Riddims of the Street, Beach, and Bureaucracy: Situating Geographical Research in Jamaica

This paper is motivated by a concern about the limited critical attention directed toward the methodological challenges of conducting geographical research in the Caribbean. Drawing on social theories and our empirical experiences with doing qualitative research in Jamaica, we present a variety of methodological conundrums associated with three distinctive contexts: the street, the beach, and the bureaucracy. Such contexts in Jamaica, we argue, should be understood and approached by researchers with respect to their 'riddims,' that is, their distinctive socio-spatial textures and cultural expressions. We seek to foster critical discussion of how methodological problems can result from contextually and spatially insensitive research. This paper contributes to the critical literature on methodology in the Caribbean by showing how certain epistemological and methodological frameworks may hinder research in Jamaica. We do this by explaining how various micro-scale inter-personal dynamics between the researcher and the researched in Jamaica are shaped by the meso-scale riddims of the street, beach, and bureaucracy.