It's not what I expected : encountering the serendipitous in qualitative research fieldwork

As a researcher, when I go out to do my fieldwork, it is inevitable that I carry with me a certain mindset of what I expect or hope to encounter. While remaining conscious of the research question when conducting fieldwork, there is also a necessity to cultivate an awareness of the serendipitous, that happy encounter with the unexpected which can offer alternate paths or different insights into the research questions. I find that opening myself to all my senses, grounding myself in where I am, increases my intuitive awareness and the possibility of encountering the serendipitous in my fieldwork. As I foreground sensory interconnection in the field, I may find myself being guided to insights by the unexpected. In this paper, I explore the possibility of a causal connection between a grounded, sensory and experiential approach to my fieldwork and the serendipitous occurrence. My methodology is hermeneutic phenomenology which requires 'an awareness of life as an interpretive experience' (Laverty 2003). I would argue that this requires the researcher to be cognizant of being sensorily embodied in this world. Sarah Pink (2015) writes: 'the idea of a sensory ethnography "¦ is based on an understanding of the senses as interconnected and interrelated' (p.xiii). I will be illustrating my paper with short narratives and images from my fieldwork in Japan and Central Australia.