Paper short abstract:

Departing from studies on embodied reactions to war, queer futurism and harm-related moments in fieldwork, we explore care as a political endeavour that re-orients anthropological times and spaces towards the sustaining of radical interdependence and safety between researchers and communities.

Paper long abstract:

The accelerating world intensifies affects and emotions. These corporeal responses impact the ways we do anthropology, putting our intersectional backgrounds into play when we research, sometimes without being too explicit. We can feel it, while often lacking specific tools to make that critical awareness a place of care and safety in how we produce knowledge. This discussion is a twofold reflection: how we unveil the dynamics of ethics in our fieldwork and how we can recognise them in others. The first part is based on our recent individual work in Russia on corporeal reactions to violence and, in Berlin, the political-affective impact of queer nightlife spaces on the body. The second part is on our current job as guest editors of an issue of a dance research journal dedicated to ethics, risk, and safety in the field. We have invited researchers to contribute their encounters with harm and care strategies shaped by different temporal and spatial locations throughout different layers of power. We outline the poignant points of witnessing the institutional lack of these discussions and recognising these topics as an urgent political endeavour for re-doing anthropology. Guest-editing this journal was a strategy of care, as we could open a conversation between gendered, sexualised, racialised, reduced and categorised embodied voices. This is how we re-do our practice as researchers: we bring our and the author’s testimonies presenting different ways to re-orientate the anthropological gaze in research practices adaptable to time-space-specific affective events unfolding before, during, and after fieldwork.