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- Convenors:
-
Anna Gustafsson
(Stockholm University)
Victor Nygren (Stockholm University)
Hakon Caspersen
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This roundtable focuses on the post-fieldwork period. We wish to emphasise and encourage discussion on responsibilities towards the experiences and emotions of the vulnerable anthropologist leaving and returning from the field.
Long Abstract:
Within anthropology much attention is given to preparation of fieldwork and the time in the field through discussions of methodology, ethics, funding opportunities and the possibilities of ethnography. We build on these conversations by focusing on various responsibilities after fieldwork - towards oneself, one's research participants and colleagues. Although fieldwork is often rewarding and enjoyable, we wish to foreground the ways in which we speak about and handle distressing or disturbing experiences of, for example, violence and harassment, and emotions such as guilt, heartbreak and regrets. How do we responsibly navigate changes in social relationships in the field and at home after research? Moreover, we need to interrogate how vulnerabilities of the home-coming fieldworker are situated within a context of multiple precarities that researchers may face with regards to lack of funding, zero-hour contracts and uncertain job prospects. We are interested in exploring why so little is talked about how vulnerabilities in the field continue to affect ethnographers at home, when similar experiences in a home environment might have been treated differently. What does it mean for our personal wellbeing to distance ourselves from fieldwork, as we often are encouraged to do, in order to understand our data?Based on these and related themes we invite researchers to contribute with reflections around the disciplinary, social, or moral responsibilities that emerge from the difficulties of the post-fieldwork period. Together we can make suggestions around what kind of responsibilities and support systems could be put in place after fieldwork.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to write ethnography collaboratively? What responsibilities and vulnerabilities come with writing together in research projects that cross (post)colonial power lines? This paper reflects on the assumptions, errors and occasional successes of life after fieldwork in a such project.
Paper long abstract:
What does it mean to write up ethnography collaboratively? How is this process mediated by personalities and power dynamics, by temporal and geographical distance, and by technological inequalities? How is it shaped by different ideas about what it is to collaborate, to write, to analyse, or even what counts as ‘data’? How are these points of difference identified and navigated – and can they ever be satisfactorily resolved? This paper tries to begin to answer these questions through critical reflection on the process of writing in a recent project focused on using ethnography to better understand what, if anything, can be done to reduce schistosomiasis transmission in rural Uganda. The part of the project focused on here primarily entails the post-fieldwork relations between three people: one tenured UK anthropologist and two Ugandan Research Assistants who work as professional data collectors, trained to undergraduate level in the ‘social sciences’. All three have wider responsibilities within and beyond the project to the PI, funder, employing institutions and more. Two of the three are precariously employed, and thus vulnerable to the harms, as well as the opportunities, that come with the ‘capacity building’ component of the project. Collaborative research – from design to writing – entails multiple, sometimes contrasting ethical choices. Ethical research practice requires reflection, even when it is uncomfortable. This reflexive paper seeks to do some of this uncomfortable work in order to think through the responsibilities and corresponding vulnerabilities that come with writing up in ‘collaborative’ international research projects.
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to portray the vicissitudes of vulnerable anthropologist post- fieldwork. Learnings from the fieldwork accomplish the life stories and memories, emotions and sorrows of the researcher in a holistic perspective.
Paper long abstract:
Fieldwork is an important component in the discipline of anthropology. It occupies and plays a pivotal role not only in the development of the discipline but also for the people who are engaged in the fieldwork. Majority of the anthropologists who carry their intensive fieldwork shall definitely have their emotions, sorrows, difficulties and memories from their field areas and the people or communities they study. Fieldwork also teach us to accomplish all these different situations and support us to become a trained anthropologist.
The paper draws inferences from the three different field situations and time periods among three different social, cultural and economic settings. All these three settings have certain similarities and differences in relation to the kinds of insights and emotional learnings and anthropological underpinnings. The first field situation is with reference to the Masters fieldwork during December 1997 among the Koya, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) from the Boddugudem village of Bhadrachalayam, Khammam district of Telangana region. The second field situation is during the M.Phil. fieldwork from September 1999 to March 2000 in Kotha Indlu village of the rural hinterlands of Chittoor district of Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh. The final field situation is undertaken for Ph.D. fieldwork among the Sugali Tribe, a semi-nomadic group, during the intermittent periods of 2003-2004-2005and 2006 from Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. During the first field situation, the responsibility and learnings filled with jovial and joyful company of teachers and classmates of the researcher is different from the second and third field settings. The second field context learnings are equally different from the third and first field situations. During this time, it’s a more responsible and more serious fieldwork and emotions are truly engaged the researcher to pursue his career. The last situation is totally different from the other situations though there is a similarity with reference to a tribal people of the rural setting. But, the emotions and difficulties with reference to the study people and the researcher are evolved as life saving and learnings to the researcher. All these situations encompass the vicissitudes of the researcher’s narratives from the study areas and different groups of people. Theses learnings have definitely made a vulnerable anthropologist to cope up with the kinds of risks in the lives of the people in general and research situation and personal narratives of the researcher in particular.
Paper short abstract:
My presentation focuses the experience of vulnerability in building knowledge after fieldwork, where the researcher’s own body was used for the conception of a technological device, namely an exoskeleton. I name this experience “epistemological vulnerability”.
Paper long abstract:
Current developments in robotics, among which exoskeletal devices, have known a constant increase. Originally called “extenders” (Kazerooni 1990), robotic exoskeletons, are “a class of robots that extend the strength of the human hand [or leg n.n., D.B.] beyond its natural ability while maintaining human control of the robot” (Pons, Ceres, Calderon 2008: 8).
Wanting to understand how these technologies transform the realities of the bodies for which they are intended, and thus their embodiment, I conducted fieldwork in centers where exoskeletons are designed, in the frame of a project the PI of which I am. I was allowed by colleagues in robotics to take part in a test for an exoskeleton developed for persons with motor impairments. In this experience, data collected from my walking and breathing during the test was further used to build the algorithm of the device. This brief autoethnographic experience made me sensitive to how the knowledge about my own able body contributes to forge forms of knowledge for impaired bodies. For the interval of the experiment I was “decorporalized” (Crary 1990: 39), quantified (Nafus 2016), and needed to quickly develop technological literacy in order to respond to what my colleagues from engineering sciences needed. Being “objectified” made me in my post-fieldwork stage sensitive to a form of “epistemological vulnerability”, by which I mean my taking responsibility in shaping the object of scientific worlds but also of human bodies other than my own, while simultaneously constructing my own scientific object.