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Paper short abstract

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Uganda, this co-authored reflection interrogates how funding regimes entangle knowledge and capital, asking what forms of engaged, affective anthropology are possible under institutions complicit in the harms.

Paper long abstract

This co-authored reflection draws on our experiences of conducting long-term fieldwork in Uganda and on the profound affective consequences that followed us back into academic life. We approach our experience of burnout as an analytic category, rather than as an individual failing, to discuss the structural tensions between anthropology’s moral and epistemological mandate, and the institutional demands under which knowledge is produced.

We pay particular attention to funding regimes which govern research agendas, to discuss entanglements of knowledge and capital. When the production of knowledge depends upon grants embedded in global economic structures that are themselves implicated in inequality and violence, what forms of inquiry become possible - and which are foreclosed? How can scholars ask for support to undertake intellectually and emotionally engaged research when the infrastructures of support participate in the very “darkness” we seek to analyse?

By taking our own experiences of exhaustion and fragmentation seriously, we aim to reopen questions about anthropological commitment. We argue that being emotionally affected by the field is indivisible from the creation of meaningful knowledge around it, and ask - what institutional arrangements - temporal, financial, collegial - would allow researchers to engage difficult materials without collapse? What would it mean to build academic structures that recognise affective labour as constitutive of knowledge rather than incidental to it? Crucially, what kind of knowledge production is possible under funding structures which are complicit in the production of the harm we study?