived experiences – considering that these are interpreted, ‘edited’, or even lost.

Hence, there is a tension between grappling with the totality of lived experience and the translated, written ‘representative’ experience. This point aligns with Brace and John-Putra (2010: 400) who suggested reconciliation between non-representational theory and questions around representation to understand process and text simultaneously. They argued that reconciliation can be obtained through intertextuality: that is, ‘all sorts of relations “between-texts”’ (Pope, 2005, 91, cited in Brace and John-Putra, 2010: 409). Importantly, they moreover suggested that non-representational does not necessarily imply non-representable as ‘representation is still a relevant theoretical lens through which to examine creative endeavours’ (Brace and John-Putra, 2010: 411).

Regarding a deeper questioning of epistemological and empirical dimensions of fieldwork, our study has contributed insights into CW as a way of enhancing participatory research, community empowerment, and the relationship between researchers and research participants. Relatedly, our study has contributed perspectives of using CW as a vehicle for bearing witness, educating peers, impacting thinking, and imagining alternatives (such as through challenging oppressions and advocating social change).

The peer discussions in our study provided insights into CW as an original means of gaining grounded understandings of the localities and communities of research. CW was suggested as an empowering method for researchers to voice their own fieldwork perspectives, for participants to be voiced, and for empirical experiences and findings to be expressed in inventive ways to discover fresh perspectives on fieldwork data. Workshop participants largely found CW to be an engaging means for conceptualising fieldwork, particularly when facing practical challenges in accessing, or re-accessing, fieldwork localities – due to issues such as lacking funds, limited time, and restrictive health and safety-related mobility measures (notably during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Furthermore, regarding an imaginative evaluation of fieldwork encounters, our study contributed insights into how different research contexts (e.g. research conventions, research cultures, and communities of the ‘researched’) influence the field research process and shape CW practices to express nuances to this process. The workshops highlighted the challenge of how to reflect on different stages of fieldwork in relation to the specific type of thinking involved – whether it takes place within the field, at the desk, or elsewhere. Building on the previous point, the workshop discussions recognised CW as a method for supplementing established practices, such as observations and interviews, for taking resourceful leaps to reimagine notions of place (e.g. being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the field) and alternative positionalities among researchers and participants.

Revisiting Donnelly's (2010) question, ‘does the writing workshop still work?’, our CW workshops provided an opportunity to screen their value as a peer-to-peer space for evaluating fieldwork and its outcomes. Howe (2016) compellingly likened the CW workshop to a theatrical space ‘where voice is always already under construction; it is a place of apprenticeship, where language and craft are handed down and knowledge is shared’ (Howe, 2016: 499). Drawing on this view, we argue that the workshop model can boost the potential of CW, not only as an individual skill but also as a means of co-producing critical knowledge of the field. We think that tense issues around representation of dominant versus underrepresented voices would merit further consideration, in particular how historical legacies and social power dynamics shape field research spaces and work their way through in CW and collaborative knowledge production.

Also, we were mindful of our role as conveners in guiding the workshop process and the possible risk of the workshop model monopolising the agenda and discussion (although none of the workshop participants raised this as a problem). It remains important to acknowledge the risks of dominance and conformity when the workshop instructor assumes a mentor-like role, potentially resulting in a ‘homogenization of writers’ voices’ (Howe's, 2016: 491; see also Shivani, 2011). Brace and Johns-Putra (2010: 410) reported related concerns, raised by creative writers in their study, about maintaining ‘the integrity of the[ir] authorial voice’ within interactive settings of the CW workshop.

CW is a highly skilled practice with its own vast knowledge and practice base (see Harper, 2010; O’Neill, 2020). Further research can probe into the effectiveness of different CW techniques (such as descriptive, character-driven, and emotive writing) that are suitable for different fieldwork objectives while producing distinct guidelines that allow a consideration of CW in different socio-cultural and geographical contexts of fieldwork. This research should also draw attention to the role of learning from mistakes and refining CW skills, thereby helping to promote the diversification of research output through CW.

A final point warranting further research is the role of CW in uncovering or creating geographical fieldwork ‘data’, where the distinction lies between creativity as a tool and creativity as its own outcome. This is crucial because CW techniques have the potential to encourage researchers to think differently and produce new insights, not only about their fieldwork but also about their particular research locations and broader research practices. It is, therefore, worth exploring how CW techniques can enable researchers to relate differently, and discover more imaginative pathways, to theory as well as fieldwork empirics.