Record Details

Exploring Borderlands and Romanticizing Clandestine Activities

Tanzania Journal of Development Studies

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Field Value
 
Title Exploring Borderlands and Romanticizing Clandestine Activities
 
Creator Pophiwa, N
 
Description The article critiques methods and theoretical issues regarding clandestine activities and borderland studies by briefly presenting some of the experiences and findings from a research on smuggling among the Penhalonga and Nyaronga borderland communities astride Zimbabwe and Mozambique between August 2005 and July 2007. The article revisits some of the research issues that I overlooked such as ethics
and representativeness of the findings. I agree with some critiques on borderlands studies that the main shortcomings in researching this subject have to do with the inadequate training provided in some graduate schools on African studies. It is this
weakness in the training, coupled with other reasons such as the researchers’ ‘romanticization’ of clandestine activities, that makes them take for granted crucial methodological requirements such as ethics and generalizability among other things. This is done through highlighting the methods (such as document analysis, oral history, interviews, and participant observation) which I applied, and the encounters that I met during fieldwork. I realized the impact of discussing methodological and field research encounters, for the benefit of readers and researchers, who may want to work on a similar subject in future, as this could offer assistance on how to handle certain complex methods in probing various subjects.
 
Publisher Educational Publishers and Distributors
 
Contributor —
 
Date 2009-11-17
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
 
Format application/pdf
 
Identifier https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tjds/article/view/47891
10.4314/tjds.v7i2.47891
 
Source Tanzania Journal of Development Studies; Vol 7, No 2 (2007); 79-88
2591-6831
0856-9622
 
Language eng
 
Relation https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tjds/article/view/47891/34261
 
Rights Copyright is owned by the sister institutes: IDS, University of Dar es Salaam, DSI, Sokoine University of Agriculture and Department of Development studies, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences.