Preparatory participation as method: Reconceptualising pre-fieldwork through embodied and relational practice

Abstract

This Note proposes the concept of preparatory participation as a way of attending to early relational and embodied engagements that shape qualitative research before and alongside moments typically recognised as fieldwork. Drawing on work undertaken with visually impaired co-participants in blue space environments, it reflects on volunteering, sighted-guide training and open-water safety certification as practices through which methodological sensibilities are cultivated. These engagements are approached not as preliminaries to research but as critical sites of methodological thinking where co-presence, sensory reflexivity and relational ethics are learned through lived practice. Situated within established traditions in ethnography, sensory methodology and critical disability studies, the Note contributes to ongoing methodological conversations by tracing how ethical and epistemological orientations are co-produced through early encounters involving access, risk and interdependence. Rather than proposing a new method, preparatory participation offers a vocabulary for recognising forms of embodied and relational labour that many researchers already undertake, and which preparatory participation helps to bring into methodological focus.

Beginning in the water: Embodied thresholds and methodological openings

I begin just before what is conventionally named ‘the field’ – shoulder-deep in cold tidal river water, visibility blurred by a fogging mask, arms reaching uncertainly into moving currents. No data was being gathered in any formal sense. No recorder ran. I was undertaking open water safety training, learning how to navigate unpredictable blue spaces in ways that could support both myself and those I would later research with. At the time, I did not understand this as research. In retrospect, however, this wet, disorienting moment marked an early shift in how bodies, relations and attentions were already being reconfigured. These encounters were not yet data, but neither were they neutral; they formed part of the ethical and sensory labour through which research became possible.

This Note reflects on a series of early, pre-fieldwork embodied engagements undertaken in blue space environments – encounters shaped by movement, disorientation and emerging orientations towards co-navigation. Rather than treating these activities as separate from research, I approach them as part of a gradual methodological becoming: moments through which I learned to attune, respond and move differently within an unfolding field.

Building on feminist, ethnographic and disability-informed traditions that emphasise relational, sensory and ethical dimensions of research preparation (Okely, 2007; Caine et al., 2009; Kafer, 2013; Procter and Spector, 2024), this article contributes to ongoing conversations about how knowledge-making emerges through slow immersion – often before formal fieldwork is declared, but already shaping ethical and epistemological orientations.

Preparatory participation is introduced as a conceptual prompt for attending to often-informal practices that shift a researcher's stance, surface new sensitivities and reconfigure what questions become possible. These engagements were not ancillary to research but formative encounters through which methodological orientations took shape through shared movement, risk and relation.

The study on which this Note draws explored how visually impaired people access and experience so-called blue space environments (Rockliffe, 2026). It employed a multi-modal, relational methodology – swimming-with, walking-with and sitting-with participants – to engage with embodied, sensory and place-based experiences of coastal and aquatic access. These approaches required not only physical readiness and training but also the cultivation of trust, co-navigation and sensory attunement. It was through these demands that preparatory participation emerged – from the practical and ethical conditions of entering the field alongside others.

While grounded in research with visually impaired participants – in contexts shaped by ocularcentric and ableist assumptions (Macpherson, 2009, 2017; Bell, 2019; Petty, 2021; Heinemeyer and Berding, 2023; Job et al., 2023; Ainsworth et al., 2024; Rockliffe, 2026) – this Note reflects more broadly on how researchers come into relation with their fields. It frames preparation not as technical readiness but as a shared, relational process through which bodies, ethics and knowledge practices are mutually reconfigured.

The sections that follow develop the conceptual framing of preparatory participation, present three embodied vignettes and consider their implications for qualitative inquiry in contexts where access, risk and embodiment matter.

Defining preparatory participation: From pre-fieldwork to relational method

Scholarship across ethnography, qualitative inquiry and embodied methodologies has long recognised that research does not begin only at the moment of formal data collection. From foundational work in ethnographic practice, where early immersion and participant observation are central (Aktinson and Hammersley, 1998; Okely, 2007; Spradley, 2016), to decolonising and relational frameworks that emphasise research as co-constituted over time and through ongoing negotiation (Smith, 2021; Foley et al., 2019; Procter and Spector, 2024), qualitative inquiry has persistently attended to how researchers and participants come into relation.

This body of work challenges any simplistic divide between ‘preparation’ and ‘fieldwork proper’. As Armstrong et al. (2023) and others have observed, the boundaries of fieldwork are porous, shaped by prior relations, histories and embodied engagements already in motion before institutional approval or formal access. Preparatory participation engages with this lineage, attending specifically to the embodied, relational and affective practices through which researchers begin to move, sense and respond in situ – particularly in unpredictable, more-than-human settings like open water.

