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 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.