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- Convenors:
-
Luisa Enria
(LSHTM)
Mats Utas (Uppsala University)
Myfanwy James (LSE)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Understandings of crises depend on the stories we tell about them, but crisis narratives are never passively accepted by those they purport to describe. We invite ethnographic accounts of 'epistemic navigations': how people affected by crisis appropriate, resist and engage with crisis framings.
Long Abstract:
We live in a time of interlocking crises—from environmental collapse, to protracted conflict and recurrent epidemics. The way we come to understand these crises depends on the stories we tell about them. From media and policy reports to anthropological research, crisis narratives offer portrayals of root causes, descriptions of victims and perpetrators, proposals for intervention and forecasting of future risks that all shape how we think about what is possible, or what is off limits. These narratives have material effects, but they are never passively accepted by those they purport to describe. In this panel, we seek contributions that focus on how people affected by crisis appropriate, resist and engage with different crisis framings. These framings might be produced by aid intervenors, the media, or different political authorities. We are especially interested in ethnographic accounts of everyday ‘epistemic navigations’ (Enria 2019), that is, practices used to mediate diverse or conflicting forms of knowledge in times of emergency and types of tactical ‘shapeshifting’ (James 2022) that help people fashion different identities and reposition themselves to manage highly uncertain political terrains. How is crisis knowledge done and undone through everyday efforts to survive? What is obscured or hidden through these processes, and what alternative forms of knowledge become (in)visible? This includes reflections on the role of the anthropologist as a producer of knowledge, as well as an observer or challenger of official narratives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Myfanwy James (LSE)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the epistemic navigation conducted by Congolese humanitarians whilst negotiating access with rebel groups in eastern DRC. Humanitarians become shapeshifters: they play different roles for different audiences as a tactic of social navigation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the epistemic navigation of Congolese humanitarians whilst negotiating access with armed groups in North Kivu, in east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Humanitarian agencies have been providing assistance in the region for decades. In order to operate, they need to negotiate access with a range of different political authorities and armed groups. Congolese humanitarians learn to become shapeshifters: they fashion different identities and reposition themselves for different audiences as a tactic of social navigation in highly uncertain political terrains. Because humanitarians encounter risks related to their perceived identity, they construct and reconstruct their identities in real time in order to facilitate the delivery of aid, and to manage their own safety. This involves playing upon identity categories and personal histories, situating themselves tactically during encounters with different armed actors through creative modes of self-fashioning. To do so, they appropriate and resist different crisis framings about the conflict, playing with the binary identities that are produced such as autochthonous/non-autochthonous, local/non-local, or armed combatant/apolitical women and caregiver. Shapeshifting is part of the relational and interpretive labour of local humanitarians which often remains hidden behind the discourse on humanitarian principles, and another example of the creative processes of epistemic navigation conducted by people working in contexts of uncertainty.
Luisa Schneider (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Respondents whose lives are depicted by crisis narratives begin spectacular performances of such narratives. They offer professionals enacted stories while concealing their lives. This raises questions about power, crisis knowledge, and how disguise and revelation molds its own reality.
Paper long abstract:
"They won’t stop writing about us nor change what they write. Let us at least benefit too.” Mr. Bangura guided a team of American development workers through his Susan’s Bay home in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He introduced them to his family, hosted them, and proudly showcased the recycled toy cars he crafts for community children, promoting a circular economy. However, a news article later depicted his daughter in a context of parental neglect and children playing in hazardous and unsanitary conditions.
Mr. Schonfeld allowed a film crew to spend a day at the Leipzig street camp he established, offering a secure home for employed rough sleepers from diverse backgrounds. This narrative was condensed into a short film focusing on drug use and cycles of addiction. Rather than enduring the ongoing emotional labor of correcting narratives that oversimplify tales of resilience into stories of disaster or addiction, some research collaborators begin performing according to the expected narratives. Instead of being excluded from narratives about their lives, they now engage in spectacular acting to portray the stories that researchers, journalists, and practitioners profit from. These tactically performed revelations that confirm preconceived narratives, allow private lives to remain concealed and keep spectators at a distance. This raises intriguing questions about who truly holds power, the intertwining of crisis narratives with crisis responses, and how a relationship characterized by multiple disguises and selective revelations shapes its own reality.