In phenomenological and sensory ethnography, scholars emphasise that methodological insight is not a detached product of planning, but emerges through practice – through bodies in motion, through meaningful co-presence with others and through the contingencies of environment and risk (Low and Abdullah et al., 2021; Pink, 2015; Samudra, 2008; Wacquant, 2015). Similarly, post-qualitative perspectives (Springgay and Truman, 2018; Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008) foreground co-becoming and relational accountability as constitutive of knowledge – not subsequent to but woven into, the processes of inquiry.

Yet even within these rich traditions, there has been less explicit attention to the specific forms of engagement that precede what is typically labelled ‘fieldwork’: those early, relational and embodied engagements through which researchers begin to attune, sense and respond – sometimes months, years or even a lifetime before formal data collection is named. While ethnographic and qualitative literatures often emphasise immersion and participant observation, discussions about preliminary field-work – where reflexivity, trust building and interaction with communities take shape prior to protocol and ethics approval – remain comparatively sparse (Caine et al., 2009). This includes the embodied learning, ongoing tuning of sensory perception and early relational enactments of interdependence and care that help constitute how one comes to inhabit a research context. Preparatory participation builds on and extends these perspectives by naming and attending to these early practices as methodological phenomena in their own right. It does not posit a clean, linear phase of preparation before fieldwork, nor does it suggest a universal pattern. Rather, it illuminates how engagement with dynamic environments, risk and diverse bodies generates methodological sensibilities – ways of attuning to emergent relations that reconfigure what questions are thinkable, what ethics are possible and what forms of knowledge can be produced. By naming and analysing these early activities as sites of methodological formation, preparatory preparation offers both a generative provocation and a way to affirm that preparation itself is a critical site of methodological thinking. It extends researcher positionality by foregrounding how epistemologies take shape through relational practice – through volunteering, training and shared movement – not just reflection.

Preparatory participation affirms that early, relational practices are foundational to ethical research, acting as constitutive of how researchers come to move, think and relate with others. It offers a methodological orientation through which researchers across topics, methods and disciplines can reflect on their own sensory, relational and epistemic habits – particularly when working with co-researchers and participants whose lived experiences unsettle normative assumptions about access, risk and knowing. In such contexts, preparatory practices support the cultivation of reciprocal trust, shared adaptation and attentiveness to diverse ways of sensing and moving through the world. Rather than framing vulnerability as an outcome to be mastered or resolved, preparatory participation foregrounds it as a condition through which dominant logics can be unlearned and relational practices recalibrated. As such, it contributes to a broader recognition of the researcher as part of a shifting research assemblage, where bodies, tools, practices and environments co-produce knowledge and where methodological learning unfolds through lived experience and collaborative expertise.

Blue space environments, with their shifting currents and sensory volatility, make these processes particularly traceable. As Foley (2018) suggests in water-based research, immersion is not only a physical experience but a methodological condition that leaves enduring marks on how researchers come to sense, interpret and respond. In this sense, preparatory participation highlights how early encounters with dynamic environments leave methodological traces – affective, sensory and ethical residues that continue to shape how researchers inhabit their fields. Research does not begin at arrival but is carried forward through these traces of dwelling, attunement and movement-with, which quietly configure epistemological and ethical orientations over time (Rockliffe, 2026).

By engaging with this broader methodological landscape – and with literatures that already challenge discrete beginnings, detached observation and purely procedural preparation – preparatory participation affirms and extends existing conversations. It invites further reflection on how early, embodied engagements generate methodological commitments in qualitative inquiry, how researcher–participant relations are choreographed through gradual immersion, and how blue space research can render visible the mutual shaping of method, ethics and field. The vignettes that follow offer grounded examples of this process in action.

Vignette 1: Learning in the current: Deep water as teacher

The snow began to fall as I entered the tidal river, wetsuited but already shivering. Around me, the others – construction workers, engineers, occupational safety personnel – waded into the churning grey water, preparing for rescue drills and defensive techniques. I was the sole researcher among them, an outsider in purpose as much as in method.

This was Level 3 Deep Water Management training, and it was no simulation. The river was alive with unseen forces – currents strong enough to dislodge footing, sediment that threatened suction entrapment, eddies that spun bodies unpredictably. We learned, hands numbed and faces stung, to assess risk in motion: reading the river's surface, communicating across distance and roar, calculating rescue approaches that balanced self-preservation with assistance.

