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Contribution short abstract

Building on our practice of a joint ethnography carried out together by a young anthropologist and an experienced activist, we argue for relational care as a central feature to make experimental research possible while facing the tensions of academic conventions of knowledge-production.

Contribution long abstract

The present contribution is based on a conjunct research project aimed at bringing together knowledges from inside and outside academia as equals. Through our methodological experiment, which we call joint ethnography, we have come together as a young anthropologist and an experienced activist, separated by an age gap of more than forty years, but united in a common research interest: to understand the strategies of persistence employed by self-organised spaces in and around Exarchia (Athens).

From the very start of our project, we have set out to work together on a base of co-responsibility at all stages, combining our different epistemological backgrounds while engaging with a geographical and cultural context to which none of us had any kind of personal relationship previous to fieldwork. As our method requires permanent dialogue with each other, relational work and mutual care have turned out to be a vital condition for its success. Joint ethnography and our personal lives have become more and more entangled as we have become friends beyond research.

At the same time, we have had to deal with the tensions that emerged from the need to work inside the very academic system whose conventions we were putting into question. All in all, we hope to contribute our grain of sand to opening up the structural constraints of academy that define whose knowledge is considered valuable in anthropological journals, conferences and classrooms.