Paper short abstract:

Vulnerabilities can be devastating but they also connect people across differences and inequalities, allowing new forms of exchange, solidarity and care to emerge and thrive in fieldwork and academic institutions.

Paper long abstract:

While vulnerabilities can deeply affect researchers’ physical and emotional well-being, they are also powerful and revealing encounters with what makes us human in an entangled and unequal world. Building on reflexive and feminist anthropology, we introduce the concept of “reciprocal vulnerability,” recognizing that vulnerabilities are relational, shifting, and situational experiences and positionalities that can connect people across differences and inequalities, allowing new forms of exchange and reciprocity to emerge and thrive in fieldwork and anthropology more generally. Creating bonds of care and solidarity with others, including interlocutors and colleagues, reciprocal vulnerabilities can support anthropologists from all walks of life in their recovery from harmful and devastating experiences in the field and in academia. We therefore see vulnerabilities as a possible and common ground for an institutional ethics of care and solidarity for and with our students, colleagues and research participants, in which the exposure to harm or violence is neither invidualised and silenced nor heroicised.