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- Convenors:
-
Piotr Goldstein
(ZOiS Berlin)
Mari Korpela (Tampere University)
Riikka Era (Tampere University)
Perla Frida Goldstein
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- Chair:
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Magdalena Nowicka
(DeZIM Institute)
- Discussants:
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Georgeta Stoica
(Université de Mayotte (France))
Doaa Abdullah Nemer Shaheen (Al Aqsa University)
Yasmin Ben-Dor
Ahmed Alaa Al-Deen Saeed Shaheen
Adam Alaa Al-Deen Saeed Shaheen
- Formats:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This roundtable brings together parent-researchers and their fieldwork-joining children. We want to break what is often a taboo for employers, funders and ethics commissions, and think constructively about how such arrangements can be beneficial for all parties involved.
Long Abstract
It is not uncommon for anthropologists who have families to travel to their field sites with children and/or partners. Yet, the practice is somewhat taboo - in most cases, employers and funders do not want to hear about family members accompanying the researcher, and ethics commissions typically do not inquire about such arrangements. Yet, to travel to the field with family is both a practical and ethical decision as it is to travel without the family. If children are left behind, should we not ask what impact it has on them and on the person who takes care of them during the researcher’s absence? What does it mean for this person’s career, wellbeing, etc.? Conversely, if children are taken to the field, how does this impact our research, but also children themselves?
Drawing on previous research (Korpela, Hirvi & Tawah 2016, Hope et al. 2025) and the experiences of the roundtable’s members, we come to discuss challenges and opportunities of researching with children and/or partners. The roundtable brings together (adult) researchers and their children with different perspectives on accompanying fieldwork: parents with small children who recently started research away from home, young adults who can reflect on the past experience of accompanying their parents to fieldwork and teenagers who have been repeatedly joining their parents for research since being small. In the spirit of collaborative social science, we want to include the voices of children and teenagers themselves and think aloud about what needs to be done to make the process beneficial for all sides involved.
Accepted contributions
Session 1Contribution short abstract
Becoming a single parent by choice reshaped my assumptions about “normal” academic life. Reflecting on a short-term fellowship in Japan with my son, I explore the co-constitutive and generative aspects of academic mobility, care, and family and institutional narratives of “family-friendly” academia.
Contribution long abstract
I have always been fiercely independent, so it wasn't surprising to friends and relatives when I became a single parent by choice, having my son in 2022 via an anonymous donor. I naively assumed that he would simply slot into my existing life and routines. I did not anticipate how profoundly motherhood would require me to rethink what “normal” meant, both personally and professionally. While I have benefited from my institution's family-friendly policies, I have come to realise these frameworks continue to assume that care and research are separate domains to be managed rather than co-constitutive aspects of parenting in academia. This tension became particularly acute when I was awarded a prestigious short-term fellowship in Japan in spring 2025. Although professionally exciting, the fellowship brought with it significant emotional and logistical strain. Our time in Japan was academically productive, but emotionally demanding for both of us, further dismantling my earlier, idealised assumptions about the compatibility of my work and solo motherhood that made me doubt my place in academia. However, in this roundtable, I want to revisit our time in Japan specifically through the eyes of my son, his moments of learning, self-discovery and adaptation, and explore the generative dimensions my academic mobility has had on our family unit as well as for my own career optimism. Collectively, I want to reflect on the lived experiences of many academic families and explore, to what degree do they reflect or contrast the institutionalised narratives and policy-oriented language of "family friendly" academia.
Contribution short abstract
In this presentation I reflect with my two grown children how my ethnographic fieldwork periods and visiting scholarships have affected our family's lives and my children's identities and trajectories.
Contribution long abstract
When the mother is an anthropologists, the children should not get too attached to particular locations and people. In this presentation, I reflect with my 20-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son what it has meant for our family that we have lived in India and the UK because of my work, and that I made an ethnogrpahic documentary film in our hometown in Finland. The children share their experiences and reflections on our family's international life and their current views on the mother's profession and research topics. They also elaborate on how the mother's work related family adventures have affected their own identities and life trajectories. Eventually, the mother elaborates on the concept of anthropology as a family business from a more scholarly point of view.
