When things go wrong in research… (A love letter to the accidental)

When I think about all the research projects I’ve worked on, I can’t think of one that hasn’t experienced – and actually often benefitted from – things going wrong. Or at least not to plan. This has been quite upsetting – every single time – because I’m a planner; I like spreadsheets, and ticking things off, and colour-coding things, and putting things in order.

You see, I am good at creating the illusion that I can plan my way out of the accidental because the accidental is unexpected, and my plans, by definition, don’t account for the unexpected. And in many ways, I’m dangerously emboldened by the frameworks around research that let us pretend that we can plan much more than we actually can. The planning of fieldwork – well, it can be put into lists and timetables and spiralbound in a folder. And the ethics approval processes: a neat form that you work your way through in order, and then it (eventually) gets stamped off? Yes, please. And then (for the kind of research I tend to do, at least) you can tick off the interviews that have been transcribed, and then the ones that have been approved, and then you can get your highlighters out and analyse your data and then tick off the interviews you’ve done? Delightful. Like I said – spreadsheets, ticking things off, colour-coding things, and putting things in order: these are things that make me happy.

And yet, as hard as it is for me to admit it, the accidental has actually been a very good friend to me in my research in all sorts of ways.

The accidental has been serendipitous. During my doctoral research, I hit a brick wall. I had my data and I’d been trying to revise my methods chapter for months to make it work, and it just wouldn’t. All of these words that I’d painstakingly put together – these really hard words on discourse and Foucault and signifieds and signifiers – it was a nice enough chapter. But it wasn’t right for my dissertation. And revising it (and revising it, and revising it again) just wasn’t going to make it right.

This was especially disheartening because I’d already ticked off that box in my ‘PhD plan’ (and as any planner knows, there’s nothing worse than having to untick a ticked box). And with no plan, I took myself off to walk the aisles of the library at Sydney Uni without any clear sense of why I was there or what I was looking for. And from the stacks, my methods chapter (and more) started to emerge – the answers I’d needed had always been there, but they had been in places I hadn’t thought to look (mainly because I was in the department of International Relations and the answers I was looking for were in the archaeology section). Here, the accidental was a case of serendipity for me.

There’s also been the accidental as the unexpected. A few years ago, I worked on a delightful project on the care labour that sustains the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. To begin with, we had a solid plan: these interviews that we were doing were designed to map networks; to offer a qualitative counterpart to a social network analysis that we’d done the year before. We had our questions, we had an idea of what we were expecting to find (because of the earlier findings), and we were feeling very on top of things. It was lovely.

And then we started doing the interviews. And the stuff we thought we wanted to know wasn’t the interesting or important or main aspect of the early interviews. The conversations we were having kept going in their own direction, and the book almost took on a life of its own. Instead of networks, the conversations turned to what it was like to work in this space, the motivations, the challenges, and the hopefulness and hopelessness of working on gender and security. Again, infuriatingly, this was not part of the plan at all, and even more annoyingly, it felt very much as though it was actually the story we were supposed to tell all along – we just hadn’t known it.

The third accidental was a sort of ‘everything going wrong’ kind of accidental. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work on a project looking at women in government in Vietnam. The Australian lead investigator had developed a framework that the Vietnamese lead investigator thought could be useful in explaining the glass ceiling for women in Vietnam’s public service. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs was happy to fund the project, and so, after a great deal of back and forth, we took our budgets and spreadsheets and interview timetables, and we got on the plane to Hanoi.

We might as well have left the folders on the plane. Timetables shifted dramatically, days were switched around, people were added, people dropped out, translations seemed a bit wonky at times, our hotel was being renovated and we had to move unexpectedly… in short, nothing went according to plan. And yet, the research was incredibly rich, the participants were so generous with their time and insights, and the opportunity to conduct the study (and the access we were given) was such a privilege. Everything went wrong, and yet somehow, it all ended up going just the way it was supposed to.

While I might like to continue to pretend that I have any control over anything and that my plans mean something, I probably need to be much more grateful for the role that the accidental and the serendipitous and the unexpected, and the rethinking have played in my research and my professional life more generally. If I’m to be really honest, I couldn’t have planned it better myself. But believe me, I tried.