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- Convenors:
-
Izabella Main
(Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)
Anna Witeska-Młynarczyk (University of Marii Curie-Skłodowska)
Monika Golonka-Czajkowska (Jagiellonian University)
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- Discussant:
-
Frances Pine
(Goldsmiths College, University of London)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how methodologies of care—understood as ethical, reflexive, and relational approaches to research—can help navigate the complexities of polarized fieldworks. We welcome contributions concerning medical contexts, memory-laden landscapes, or sites of mobility and border-making.
Long Abstract
In an era marked by deepening social, political, and epistemic divides, anthropologists are increasingly called to engage with field sites shaped by conflict, trauma, and contested narratives. This panel explores how methodologies of care—understood as ethical, reflexive, and relational approaches to research—can help navigate the complexities of polarized environments. Whether working in medical contexts, memory-laden landscapes, or sites of mobility and border-making, anthropologists must grapple with how their positionality and methodological choices shape both the research process and its outcomes.
We invite contributions that critically examine:
● how anthropologists adapt their methods in environments marked by polarization, such as conflict zones, divided communities, or contested histories
● what ethical dilemmas and responsibilities arise when conducting fieldwork in spaces of medical vulnerability, memory conflict, or migratory precarity
● whether collaborative and participatory methods genuinely foster trust and reduce epistemic divides—or whether they risk reproducing existing hierarchies and exclusions
● how specific methodological choices may inadvertently reinforce polarizing structures, or conversely, offer pathways toward dialogue, healing, and mutual understanding.
This panel seeks to open a space for methodological reflection and innovation, foregrounding care not only as a research ethic but as a political and epistemological stance. We welcome papers from all subfields of anthropology, as well as interdisciplinary perspectives, that engage with the tensions and possibilities of fieldwork in polarized settings.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This proposal is based on fieldwork conducted in a breast cancer support group during the pandemic. The unpredictability and non-linearity of this experience managed to update my ethical and epistemological perspective, turning me towards the categories of (self-)care as the vehicles of refusal.
Paper long abstract
This proposal is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in a breast cancer support group in Poland. The project, carried out in 2019–2022, was unexpectedly affected by the global pandemic and its consequences. The unpredictability and non-linearity of this experience not only had a broad impact on the manner in which my research was (dis)continued, but also managed, in a spirit of anthropological serendipity (Hannerz 2006), to alter my perspective on what constitutes my fieldwork experience and, above all, what my project is all about. Confronted with the pandemic reality while remaining attentive to the emergent, I took on a different perspective on the embodied practices in the association, as well as on my own research and ethical choices. During this extremely difficult, yet eventful time, I turned to the categories of care and self-care, understood both as ways of ‘continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto & Fisher, 1993) and as the vehicles of resistance (Riccitelli, 2025). Those categories and their potential to challenge different power relations (e.g., responsible for the modes in which women’s association 'should be' operating as well as for what constitutes a 'proper' research approach) serve as both ethnographic subjects and modes (McGranahan, 2016).
Considering care as never neutral and self-care as necessarily vulnerable engagement, I thus explore those notions as inherently involving an ethical and political intervention that affects both the researcher and the process of knowledge emergence.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores how plasma donation as a method created care(ful) links between competing expert groups, donors and patients during the EU policy revision on plasma collection. The anthropologist’s body became a site of (contested) knowledge production and lent immediacy to bioethical debates.
Paper long abstract
Policymaking in the EU relies on channeling often competing sources of information. Lobbying can be understood as an agonistic, networked process of knowledge production mobilizing diverse forms of expertise (medical, experiential, affective, ethical, technological etc.): epistemic communities are (re)created and (re)organized. This paper explores the EU policy revision around blood plasma collection, an increasingly important activity contributing to the manufacturing of life-saving pharmaceuticals, and fulfills critical transfusion-related and clinical needs. The fieldwork involved following the debates, disruptions and (re)formulations of the epistemic community around plasma collection whose members engaged in the creation of a new piece of EU regulation. This diverse group included representatives of the pharmaceutical industry, public blood sector, patient advocates and medical experts whose different ethical, disciplinary and scientific positions prompted debates, competition and friction. The anthropologist entered this field as a plasma donor which proved to be a critical position. Her bodily expertise derived from donation was mobilized by different interest groups for varying purposes (e.g. to prompt debates about bodily exploitation/care work/creation and validity of medical knowledge(s)). It (re)created the simultaneously illusory and tangible link between recipients/patients (using plasma-derived medicines) and donors that often gets radically reformulated in the technologized and commercialized process of pharmaceutical manufacturing. Donation as a sustained practice and method during fieldwork aided fostering caring links with experts and patients alike, became a tool of knowledge production (gradually moving from bodily/sensory to theoretical) and lent bioethics – a contested field in the field – immediacy and corporeality (both for donor and patient).