Luisa Enria (LSHTM)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on research in Sierra Leone, this paper follows the epistemic navigations of an epidemiologist, a traditional healer and an anthropologist as they attempt to curate knowledge about communities for humanitarian health response mechanisms.
Paper long abstract:
Humanitarian health organisations are increasingly concerned with the role of ‘communities’ in responding to epidemics. Communities are ‘where epidemics begin and end’, and as such they are portrayed in dualistic ways, through narratives or risk and resistance on the one hand and as potential partners and repositories of information useful to guide a response on the other. New methods such as community-based surveillance or the inclusion of the social sciences in disease control toolkits are heralded as opportunities to sharpen epidemic ‘intelligence’. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork across different outbreaks in Sierra Leone, this paper explores how people navigate the knowledge economies generated by health emergencies. It follows the experiences of three people in their attempts to (re)position themselves in relation to outbreak response mechanisms: an epidemiologist, a traditional healer and the author, an anthropologist. The paper traces their individual epistemic navigations through their efforts to curate knowledge about communities for the response, in the form of daily situation reports, social science expertise and the performance of ‘community knowledge’. In this process, it also pays attention to the acts of concealment and contestations that lie beneath the production of official epidemic knowledge. Finally, by reflecting on encounters between our three protagonists, the paper also sheds light on the everyday negotiations between ways of knowing the world that are at the heart of crisis management in practice.
Simon Turner (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
By comparing the anticipatory practices of preppers and refugees, I argue that they are claiming their own futures, providing alternative epistemologies and ontologies of what the future might bring, and challenging the hegemonic future narratives of states and other public authorities.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I compare the anticipatory practices of preppers and refugees, claiming that both can be understood as a means to address anxieties about future calamities that the state is perceived to be unable or unwilling to deal with. Preppers often prepare to “bug in,” which involves stocking up on various material goods that are meant to get them through the potential disaster by staying in place. They pull potential futures into the present, as they prepare to “move” into a radically different future – after the disaster. Refugees, on the other hand “bug out,” in order to find safety from perceived future disasters. In both cases, they are actively taking their futures into their own hands, reclaiming political subjectivity. The political possibilities that emerge, subvert the temporal authority of the state. States and other public authorities govern not just through controlling the temporality of the present but also by providing predictions of the future and by distributing hope. They provide hegemonic ways of knowing the future and of preparing for it. I argue that preppers and refugees are claiming their own futures, providing alternative epistemologies and ontologies of what the future might bring. In short, when states claim that the future is safe, as long as citizens follow its rules, preppers and refugees doubt the certainty of such futures and prepare themselves for possible disastrous futures. I argue that “bugging in” and “bugging out” create unruly subjects, better understood in terms of temporal politics than spatial governance.
Andrew Littlejohn (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
What role do material traces play in how people navigate the epistemic challenge of knowing and narrating disasters and other crises? This paper explores this question by examining attempts to leverage the knowledge produced by Japan's tsunami ruins within conflicting social and political projects.
Paper long abstract:
What role do the material traces left by disasters and other crises play in the stories we tell about them? In particular, the stories we tell about what the crisis was and how we can know it? In 2011, a tsunami struck northeastern Japan following a magnitude 9.1 earthquake. This paper explores how survivors incorporated the ruins it left into the stories they told about what the ‘disaster’ (shinsai) was and what practices those stories in turn depended on and enabled. The ruins in question include remains of government buildings, elementary schools, police boxes (kōban), and the seawalls supposed to protect people. I examine attempts to integrate tsunami ruins narratively into social and political projects by investigating how different groups mobilized interpretations of those ruins to reveal “what went wrong” and thus should be done. In some narratives, tsunami ruins functioned as what I call ‘critical allegories,’ or objects interpreted as revealing the fraught histories of inappropriate development that produced them. However, other survivors and officials argued that ruins revealed nothing more than the tsunami itself. In preserving them, the latter sought to institutionalize dominant accounts of what had gone wrong. And by doing so, they provided support, sometimes inadvertent, for policies seeking to further develop the coastline. By exploring the conflicts between these groups, the paper asks how people navigate the epistemic challenge of knowing and narrating ‘disaster’ and what role conflicts over their material traces play in this.
