Follow the Knowledge, Not the Proximity: What One “No” Taught Me About Community Fieldwork

A field reflection from Saving the Burning Library — and a message to future Narrative Engineers. Sometimes the most useful field encounter does not produce an interview. Early last week, I was having an informal conversation with a neighbour in Porto San Pancrazio, Verona. This was someone nearby, someone familiar, and because I was already working within the neighbourhood, it seemed natural to explain what we were doing with Saving the Burning Library.

I spoke about some of the conversations I had been having with older residents, including memories connected to the Second World War, and I raised the possibility of conducting an interview.

The answer was no. There was no confrontation. The conversation remained friendly and even humorous. Nothing went wrong between us. The person simply did not want to be interviewed, and that was enough. Yet the encounter stayed with me because it challenged an assumption that can easily enter community fieldwork without us noticing it: the belief that proximity creates participation.

It doesn’t.

A person can live beside you, know you personally and still have absolutely no interest in becoming part of your documentation. Meanwhile, somebody you have never met may open their home, share photographs, introduce you to other people and become one of the richest knowledge holders in the entire Collection.

That difference is worth understanding.

The Nearest Person Is Not Necessarily the Right Knowledge Holder

When we enter a community, proximity can create an illusion of access. We naturally begin with the people we already know because those relationships feel easier. A neighbour is nearby. A friend already knows us. A familiar business owner may recognise us. There is less distance to cross before starting a conversation, and that can certainly help us explain the project.

But access is not the same as relevance, and familiarity is not the same as willingness.

A friend may say no. A neighbour may say no. Someone you have known for years may have no interest in being documented. Another person may possess knowledge that would be extremely valuable to the Living Library and still decide that they do not want to share it publicly. None of these decisions makes the person difficult, and none automatically makes the fieldwork unsuccessful.

The Narrative Engineer therefore needs to look for an intersection of three things:

• Relevant knowledge — does this person carry experience, memory, practice or evidence connected to what is being explored?
• Willingness to participate — does the person actually want to contribute?
• Appropriate consent — have they understood what participation involves and agreed to the relevant form of documentation?

If one of these is missing, we should not manufacture an interview simply because the person happens to be accessible.

This gives us a simple field rule:

The nearest person is not necessarily the right knowledge holder.

A Refusal Is Also Information About the Field

There is a temptation to treat every refusal as a failed conversion. We approached someone, explained the project and did not get the interview. Therefore, nothing was produced.

I think that is the wrong way to understand community fieldwork.

A refusal tells us something important about the boundary of participation. It reminds us that the community is not raw material waiting to be documented. People decide whether they want to enter the archive. They may agree with the purpose of the project and still not want to appear on camera. They may have valuable memories and prefer to keep them private. They may be interested in the documentary but not interested in becoming part of it.

Those distinctions matter.

We had already encountered another version of this during the Porto San Pancrazio work. One family member did not want to be filmed but was pleased by the idea that the documentary would eventually be returned to the community through restitution. That person could still support the work without becoming visible within it. This latest encounter made the principle even clearer: participation has to remain voluntary, and refusal has to remain a legitimate outcome.

That means a Narrative Engineer needs to learn how to hear the word no without immediately trying to turn it into yes.

Do Not Sell the Interview

This may become an important part of Narrative Engineer training because people working on a meaningful project can easily become too persuasive.

We believe the work matters. We know that memories can disappear. We know that an elder may carry knowledge nobody has documented. We may have travelled across the city, prepared equipment and spent hours arranging an encounter. When someone hesitates, the instinct can therefore be to explain more, convince them of the importance of preservation and keep pushing until they agree.

But there is a line between explaining the project clearly and selling someone into participation.

The Narrative Engineer’s responsibility is to explain what we are doing, answer reasonable questions, describe how the material may be used, clarify rights and invite participation where appropriate. Once the person understands enough to make an informed decision, the decision belongs to them.

If the answer is no, respect the no and continue.

That is particularly important for Saving the Burning Library. If our objective is to build trust with communities, then the quality of participation matters more than increasing the interview count. Ten interviews collected through pressure would not demonstrate a stronger methodology than five interviews given freely by people who understood why they were participating.

