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- Convenors:
-
Juergen Schaflechner
(Freie University Berlin)
Max Arne Kramer (Zentrum Moderner Orient)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
How can anthropologists working with persecuted communities and at-risk activists present in-depth ethnographic accounts of precarious lifeworlds while guaranteeing interlocutors’ safety in authoritarian and digital media-saturated environments? The answer is often fictionalization. But how?
Long Abstract
How do we guarantee in-depth ethnographic knowledge when common strategies of anonymization are no longer sufficient to ensure the safety of our interlocutors? How do we address the predicament that many precarious actors desire online visibility to make their grievances heard but at the same time need to guard themselves against state and societal surveillance? To address such and similar questions, this project is situated at the intersection of anthropology, literary studies, and digital research ethics. It seeks to explore the potentialities and limitations of a method of “fictionalization” as a theoretical framework for ethical writing in anthropology under the conditions of increased surveillance and big data.
Over a decade ago, German anthropologist Richard Rottenburg already noticed the tensions between thick ethnographic description and “decency” in his work on humanitarian organizations (Rottenburg 2009). To steer clear of a scenario where the reader fixates on questions of individual responsibility, Rottenburg fictionalized his ethnographic accounts. In 2025, we argue, it is not only “decency” that demands rethinking the uses of fictionalization. Especially when working with activists and other precarious interlocutors, the interplay of visibility and tracking makes it imperative to develop the question, “What, when and how to fictionalize in ethnographic writing?”
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
A common reason for fictionalization in ethnographic writing is to protect research partners. This involves considerations of vulnerability and the researcher’s authority to decide when and how to fictionalize. This paper discusses the politics of naming and the ethics of fictionalized ethnography.
Paper long abstract
Apart from literary or methodological concerns, the most prominent reason for fictionalization in ethnographic writing is risk mitigation related to those featured in the research output. This involves considerations of vulnerability, but also the researcher’s authority to decide when and how to fictionalize. A fictional story can be an artistic way to present ethnographic findings and a deliberate response to positivist claims about “telling the truth.” It can also be a way of telling a story without endangering those involved, if there is no other way to preserve their integrity. However, regardless of the intention behind its use, fictionalization decontextualizes research partners from their operative identities and environments. At the same time, the researcher who fictionalizes is usually not anonymous, thereby establishing their authorial authority over the outcome. The possibility that their interlocutors may want to reveal their identities does not always absolve researchers of the ethical dilemma of making decisions based on their own risk calculations. However, this can easily become an act of patronage. Who decides which life stories are told, how, and by whom — whether in nonfiction or fiction? As with anonymization, fictionalization usually involves a hierarchical relationship. The author receives a name, unless they choose not to, while those whose story it is do not. Delving into the politics of naming, this paper discusses the ethical challenges, potential, and creative variants of authorship in fictionalized ethnography.
Paper short abstract
How can writing ethnography stay true to the lives of actors without facilitating the “legibility” of an authoritarian state? I answer this by balancing the ethnographer’s will to write against the competing will of the state to know, exploring fictionalization as a solution.
Paper long abstract
Pseudonymization or anonymization is rarely enough to protect the identity of actors when studying small-scale social worlds, especially when those same actors seek public renown. Writing about an intellectual milieu such as that of the Sultanate of Oman, on which I am working as an ethnographer, requires, however, a thick ethnographic description that pays close attention to the positions and specific trajectories of the actors. Analyzing their social properties is indeed essential to understanding their positions within the field and their specific modes of intervention in the public sphere. How, then, can we render ethnographic material while staying true to the lives of actors without exposing them, especially in an authoritarian context where actors constantly negotiate the relationship between their private convictions and their public statements? How can the ethnographer present their research without facilitating the repressive work of a state that strives to make its society more “legible” in order to better control it? Furthermore, how can empirical data be fictionalized without diluting or manipulating it to such an extent that no reader would ever be able to offer a contradictory analysis? These are the questions I will address in my talk by focusing on the techniques I use to write and anonymize my data and the issues they raise. In doing so, I will interrogate the limits of the researcher's will to write when it comes up against the competing will to know of an authoritarian state.
Paper short abstract
How can we ethically engage digitally shared narratives about/by victims of gender violence? This paper explores the ethical limits to narrating cases of victims "revived" through digital memory and activism, and survivors leveraging these spaces as testimonial spaces.
