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Short Abstract:
In light of the unprecedented circumstances we are facing, from the Covid-emergency to rapid climate change, the panel invites scholars to reflect on the methodological solutions and innovations they have introduced to their research and their implications for the conceptualisation of fieldwork.
Long Abstract:
Our post(?)-pandemic world has taken a new turn: the effects of stasis, itself embedded in lockdowns and self-isolation, work in tandem with a severe crisis enveloping multiple species and itself becoming permanent, while unravelling the structures fast-paced globalisation put in place in recent decades. Restricted or entirely stopped mobility throughout the world has been felt in heightened measures, leading scholars to radically shift how they conduct research. In this situation, anthropologists have re-imagined normative ethics and theoretical models, with the discipline's distinctive method, i.e. long-term participant observation amongst humans, shifting in form and style. With a new emphasis on human-non-human interactivity intersecting with restrictions on spatial mobility, and alongside an increased attention on the affordances digital technologies offer, the panel invites scholars to consider and reflect on the methodological solutions and innovations they have introduced, or attempted to, in their research design. Shifting our core tenets to accommodate for messier, uncertain realities could make possible for the discipline to move beyond the traditional trope of 'being there' as the dominant image of fieldwork practice. To the extent that immersive encounters with alterity are neither solely limited to belonging to the same species, nor symmetrically distributed onto the physical-digital divide, the panel would especially like to hear from PhD students and early career researchers about how their purposeful and novel staging of the event of research in the unprecedented circumstances we have been facing recently, has provided them with alternative sources of materials, reconfiguring in the process what 'fieldwork' entails.