In fact, the ability to accept refusal may itself become one of the tests of whether the methodology is genuinely community-centred.

The Community Does Not Owe Us Its Knowledge

There is a deeper principle underneath this. The fact that knowledge is valuable does not automatically give us the right to collect it.

The fact that somebody carries a story that may disappear does not remove their right to decide what happens to that story. The fact that an elder may be the last person who remembers something does not mean a researcher, filmmaker or Narrative Engineer can simply claim that memory in the name of preservation.

This creates a tension at the heart of Saving the Burning Library. We are trying to preserve knowledge before it disappears, but the urgency of preservation cannot become an excuse for extraction.

That means the work has to hold two ideas together:

This knowledge may be important to preserve.

And:

The person carrying it still controls their participation.

Sometimes those two things will align and we will be able to document extraordinary material. Sometimes they will not.

When they do not, respecting the boundary is part of the methodology.

“But You Are Not Even Italian”

There was another part of the conversation that stayed with me. The neighbour asked a very reasonable and interesting question:

“But you are not even Italian. Why are you doing this?”

My answer was essentially that I am interested in this work, I have lived here for many years, and conversations with people in the community have made me increasingly interested in preserving these stories.

But the question deserves more attention than the answer I gave in that moment.

It raises a methodological issue that future Narrative Engineers may encounter repeatedly:

Who has the legitimacy to document a community?

I would not take one neighbour’s question and turn it into a general conclusion about how Porto San Pancrazio views me, how Italians view outsiders, or how communities respond to researchers. One encounter cannot support those conclusions. But it can reveal a question that deserves to remain open.

A Narrative Engineer may document a community they were not born into.

Someone working in London may have been born in Lagos.

Someone documenting a neighbourhood in Paris may have arrived there twenty years earlier from Senegal.

Someone documenting an African community may come from another African country, another ethnic group or another language community.

Even someone born inside a place may still be an outsider to particular families, professions, generations or experiences.

So perhaps the question is not simply:

“Are you from here?”

A more useful methodological question may be:

“How are you entering here?”

You Do Not Need to Own a Community to Care About Its Knowledge

There is a danger on both sides of this question. On one side is the assumption that anybody with a camera and an interesting idea has the right to enter a community and tell its story. That can easily become extraction. The researcher arrives, collects testimony, creates a documentary or academic paper, leaves with the material and may never return.

On the other side is the idea that only someone born inside a community can legitimately participate in documenting it. That would create a different problem. Human knowledge has always moved across relationships, migrations, friendships, professions and encounters. People can develop genuine responsibility towards places they were not born into.

The question, therefore, cannot be answered by birthplace alone. For Saving the Burning Library, I think legitimacy has to be built through practice.

• Do you enter with curiosity rather than assuming ownership of the story?
• Do you explain why you are there?
• Do people participate voluntarily?
• Do you preserve provenance?
• Do you distinguish testimony from verified evidence?
• Do you allow people to correct what has been documented?
• Do you respect what people do not want published?

And crucially, do you restitute what has been created to the community rather than simply taking the material away?

Those behaviours do not magically make someone an insider. Nor do they erase power differences or cultural distance. But they establish a discipline through which an outsider can work responsibly without pretending that the community belongs to them.

Restitution Changes the Relationship

This is one reason the Principle of Restitution is becoming so important to the methodology.

We do not want to enter Porto San Pancrazio, collect interviews, produce documentaries and disappear. The work needs to return to the people and places from which it emerged. The community should have an opportunity to see what has been created, question it, correct it, add missing information, identify other people and continue the knowledge chain.

That changes the relationship between researcher and community.

The model is no longer:

Enter → Collect → Produce → Leave

It becomes:

Enter → Listen → Discover → Capture → Preserve → Interpret → Return → Community Responds → Correct → Expand → Continue

Restitution does not solve every ethical question about documenting a community one was not born into. But it creates accountability. If I know that I will eventually return to Porto San Pancrazio and sit with the people whose community I have documented, I have to work differently. I have to be prepared for somebody to say, “That is not how I remember it,” or “You have missed this person,” or “That photograph is not from the year you think it is.”