Paper short abstract
How to research without harming? Based on an ethnography with transmasculine people in Brazil, this paper argues that care functions as an ethico-political method that reshapes fieldwork, redirecting research away from surveillance-prone sites and opening new ethnographic and analytical horizons.
Paper long abstract
What is the researcher’s responsibility when their presence negatively affects the study group’s everyday lives? This question emerged at the beginning of the fieldwork for my ethnography, which examines the care trajectories of trans men and transmasculine people in Brazil through relationships between patients and healthcare professionals. Grounded in feminist and care studies, this research addresses ethical and methodological challenges of conducting research in contexts marked by vulnerability and polarization, proposing care not merely as an analytical lens but as a praxis of ethnographic practice. Healthcare services are highly tensioned environments for trans people, historically shaped by rigid clinical protocols and pathologizing practices. Upon entering the field, two initially planned methodological strategies had to be reconsidered. The observation of clinical consultations was abandoned after dialogues with patients and professionals, as an external gaze was perceived as an additional layer of surveillance that could negatively affect care. Likewise, participation in support groups for trans youth was suspended, since in a polarized social context these groups operate as protected spaces whose dynamics could be disrupted by the researcher’s presence. As a result, ethnographic observation was redirected to reception and waiting rooms. Treated as marginal, these spaces proved analytically productive as the first point of contact with the healthcare system, where names are recorded and demands and solutions are negotiated. I argue that ethnography in sensitive fields requires continuous methodological reassessment. In this sense, care functions as an ethico-political tool guiding research decisions, allowing for the emergence of new and unexpected methodological horizons.
Paper short abstract
Reflecting on fieldwork with Filipino and Sri Lankan migrant women in Bucharest, this paper explores care as persistent tinkering adapting to time scarcity, vulnerabilities, and precarity while questioning reciprocity, positionality, and the limits of ethnographic responsibility.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ongoing doctoral fieldwork with Filipino and Sri Lankan migrant women in Bucharest, Romania, this paper reflects on conducting research at the intersection of medical vulnerability and migration precarity. My interlocutors are embedded in what Parreñas (2001) terms the „international division of reproductive labor”, women caught in global care economies who often lack access to care themselves. Working with women who labor six days a week under extended hours, I have had to adapt my methods to rhythms that leave little space for sustained engagement in the classical Malinowskian style. Reaching discussions of healthcare proves especially challenging, as every encounter requires ongoing adjustment and attunement to both particular and structural vulnerabilities, as well as to specific cultural frameworks of health. When I take their limited free time, I cannot escape the sense that I am extracting their scarce resource for my own ends, colonizing hours they might otherwise rest, call family, or simply breathe. Yet care generates ambiguity. Though I am neither a healthcare practitioner nor a service provider, some interlocutors perceive me as a resource, a „native” in their host country.
These dynamics raise critical questions: What are the limits of care when conducting such research? Can research that depends on such extraction truly serve those it studies? How do we remain accountable when collaboration is neither formalized nor symmetrical?
This paper argues that care, while essential, is never neutral. It must be continuously interrogated as both methodological commitment and site of unequal exchange and expectations.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses ethical dilemmas that arose during my research on memory of racial examinations conducted by German anthropologists in occupied Poland. The research required particular caution in order not to expose interlocutors to negative consequences and to avoid escalating memory conflicts
Paper long abstract
The development of radical views in contemporary world narrows the space for mutual dialogue, understanding, and compromise. Conducting research in polarized communities, especially small ones, poses numerous methodological and ethical challenges. These challenges are intensified when the researcher originates from the community under study.
In my presentation, I would like to share problems that arose during my research on the memory of World War II among the inhabitants of Podhale, my home region. The motivation for undertaking this study was the discovery of German collection of Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit, which contained documents from ethnographic and racial studies conducted by Nazi anthropologists in occupied Podhale. My first steps in the field revealed a number of methodological and ethical dilemmas. The witnesses I found, fearing a return to sensitive events from war period, initially refused to meet with me. Their concerns were not only about dehumanizing racial examination, but also the collaboration of a small group of local residents with occupiers. These reactions made me realize that my research required a special approach: caution and patience in order to earn trust of my interlocutors. This meant that I had to develop appropriate methods for navigating the field, taking into account empathy, care and responsibility. The following issues proved to be particularly important 1) how to collect empirical materials and use them in an anthropological text without exposing interlocutors to negative consequences, and 2) how to navigate the field so as not to escalate existing tensions and conflicts of memory
Paper short abstract
This paper explores ethical challenges in researching difficult pasts, drawing on studies of smuggling on the Polish–Slovak border during and after Second World War. It reflects on the role of empathy in protecting interviewees’ agency while breaking silence around contested histories.