Contribution short abstract
Conducting doctoral fieldwork with my one-year-old son offered insight into the gendered dimensions of research. Rather than impeding my progress, I found that his presence normalized my work and created rapport, shaping my research relations with local women.
Contribution long abstract
The most common question I received when attending mosque classes for participant observation was not “How is your research going?” but rather “How is your son?” During fifteen months of doctoral fieldwork, my primary research assistant was my son, who lived with me in the field from the ages of one to two. While often treated as a marginal concern, bringing my child to the field was not only a logistical reality but an ethnographic benefit: it facilitated rapport, normalized my presence, and shaped my positionality as a female researcher.
As an American married into a Moroccan family and conducting fieldwork in my mother-in-law’s city, bringing my son to field sites drew attention to the gendered dimensions of conducting fieldwork. While my status as a working mother may have been off-putting to some interlocutors, visibly caring for my son allowed me to demonstrate adherence to local gender norms and establish common ground with other women. Conversations about religious life often followed child-rearing advice, situating my research in the context of local motherhood.
More broadly, navigating religious media, particularly television and radio fatwa programs, amid the din of dinosaur play or while cooking dinner provided insight into the consumption of Islamic guidance in domestic contexts. Ultimately, my son’s presence underscored the role of accompanying children in actively shaping fieldwork experiences, allowing me to demystify and normalize my presence in places where a participant observer would seem out of place.
Contribution short abstract
In this contribution, we reflect on over 14 years of joint fieldwork, conferencing and collaborative events. We ask what all of these experiences mean from the perspective of a young person who has been involved in anthropological practice their whole life.
Contribution long abstract
When children join their parents for fieldwork, it is often not only about being in a place where their parent is researching, but also about participating in events, meeting research partners, and, when all parties agree, actively collecting data (e.g., operating the "second camera" or recording sound). Likewise, participating in conferences like EASA is not only about being in a given place, but also about meeting and observing anthropologists, thus somehow unintentionally becoming an "ethnographer of ethnographers". Here we reflect on such experiences and on being the youngest presenter at the conference :).
Contribution short abstract
This argues on conducting ethnographic fieldwork with young children, challenging the taboo surrounding family accompaniment in anthropology. Drawing on lived experience and care ethics, to explore how researching with children reshapes ethics, responsibility, and knowledge production in the field.
Contribution long abstract
This contribution reflects on the practice of conducting ethnographic fieldwork with young children, a reality for many anthropologists that remains largely unspoken within academic institutions, funding structures, and ethics review processes. As I prepare for extended fieldwork with my children, I engage critically with the ethical, practical, and affective dimensions of family accompaniment in research, asking how care, responsibility, and knowledge production intersect in such arrangements.
Anthropological discussions of fieldwork often assume an unencumbered researcher, obscuring the relational labour involved in sustaining family life during research periods. Drawing on care ethics and emerging scholarship on researching with family members (Korpela, Hirvi & Tawah 2016; Hope et al. 2025), this contribution situates accompaniment as neither an ethical failure nor a personal compromise, but as a situated response to structural constraints, gendered expectations, and uneven care responsibilities. Whether children are left behind or brought to the field, both choices carry ethical and affective consequences for caregivers, children, and research trajectories.
Rather than treating children as passive dependents or disruptions, this reflection considers how their presence reshapes field relations, temporalities, and sensitivities, while also raising questions about safety, consent, and institutional accountability. Positioned within the roundtable’s collaborative spirit, my contribution does not seek to generalize but to open dialogue around what supportive infrastructures, ethical frameworks, and institutional recognitions are needed to make fieldwork with family members viable and just. It invites anthropology to take seriously care not as a private concern, but as a constitutive condition of knowledge-making.