Sunday 21 September 2014

Fieldwork in Guinea Bissau, September 2014

From the end of August to beginning of October, Kasper conducts a second fieldwork trip in Guinea Bissau, the first funded by the project. This fieldwork trip continues earlier efforts in the beginning of the year to establish contacts and identify sites for field research in the capital of Bissau as well as in the town of Bissorã in the north of the country.

In semirural Bissorã the fieldwork is rather informal and casual, comprising mainly of conversations and contacts with business people in the central Praça. In Bissau, I'm accepted as a researcher/voluntary teacher in a centrally located popular language school, and I've strengthened contacts with the American Corner in Bissau at the university campus. I have also visited the French cultural centre again and Tchico-Té college for teacher training, although so far without establishing formal arrangements with them.

During this fieldwork trip, a contract has also been signed with Reinaldo Natcha, adding him as a fourth member of the team as a field research assistant based in Guinea Bissau until the beginning of 2016. Natcha is an eloquent multilingual with prior experience as research assistant and a well-known member of his community as well as of Bissau's English language teaching community.

I'm regularly posting about this fieldwork trip on my personal Facebook page, reaching out to a body of 100-200 people of friends, family, around the world. A summary of these posts which will be published as a research brief on this blog after my return.

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