Mats Utas (Uppsala University)
Paper short abstract:
Knowledge of civil wars and their aftermaths is co-produced through negotiations between researcher, research broker and local communities. With a focus on the researcher/broker/community nexus, this paper locates continuities of colonial hierarchies in post-colonial research practices.
Paper long abstract:
Knowledge of civil wars and their aftermaths is co-produced through continuous negotiations between researcher, research broker and local communities. With a focus on the researcher/broker/community nexus, this paper locates the troubling continuities of colonial hierarchies in post-colonial research practices, but at the same time see potential for a creative space of co-production, or potentially a structural hole, to speak with Burt (2004). In this paper, we in particular make use of elements of time and space as prisms to understand the continuity and change of global, in particular northern, research practices in war and post-war settings. The paper draws on a dialogue between James, a southern research assistant/broker and Mats, a northern researcher. Together we have about 60 years research experience from West African warzones, in particular Sierra Leone. In addition, this paper draws on interview material and workshop discussions with 14 Sierra Leonean research brokers active during and in the aftermath of the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991-2002).
Christoph Vogel (Ghent University) Josaphat Musamba (Ghent University Belgium)
Paper short abstract:
Brokerage, mediation or navigation are important concepts for the production of crisis knowledge. While valuable to understand social dynamics of crisis, we reverse the gaze to look at how researchers become actual brokers of crisis, how that affects epistemic frames and what tensions arise thereof.
Paper long abstract:
Concepts such as brokerage, mediation and navigation have a long tradition in anthropological studies of social transformation. Ethnographic theory and empirical accounts of crisis, conflict and war are often concerned with the agency, role and power of those operating on the fringes of (in-)visible institutions and networks, and in spaces marked by rapid change, risk and violence. Yet, if these concepts offer an equally rich toolkit to understand the agency of researchers themselves, scholarly analyses rarely reverse the gaze.
Our paper explores how researchers, allegedly objective observers, become brokers of truth and truism in situations of crisis. Employing an auto-ethnographic perspective, we leverage our research experience in eastern Congo – where protracted armed conflict overlaps with environmental risk and periodic epidemics. In this setting of interlocking crises marked by historical contestation over facts and fiction and a disconnect between local sense-making and global portrayals, the role of researchers is no longer restricted to knowledge production but includes broader questions of framing and the “public afterlife of ethnography.”
Analysing our own entanglement as brokers between active stakeholders of crisis and conflict and broader public narratives, we take a critical look at our own practice of “epistemic navigation” and “shapeshifting,” and often unintended, unwitting strategies of adaptation, emulation and positioning. In so doing, we argue that scientific objectivity may not be unmade per se but can be significantly constrained by tactical agency and attempts to mediate conflicting knowledge, politics and discourses across increasingly ‘glocal’ spheres.
Beata Kowalczyk (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland) Sayaka MORI (Kochi University)
Paper short abstract:
We draw on ethnographic research in southern Japan to show how citizen science operates as a paradigm of knowledge parallel to official expertise. Our talk invites reflection on disaster management and collaboration between government and civil society in building disaster resilient communities.
