Description
This book focuses on the emotional hazards of conducting fieldwork about or within contexts of violence and provides a forum for field-based researchers to tell their stories. Increasingly novice and seasoned ethnographers alike, whether by choice or chance, are working in situations where multidimensional forms of violence, conflict and war are facets of everyday life. The volume engages with the methodological and ethical issues involved and features a range of expressive writings that reveal personal consequences and dilemmas. The contributors use their emotions, their scars, outrage and sadness alongside their hopes and resilience to give voice to that which is often silenced, to make visible the entanglements of fieldwork and its lingering vulnerabilities. The book brings to the fore the lived experiences of researchers and their interlocutors alike with the hope of fostering communities of care. It will be valuable reading for anthropologists and those from other disciplines who are embarking on ethnographic fieldwork and conducting qualitative empirical research.
Table of Contents
1 Entanglements of fieldwork: an introduction
Nerina Weiss
2 Unspeakable:silences and silencing around fieldwork amid violence
Samira Marty
3 Drawing on your inner anthropologist: some tools for violent and difficult ethnographic fields
Ivana Maček
4 A cautionary and hopeful tale about experiencing, thinking with, writing through, reflecting on, and teaching the emotional in ethnographic fieldwork
Jastinder Kaur
5 The fieldwork of never alone: reframing access as relationships of care
Cari Tusing
6 ‘You are one of us’, but I wasn’t: managing expectations and emotions when studying powerful security actors
Erella Grassiani
7 Conversations about violence during fieldwork in Colombia
Colleen Alena O’Brien
8 Staying sane and safe in Israel/Palestine: a foreign researcher’s reflections on fieldwork across boundaries
Andreas Hackl
9 Involved and detached: emotional management in fieldwork
Anna Hedlund and Steven Sampson
10 On Catalina’s silence and the things about her I still do not know how to say
Simone Toji
11 Side effects: how fieldwork and ethnography helped me reclaim my life
Molly Hurley Depret
12 Violent experiences, violent practices: caring and silence in anthropology
Lena Gross
13 Hospitality and violence: writing for irresolution
Aya Musmar and Ann-Christin Zuntz
14 Getting closer to the skin: writing as intensity, writing as feeling
Omer Aijazi
15 Cherry blossoms and grilled lamb
Eva van Roekel Cordiviola
16 Making common cause: Ethics a politics, anthropology as praxis: an afterword
Linda Green