Paper long abstract
This paper reflects on the ethical challenges of researching difficult pasts, based on anthropological and historical work on smuggling on the Polish–Slovak border during the Second World War and the postwar years. At that time, smuggling was a significant element of the region’s social landscape, closely intertwined with the activities of the Polish underground and the cross-border escape of Jews. Yet, as an illegal and morally ambivalent practice, smuggling has remained largely absent from dominant wartime and postwar memory narratives.
Ethnographic research on the memory of smuggling therefore inevitably becomes an act of breaking historical silence. While this can open space for discussion about violence, illegality, and contested pasts, it also raises ethical questions. These concern how to work with witnesses and their families in ways that respect their agency, emotions, and right to remain silent, as well as how to approach archival materials responsibly.
The paper draws on ethnographic research conducted by the author within the project 'Faces of Smuggling in the Polish–Slovak Borderland between 1918 and 1949', supervised by Dr Karolina Panz. It explores how research empathy and practices of care help the research team engage with socially taboo topics and create conditions in which both researchers and interlocutors can navigate the process of breaking historical silence. The paper asks how ethnographic and archival sources can be brought into dialogue to shed light on various aspects of the contested pasts.
Paper short abstract
Based on ongoing activist research in the EU–Moroccan Borderland, this paper explores comradeship as care-based method, asking how friendship and political struggle might enable or constraint ethnographic knowledge production.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores methodologies of care in my ongoing activist research on the emotions and affective arrangements of solidarity within the No Border network—an autonomous social movement that opposes border regimes and supports migrants. Drawing on long-term participant observation in the EU–Moroccan Borderland, the paper explores how care functions not only as an ethical commitment toward migrants and among activists, but also as a methodological lens shaping knowledge production in engaged anthropology.
As both researcher and activist, I became deeply involved in friendships, comradeships, and mutual support with my interlocutors. These bonds were shaped by care, solidarity, and affection, and provided access to intimate knowledge, particularly regarding difficult emotional experiences. Such close engagements however continuously raise questions about my own positionality as anthropologist as well as the emotional labour involved in participating in activist practices. At the same time, everyday practices of care—such as sharing emotional support and collective reflections—became vital tools for managing stress, emotional strain, and the affective weight of both border activism and engaged anthropology.
By exploring friendship and comradeship as method, the paper asks how relational closeness both facilitates and constrains ethnographic insight. It reflects on how care can help navigate epistemic divides between activists and researchers, while academic concerns occasionally take a back seat to the demands of close, ethical engagement. Overall, it situates care not only as an ethical stance, but as an affective and political practice.
Paper short abstract
Sometimes, when researching the situation of young people on the move, conducting interviews is not possible—for example, for ethical reasons—or is very difficult. In my presentation, I would like to consider alternative methods of conducting such research - rooted primarily in materiality.
Paper long abstract
Sometimes, when researching the situation of young people on the move, conducting interviews is not possible—for example, for ethical reasons—or is very difficult if the people in question remain on the move. For the purposes of this presentation, I am using the term “young people on the move” because I would like to focus on the situation of people who have not completed their migration path and for whom Poland is only a temporary stop. In my presentation, I would like to consider alternative methods of conducting such research, rooted primarily in materiality, e.g., documentation collected by institutions or traces and objects left behind. At the same time, the challenge in such research is to respect the privacy of individuals who are not directly involved in the research, for example, when analyzing personal history documented in the case files. The starting point for my presentation will be the failure of the original idea behind my doctoral thesis—to include foreign teenagers without parental care residing in Poland in participatory research modeled on that conducted, for example, in the British context. Due to legal barriers , logistical barriers, but above all ethical barriers, this plan was unsuccessful. For the purposes of this presentation, this will serve as a pretext for me to reflect on alternative methodologies for studying the situation of young people on the move—when conducting research directly or participatively is impossible or could expose those participating in the study to negative consequences.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research in a migrant reception centre in the Canary Islands, I examine care as a methodological and ethical challenge in contexts of urgency and profound relational asymmetry, shaping documentation practices, narratives, and migrants' futures within European border regimes.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a migrant reception centre in the Canary Islands, I analyse the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting research in conditions of extreme vulnerability, intense time pressure, and profound relational asymmetry. I pay particular attention to the tensions between ethnographic objectivity and engagement, asking how "care" becomes not only an ethical imperative and a practical dimension of fieldwork, but also one of the key challenges in such contexts.
I show how decisions made in crisis situations – regarding presence, silence, documentation, or omission – shape people's futures and determine which narratives come to be privileged. I further examine how the need to respond to suffering and urgency problematises ethnographic research. Situating the analysis within the broader context of European border regimes and polarised debates on migration, I reflect on how research conducted in spaces of migratory precarity reveals tensions between humanitarianism and the production of knowledge and power.