Facing (as) the unexpected access to guarded fields encounters with the Spanish Guardia Civil at a border crossing in Melilla

There is yet another factor that determines the chance of getting access to the field. Chance. Getting lucky. Having a fluke. It is something we rarely discuss, for obvious reasons. Luck does not lend itself to sophisticated theorization, neither can it be put in methodology books or research proposals. ‘I plan to get lucky’, will not fly well as a method with any supervisor. It sounds unserious and even stupid to base your fieldwork on chance. Yet, as all of us who managed access to difficult fields know all too well, to some extent, often to a crucial extent, we have had a fluke. That is not to say that we didn’t ceaselessly try to get access by all kinds of formal and informal means. It simply means that without that breakthrough, which was largely a matter of chance, a stroke of good luck, often in the form of an unexpected face-to-face interaction, we would have probably not made it. At least not in the form and to the extent that we eventually managed to make it.