Paper short abstract:

In this contribution, I reflect on a personal experience conducting fieldwork amid shooting, where, after Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, the risk of stray bullets generated paralysing anxieties that halted my research.

Paper long abstract:

In this contribution, I reflect on my experience conducting research in a neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro where shootings happened frequently, and how the sound of gunfire affected me differently after Covid-19 lockdown measures were put in place, mid-way through fieldwork in March 2020. Armed clashes that I was previously able to place within the web of relations of the neighbourhood had, after lockdown, shifted to and intensified in a different area, where I was residing, but about which I knew little. I then describe my own state of paralysing anxiety and fear after a stray bullet pierced the water tank of the house where I lived, a few meters above my bedroom window. I reflect on these emotions as personal reactions to the impossibility of determining the severity of the risk was under. I propose that, when preparing to conduct fieldwork in violent settings, we must think beyond the bureaucratic framework of risk assessments to consider how different dangers might intersect with personal sensitivities and affect us in ways that may be hard to predict.