Paper long abstract:
In summer 2020, record rainfall caused extreme and unexpected flooding in southern Japan. In the Hitoyoshi-Kuma region, citizen scientists (Irwin 1995; Polleri 2019) from the local non-profit organisation (Tewatasu-kai) documented the scale and impact of the disaster by collecting a wealth of empirical data during the flood and the weeks that followed. The report based on this material has been offered to the local authorities as knowledge to be used in planning future flood prevention measures. However, as it presents alternative views to the official assessment of the cause and course of the flood, the government refuses to recognise the legitimacy of citizen science and thus to address any of the concerns raised by its analysis. Instead, the authorities impose their narratives about the floods, which serve to legitimise the implementation of centrally planned prevention and recovery policies.
This presentation draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted in the Hitoyoshi-Kuma region to explore the ways in which disaster knowledge is produced and operated in post-disaster contexts. We will demonstrate how citizen science develops and operates as a parallel paradigm of knowledge that is undermined by government expertise. This leads to conflict and an increased sense of insecurity within the community, which in turn weakens their resilience to future disasters. Discussing the production and operation of competing, parallel framings of disaster, invites broader reflections on the approach to and management of disaster and its aftermath, on cooperation between government and civil society in building disaster-resilient communities, and neoliberal governance of vulnerable groups.
Sohini Sengupta (Tata Institute of Social Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
Evolving relationship between climate anomalies and social adjustments are visible in the contested drought narratives in India. Memories of farmers describe droughts as irreversible adjustment to development, in drought policy, resolution rests on personal responsibility and technological miracles.
Paper long abstract:
Evolving relationship between climate anomalies and social adjustments that are forged through contested narration of droughts, are influential for social and institutional decision making. Framing of drought as a crisis of food, hunger and endemic nutritional deficit, centre agricultural production, entitlements of rural labour, individual distress and life course vulnerability (maternity, childhood or age). Droughts as a problem of measurement in recent framings, shifts to sophisticated remote measurements of weather anomalies and popular communication of the same through viral stories. Based on my anthropological research among central Indian upland communities and changes in drought policy manuals, I show how droughts are remembered, narrated and reported by differently situated social actors. Memories of east-central Indian tribal and women farmers, who experienced drought through the era of ‘agrarian improvement’, death, eviction and labour bondage, describe landscape and social transformation through stories of nostalgia, heroism, exploitation, sacrifice and irreversible adjustments. Discussions about recent droughts (2016-17, 2023-24) in policy, news, and social media, either decentre or instrumentalise rural distress by drawing attention to the inevitability of crisis, greater role of personal responsibility, jingoistic framing of culpability and technological miracles. Stories of planetary transformation generate expectations ‘to develop viable modes of living’ that may require engagement with diverse ecologies and social experiences. Here dominant drought policy narratives falter, as their theories and ideologies of crisis and resolution, submerge the textured memories, and yet to be uncovered histories of environmental collapse and response failures, that should be included in the evaluations and expectations of just futures.
Birgit Bräuchler (University of Copenhagen) John Postill (RMIT University)
Paper short abstract:
We explore the different temporalities involved in the hybridly mediated construction and experience of global polycrises like Covid-19 or the Ukraine war
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, the notion of ‘polycrisis’ – a dynamic set of interconnected global crises such as Covid-19 or the Ukraine war – has gained traction in academia, the media and at global events like the World Economic Forum or the UN Climate Change Conference. Although there is a growing awareness that no major crisis can be analytically isolated from other such crises (Bures 2020), still largely missing from the scholarship is a media angle. As a result, we know very little about the role of media in the making of a polycrisis. The existing literature suggests that polycrises shape the way people use social media and that these media are increasingly used to frame and maintain them. In this paper, we explore media as instrumental tools for the production of crisis through the proliferation of narratives of polycrises that affect both those producing and those experiencing them. To this end, we look at two groups of people, drawing on two different kinds of ethnography: one about public figures who are key in creating, popularising and accelerating the polycrisis framing; and another that draws from existing (media) ethnographic studies of how specific groups of people experience the intersection of multiple crises in ‘hybrid media systems’ where old and new media interact (Chadwick 2017). We focus on the different temporalities involved in the hybridly mediated construction and experience of polycrisis.