Many of the men around me were grappling with identity fractures. Accustomed to physical competence, some struggled with tasks demanding agility over strength, or instinct over control. In the cold murk, failure surfaced visibly: slips, stumbles and rescues gone wrong. Vulnerability was not discussed; it was worn on shivering bodies, heavy with wet clothing and frustrated pride.

For me, too, the experience was unmaking and remaking. My academic preparation had not readied me for the drag of water, the panic of disorientation, the need to decide when body and mind froze simultaneously. Here, in the entanglement of elements, human frailty and cooperation, preparatory participation took form – not as something that precedes research, but as research-in-action (Haraway, 2016). Risk was no longer abstract, and interdependence no longer theoretical. They became muscular, affective realities – demands placed upon my body, ethics and attention.

In this space, preparation was not about control or expertise but about becoming available to the lessons of unpredictability, fragility and collective survival. This immersion marked a threshold – not simply into the field but into a methodological orientation grounded in uncertainty, responsiveness and more-than-human entanglement. It was the first encounter with the relational, sensory and ethical conditions that would later shape the research to come. And it began not with careful planning but with immersion – literal and epistemological – into cold, shifting waters (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Practicing immersion and safety in a tidal blue space. Undertaking Level 3 Deep Water Management training: a moment of learning risk, vulnerability, and relational navigation. Part of an Atlantic Crest Aquatic Safety Qualification course instructed by Lifesigns Group.

Vignette 2: Learning by touch: Co-attunement through sighted guide training

The water gave way to dry ground, but the conditions of uncertainty and co-dependence did not recede. I was undertaking formal sighted guide training – accreditation to assist VI individuals in navigating varied environments. The task appeared deceptively simple: offer one's arm as a conduit of shared mobility, to move together in a choreography of trust. Yet what unfolded was not ease but a series of awkward hesitations, missed signals and dissonance.

To guide well was not to lead, nor to protect, but to accompany. It meant offering bodily information through shifts in pace, angle and pressure in response to shifting environments and individual preferences. In practice, this required unlearning dominant sensory hierarchies. Vision had to be decentered. Spatial awareness is redistributed across touch, proprioception and breath. Language receded. What mattered was the body's ability to listen through contact. As Macpherson (2017) describes, guiding is not the supplementing of a visual lack but a sensory negotiation through which space is co-produced.

Each interaction demanded attunement to heterogeneous perceptual styles and embodied rhythms. The work was not only physical but conceptual: undoing ingrained assumptions that vision equates with knowledge and safety. Through missteps and recalibration, I became aware of how ocularcentric norms subtly structured even well-meaning assistance (Whitburn and Goodley, 2022; Powis and Macbeth, 2024). My initial instinct to narrate space was often unnecessary or intrusive. Slowly, I learned to listen – to footsteps, breathing, surface gradients and the atmosphere of movement.

Guiding also exposed the relational politics that contour access and care. Some participants asserted preferences with practiced clarity; others deferred out of politeness, echoing Macpherson (2009) concern that VI individuals often feel compelled to perform the role of grateful recipient in response to well-meaning but vision-centric forms of help. These dynamics surfaced the stakes of positionality, as roles of helper and helped became fluid, negotiated and sometimes reversed.

These encounters shaped later research practices. What emerged was not empathy or technical competence but a deeper sense of response-ability (Haraway, 2023) – a bodily and ethical readiness to dwell within interdependence. Guiding clarified the stakes of preparatory participation: not as a discrete skill learned in advance but as an unfolding site of methodological formation where research begins through relational attunement, co-produced sensing and embodied negotiation. As Petty (2021) argues, visually impaired engagements expose the fallacy of ocularcentric spatial epistemologies; here, that critique was enacted through my own faltering attempts at accompaniment. Moments of discomfort – misjudged pace, misaligned turns, over- or under-description – surfaced how able-bodied assumptions persist even within well-intentioned practice (Kleege, 1999; Duckett and Pratt, 2001; Macpherson, 2009; Svendby et al., 2018).

More than this, guiding revealed the radical relationality that underpins qualitative inquiry. As Springgay and Truman (2018) suggest, research is not the unilateral production of knowledge but a process of co-becoming through sensory and ethical entanglements. Preparatory participation, in this sense, was not preparation for guiding later; it was research-in-action – embodied negotiation, mutual responsiveness and co-presence unfolding in real time.