Paper long abstract
I begin by asking: If and when I find violence etched in my digital memory, can I ethically engage with these stories if the victims are killed? Is it ethical to engage with their stories if they survived?
Once celebrated as revolutionary, digital spaces are now shaped by surveillance, repression, and contested visibility. Using cases shared in the Arab(ic) X-sphere, it explores how the realness and corporeality of violence are transformed into public, reductive digital narratives at the convergence of state-sanctioned control and culturally sanctioned repression. Earlier literature views digital platforms as sites for redress and testimony, but recent scholarship highlights their role as extensions of social and political structures, where testimonies can be discredited, surveilled, or weaponized. These dynamics are particularly relevant when a victim is assaulted and killed, as hashtag activism and trending feeds facilitate mobilization both online and offline. However, when survivors break their silence, their bravery is often rendered obstructive and subject to control and silencing. This paper contributes to debates on how scholars navigate this digital terrain without treating narratives of violence as mere data points. Rather, they are fragments of people’s lives, echoes of pain demanding acknowledgment. Thus, what does it mean to read these stories and witness them? Can one speak on behalf of victims and survivors in a moment marked by desensitization and erasure? With these concerns in mind, this paper engages in a critical discussion of what affordances can be garnered through fictionalization as an ethical research practice.
Paper short abstract
When subjected to strict border regimes, precarious lives often resist fictionalisation. This paper explores object-oriented ethnography as a method for writing about migration at the Polish–Belarusian border beyond the limits of anonymisation.
Paper long abstract
In a world shaped by polarisation understood not as fixed oppositions but as dynamic processes of (re)producing divisions, anthropological writing becomes entangled in fields of power, visibility, and surveillance. In contexts where migration is politically instrumentalised and digitally tracked, conventional strategies of anonymisation are no longer sufficient to protect interlocutors while preserving the depth of ethnographic knowledge. This paper explores the ethical and methodological challenges of writing about people migrating across the Polish–Belarusian border, asking how anthropologists can speak about precarious lives without reinforcing polarising narratives, whitesaviourism or exposing interlocutors to harm.
Drawing on long-term engagement with humanitarian practices under border regimes, I argue that fictionalisation should be understood not merely as a stylistic device but as a situated response to polarising conditions of knowledge production. Rather than replacing ethnographic description, fictionalisation emerges as a fragile and often incomplete practice.
I propose object-oriented ethnography as a way of writing about people on the move through objects that are carried, lost, stolen, or left behind. This approach emerges from autoethnographic engagement with border realities, where the researcher’s own entanglement in regimes of visibility, risk, and responsibility reveals the limits of fictionalisation and necessity of indirect forms of narration. Objects mediate border experiences and often become the only possible narrators of migratory trajectories, enabling ethnographic knowledge to be articulated beyond the reach of conventional anonymisation.
By combining object-oriented ethnography, selective fictionalisation, and autoethnographic reflection, this paper proposes a framework for writing that navigates between visibility and concealment in polarised and surveilled worlds.
Paper short abstract
I will address questions of fictionalization while examining some of the techniques I have used in my ethnographic work on Indian Muslim online activists. I try to show that a concept of "the problem" is crucial to coming to terms with the type and degree of fictionalization required.
Paper long abstract
This presentation will address questions of fictionalization while examining some of the techniques I have used in my ethnographic work on Indian Muslim online activists. The lives of my interlocutors are hyper-securitized; they face legal persecution, and their public personas are often drawn into moral outrage. In my work I have been exploring various ways of turning individuals into characters and altering some texts that may lead to easy identification of individuals. In this presentation, I will critically revisit some of the techniques I have used in my past ethnographic writing to unearth the epistemic and ethical problems surrounding fictionality and referentiality in the attempt to represent the lives of my precariously situated interlocutors in India. If anthropological work takes on degrees of—or islands of—fictionality, I think it is important to ask, in the spirit of the writing culture debate, what kind of genre conventions and tropes mediate the fictionalized parts of what could be called a "patchwork referentiality." Is there a risk of convincing myself a bit too much of the narrative arc I aim to establish through the power of fictional worlding? In other words, how does fictionalization lend a certain worlding effect to our moral parables, dramas, thrillers, and detective stories?
To approach an answer to such questions, I will conceptualize the "problem" as a way to come to terms with the type and degree of fictionalization required.