Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation explores the complexities of conducting fieldwork at the interface of legality and illegality in relation to care and responsibility, both institutional and disciplinary. I ask where care should originate from and where it can be embedded into ethnographic work at the interface.

Paper Abstract:

This presentation explores the complexities of conducting fieldwork at the interface of legality and illegality in relation to the ideas of responsibility and care – both institutional and disciplinary. Drawing on three years of fieldwork in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank (OPWB) working across political lines in both a Palestinian refugee camp and Israeli settlement, I reflect on the numerous ambiguities, contradictions, and negotiations I faced in this work. In so doing, I highlight the flexibility and ambiguity of the ethnographic method while turning the lens back on the institutions and departments hosting our work, and our role as anthropologists. Research at the “interface” is often valued highly, causing researchers conscious of the pressures of career advancement to conduct research that can often place ourselves at risk.

Making sense of the ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions, and negotiations at this intersection necessarily involves careful thought about protecting our interlocutors, often at the expense of our own wellbeing. Drawing on three examples of such interfaces from working in an occupied, violent, and politically fraught setting, I ask what we as a scholarly community and the institutions hosting our work can do to care for each other in the process of such work. I therefore engage with the notion of the “interface” as existing both between legality and illegality, but also within dynamics of professionalism/unprofessionalism and responsibility/freedom to conduct research. Ultimately, I use this session to ask where care should originate from and where it can be embedded into ethnographic work at the interface.