Temporality shifted. Trust, vulnerability and sensory knowledge were already at stake. In learning to guide, I was also being guided: away from methodological detachment and towards what Barad (2007) terms intra-action – where researcher and participant emerge through encounter rather than pre-existing roles. The insight gained was neither certainty nor confidence, but an ongoing sensory apprenticeship: learning when to slow, when to yield and when to recalibrate in response to another's movement.

When walking became fluid – when adjustments to steps, obstacles and uneven ground occurred without verbal instruction – there emerged a glimpse of methodological relationality as it would later shape the research: not control but mutual orientation. Precarious, partial and vital knowledge was forged through the labour of moving-with. As preparatory participation, guiding became a critical site of pre-fieldwork methodological thinking – where ethics, access and knowledge were learned through embodied relation (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Co-attunement in motion: guiding across uneven ground. Learning sighted guide techniques: a choreography of shared touch, trust, and sensory recalibration.

Vignette 3: Volunteering in community: Disrupting researcher exceptionalism

If guide training demanded relational attunement, volunteering with VI charities demanded subtler recalibration: a quiet reshaping of presence in spaces where research was neither purpose nor currency. I wasn’t collecting data or preparing fieldnotes. I was another pair of hands, helping with shared activities such as kayaking, sailing, hiking and the occasional pub lunch.

Each event offered a form of embodied apprenticeship. Supporting someone onto a sailboat, steadying a kayak or listening attentively while walking in unfamiliar terrain involved more than physical assistance. These moments called for shared improvisation, patient adjustment and attunement to a choreography shaped by trust, environment and interdependence. Rather than linear tasks or one-directional support, these encounters were dynamic exchanges – rich with sensory diversity and responsive interaction.

Beyond the immediate encounters, these experiences revealed the wider ecologies that shape access. Infrastructures, businesses and bystanders variously supported or limited participation. Observing how instructors adjusted (or didn’t), how trails and facilities responded to different mobility needs and how communication unfolded in public spaces became part of an ongoing education in relational and sensory accessibility. These moments highlighted both the barriers that constrained inclusion and the resourcefulness through which VI communities reconfigured exclusion into shared belonging (Imrie, 2000; Bell, 2019).

Volunteering – particularly the mundane, unnoticed parts – shifted how I understood research itself. Over time, these small acts displaced the centrality of the researcher’s role and foregrounded forms of care, maintenance and navigation that carried epistemic weight. These moments weren’t separate from the research process – they shaped how it would eventually be imagined, enacted and understood (Bettez, 2015; de La Bellacasa, 2017).

In these settings, my presence was shaped by others’ needs, rhythms and comfort. Research did not follow a clear, linear timeline but unfolded through adjustment, patience and shared adaptation. These unrushed interactions echo Brice (2024) framing of vulnerability as a site of methodological potential (Minatti and Gass-Quintero, 2025). Learning to listen, pause and respond within another's pace reframed both method and presence. Moments such as navigating uneven terrain or collectively problem-solving during a capsize drill generated situated, affective knowledge that could not be produced through interviews or distant observation.

Rather than sitting at the margins of research, volunteering formed the ground through which research became possible, anchored in response-ability (Haraway, 2008) and forged in co-created moments of care, adaptation and mutual trust. As broader scholarship on volunteering has shown, these settings support non-formal learning, embodied skill-building and the transformation of self–other relations (Rochester et al., 2010; Chadwick et al., 2022; Nichol et al., 2024). Recognising these moments as methodological is not merely descriptive; it invites researchers to reflect critically on the forms of labour, attunement and unlearning that precede formal fieldwork and make ethical, inclusive research possible (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Shared Preparation: Canoeing as Relational Method. Capturing a moment of shared anticipation and preparation before entering the water. Volunteering alongside visually impaired participants in activities such as canoeing reframed preparation as research-in-motion – where attunement, adaptation, and collective navigation became the method itself.

Situating preparatory participation within broader methodological conversations

Taken together, the vignettes do not position preparation as a discrete stage prior to research, nor as a neutral backdrop against which methodological decisions are later enacted. Instead, they trace how preparatory participation functions as a site of methodological formation through which researchers learn how to be present with others, how to sense and respond within shared environments, and how ethical orientations take shape through practice. In this sense, preparatory participation does not stand apart from broader methodological shifts in qualitative inquiry; it offers a way of attending to how these shifts are lived into being through early engagements that precede formal fieldwork while already shaping its ethical and epistemic conditions.