That is not a threat to the methodology.

That is the methodology working.

Follow the Knowledge, Not the Proximity

This encounter also connects directly with something Porto San Pancrazio had already been teaching us.

Earlier fieldwork produced the principle:

Follow the knowledge, not the interview list.

Now another principle sits beside it:

Follow the knowledge, not the proximity.

These two rules protect us from different assumptions. The first prevents us from believing that the people we identified before entering the community are necessarily the only people worth documenting. The second prevents us from assuming that the people easiest for us to reach are necessarily the people who should participate.

Knowledge may be somewhere else.

• The person carrying it may be somebody you have never met.
• They may live on another street.
• They may be ninety years old.
• They may operate a business you have walked past hundreds of times.
• They may be introduced by someone you interviewed yesterday.
• They may be sitting in a bar with other elderly residents.
• They may have no digital presence and no obvious public profile.
• The Narrative Engineer’s job is not to make the available people fit the project.

The job is to follow the knowledge towards the people, places, objects and relationships through which it actually survives.

Sometimes “No” Protects the Integrity of the Library

There is another way to think about refusal.

A Living Library built through voluntary participation should contain boundaries. Some people will participate publicly. Others may contribute with restrictions. Some may share an object but not their face. Some may provide a referral but no testimony. Some may attend restitution without ever entering the archive. And some may simply say no to everything.

That means absence itself should not automatically be interpreted as failure.

If everybody we approached agreed to everything, I would eventually begin wondering whether our consent process was meaningful enough.

Real consent produces different answers.

• Yes.
• No.
• Not now.

You can record my voice but not my face.

You can preserve this privately but don’t publish it.

You can use the photograph but not my name.

I don’t want to participate, but you should speak to this person.

Those boundaries make the archive more complicated.

They also make it more trustworthy.

A Message to a Future Narrative Engineer

If you are reading or listening to this years from now while preparing to enter a community, remember that familiarity gives you an opportunity to ask. It does not give you a right to receive.

Your friend does not owe you an interview.

Your neighbour does not owe you their memories.

An elder does not owe you their life story.

A business owner does not owe you access to their workplace.

A community does not owe you its knowledge simply because your project has a good purpose.

Explain the work clearly. Answer questions. Invite participation. Make the implications understandable. Then allow the person to decide.

If they say yes, document that participation responsibly.

If they say no, respect the no.

And if they ask why someone like you is doing this work, do not become defensive. Listen to the question. It may be telling you something important about legitimacy, trust, belonging or how your presence is being understood.

You are not there to prove that you deserve the community.

You are there to behave in a way that makes responsible collaboration possible.

Reality Will Keep Refusing the Original Plan

Perhaps the deeper pattern emerging from all these Porto San Pancrazio reports is not merely a methodology for interviewing people. It is a methodology for what happens when reality refuses to follow our original plan.

We plan a ten-minute interview and discover a thirty-minute intergenerational story.

We return for B-roll and meet another generation of the family.

We interview someone and the conversation causes them to begin searching for historical photographs after we leave.

We go to arrange one appointment and discover several other knowledge holders.

We follow an object and discover that the object was only the doorway to a much larger story.

And now we approach someone nearby, expecting that familiarity might make participation easier, and the person simply says no.

Each time, the field challenges the plan.

And each time, the responsibility of the Narrative Engineer is not to force reality back into the plan.

It is to recognise what the encounter is teaching us.

Sometimes the lesson is follow this person.

Sometimes it is come back tomorrow.

Sometimes it is look at this photograph.

Sometimes it is speak to that elder.

And sometimes the field says:

Stop here. This person does not want to participate.

That boundary is also knowledge.

The discipline is knowing the difference.

So I would leave a future Narrative Engineer with two field rules from Porto San Pancrazio:

Follow the knowledge, not the interview list.

Follow the knowledge, not the proximity.

And when the person standing closest to you says no, don’t treat that as a door you failed to open.

Respect it as a door they chose to keep closed.

Then continue your work.

Because preserving a community’s knowledge begins with respecting the community’s right to decide what it gives you.