“Why did you go to the Philippines?”, asked our colleagues when we presented our work in workshops and seminars; “what is the value of research in the field?”, instead of providing aid, asked a taxi driver. The value of field research is uncontested in domains such as ethnology or sociology - but mathematicians or computer scientists are rather rare. And it is a legitimate question – research in the field is more dangerous, costly, confrontational, and exhausting. The results are much harder to obtain, foresee, plan, and publish in our disciplines; and scientific rigor is hard to maintain.

Why did we leave our desks? Because we believe that any research in disaster management can only be relevant, if it involves a process of joint learning and co-creation. To learn, we have to break norms, overcome barriers of current thinking or “best” practices in both science and practice. This is, at times risky – but we believe that this is (sometimes) for academia and society to take the greatest leap forward In the past 30 years, research and the number of publications on disasters, vulnerability and resilience have grown exponentially. So have the damages from disasters – in any scale you might want to choose; from number of fatalities, to affected population or economic losses. Our scientific results, all the models, and experiments, and tests, have not (yet) lead to better preparedness for and management of disasters. And in the quantitative disciplines, related to modeling or decision support, disasters are a domain that is considered as inaccessible.

We decided to engage with the professionals that we met and interviewed in the field. We are grateful to all our interviewees, who took the time to answer our questions during an ongoing response, and for all of us, this field trip lead to new insights. Being researchers, not professionals or consultants, we started from the aim of understanding the problems in practice, and structuring needs, and requirements – instead of going into the field with ready-made solutions.

Many of the drawbacks of going to the field have been discussed – from the difficulties to publish results, to the actual workload of doing field research on top or besides an academic position. For us, field work is about overcoming silo thinking, and the silence between the professional cultures. Field work requires us to redesign the research paradigms: to reconsider what actually good research is, and how we can achieve societal relevance. It is a long way from the practices of "neutral" observing and the ideal of extracting and purifying knowledge to  co-generation of questions and answers. Yet,with field engagement a whole new world of experience and learning lies ahead of us. This may be daunting for some, since workflows and foundational issues need to be redesigned. It may not be journals and conferences which are our first outlet any more, but communication that is required in a continuous process of professional and academic learning. Yet, for many researchers, our identities of professional self worth, and alos our monetary value are tightly tethered to countable academic achievements. Some accept this, but we will continue to challenge the core assumption that we’re taught to believe: that our engagement in advancing science and implications for the real world is tightly and directly linked, but our structures in academia often sit closer in bed (or at desk?) with academic culture than the real-world itself.

Academia is no longer the sole driver of the knowledge & information – but it is our choice if can be among the leading ones also in future.

Four weeks after the field trip in the Philippines, the team meets at Tilburg University to work on the results from our field research.

Research in the field means that our team was confronted with realities that are very different from our work at a university: instead of trying to analyse the world from our desks, sitting in front of a computer we had to work in an area struck by a disaster: no mobile phone coverage, no access to electricity. No driver, no fuel, no flight, no hotel: logistics and planning needed to be continuously adapted and re-designed. As we went deeper into the field, we had less and less control about when we would be where, and whom we would be able to meet. 

An epistemology for disaster research: often, researchers try to create representativity by large sampling sizes. However, large numbers of representative and comparable interviews are difficult to collect in the field - because of the conditions, but also because there are only few people on the job. 

Being researchers, we are neutral and follow the ideal of objectivity and scientific rigour. Still, we are humans, touched by the stories we hear about a mother struggling to survive, about a barangay captain trying to maintain the order and ensuring the well being of his community - and feeling the need to give something back to these communities. In how far does this affect the process of acquiring and building knowledge? Should we engage with communities via projects such as Radyo Bakdaw - or maintaining our neutral stand point?

Another challenge is the interdisciplinary nature of our work. We have come together to synergize our different backgrounds in health, crisis mapping, information management, decision support, logistics and risk management. Our work aims at avoiding Babylonian confusion of many different disciplinary voices that are only juxtaposed, talking in different languages about different issues to audiences about the same topic: disaster management. 

The key questions we are confronted with are: how do we exploit the knowledge and information from the field in our research? How do we design the next research trips, including roles and responsibilities and rigorous research design? And ultimately: can we embrace the specifics of the field to develop new research methods that enable acknowledging and exploiting information from practice in a transparent and rigorous way? More research needed to find the answers!