Across the vignettes, preparation unfolded as an embodied process of adjustment rather than a moment of readiness. In deep water training, participation took place under conditions where attention could not be divided between observation and action, and where responsiveness to others and to environmental forces was a collective achievement. Sighted guide training similarly involved learning to attune to pace, rhythm and touch, redistributing sensory authority and recalibrating how movement and orientation were shared. Volunteering extended these processes into everyday contexts where explicit research intent was backgrounded, and where presence was shaped through usefulness, patience and shared activity rather than methodological design.

These encounters illuminate how methodological sensibilities are learned through participation rather than assumed at the point of field entry. Co-presence, in this framing, is not secured through proximity alone but cultivated through repeated exposure to uncertainty, dependency and adjustment. Sensory reflexivity develops not only through reflective interpretation but through bodily negotiation with environments, others and one's own perceptual habits. Ethical orientations likewise accrue through participation in shared practices that involve responsibility, restraint and attentiveness well before research is formally named.

This perspective aligns with ethnographic, feminist, sensory and post-qualitative traditions that emphasise research as relational, embodied and ethically situated rather than procedurally enacted (Okely, 2007; Davies, 2018; Pink, 2015; Procter and Spector, 2024). Preparatory participation does not displace these accounts. Rather, it offers a vocabulary for tracing how methodological learning occurs across temporal registers, including moments that are rarely documented as part of research design. By attending to early encounters such as volunteering, skills training and embodied learning, it becomes possible to reflect more explicitly on how researchers’ bodies, assumptions and capacities are shaped through situated engagement rather than solely through methodological instruction or retrospective reflexivity.

Many qualitative researchers already undertake such forms of engagement as part of their work. What preparatory participation brings into focus is not the novelty of these practices but their methodological significance. Rather than treating them as background activity, preparatory participation recognises them as sites where orientations towards access, risk and relation are negotiated through practice, shaping how researchers come to move, sense and relate well before data collection begins.

This perspective aligns closely with ethnographic accounts that resist linear distinctions between preparation and fieldwork, emphasising instead the gradual, relational processes through which familiarity, trust and responsiveness are developed (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019; Procter and Spector, 2024). Preparatory participation does not displace these accounts; rather, it offers a way of tracing how methodological learning occurs across temporal registers, including moments that are rarely documented as part of research design. By attending to these early encounters, it becomes possible to reflect more explicitly on how researchers’ bodies, assumptions and capacities are shaped through situated engagement, rather than solely through methodological instruction or retrospective reflexivity.

In blue space environments, where sensory intensity and material unpredictability demand ongoing attunement, these processes are particularly pronounced. As scholars working in aquatic and coastal contexts have shown, immersion unsettles distinctions between planning and practice, foregrounding the interdependence of method, environment and ethics (Foley et al., 2019) – a concern long shared within disability scholarship, where access and participation are understood as socio-material negotiations rather than technical adjustments (Kafer, 2013; Garland-Thomson, 2011, 2020; Goodley et al., 2019).

By making these formative processes explicit, preparatory participation contributes to broader methodological conversations about co-presence, sensory reflexivity and relational ethics without repositioning them as newly discovered concerns. Instead, it provides additional space for critical methodological thinking about how such commitments are learned, sustained and tested through early relational practice. In doing so, it invites researchers to reflect on how their own preparatory engagements already participate in methodological formation, and how attending to these moments can deepen understandings of how qualitative research comes to matter, move and take form.

Conclusion: Towards a practice of response-ability

Preparatory participation reframes research preparation as a site of ethical and epistemological labour, rather than a procedural prelude to fieldwork. Building on broader methodological shifts towards co-presence, sensory reflexivity and relational ethics, it traces how these orientations are not simply enacted in the field but are learned, negotiated and cultivated through embodied engagement beforehand.

By attending to practices such as volunteering, training and shared bodily learning, preparatory participation shows how co-presence is acquired through sustained relational exposure, how sensory reflexivity develops through the recalibration of perception and how ethical commitments emerge through practice rather than abstract declaration. In this sense, it does not introduce new methodological principles but extends existing ones temporally, tracing how researchers come to inhabit research worlds responsively through often-under-acknowledged preparatory labour.

Although these dynamics are particularly evident in blue space contexts, where material volatility and sensory intensity demand ongoing attunement, their relevance extends across qualitative research. Early relational engagements shape how questions are formed, how bodies move and how ethical responsibilities are understood. Preparatory participation offers a vocabulary for recognising these moments as methodological without presuming uniformity of experience or context.

Understood as an ethos rather than a replicable method, preparatory participation aligns with response-ability as an ongoing practice of learning to be affected. Ethical methodology is located not only in formal protocols but in how researchers attune, adjust and remain accountable to the relations through which research takes shape over time.