Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Fieldwork is an ongoing activity even after site visits are over, especially in contexts of catastrophe. I address how fieldwork of this kind affects our knowledge practices, enactments of the world, and our entire lived experience. I base this on 12years of research on the Colombian armed conflict.

Paper long abstract

Inspired by from feminist and decolonial scholars, in this talk I propose to attend to fieldwork as an ongoing activity that continues to occur long after we finish our encounters with interlocutors, site visits, document reading and so on. Especially so when doing ethnographic work in contexts of catastrophe, death, and violence. The experience of discomforting and even painful fieldwork shapes the entire research practice from how we relate to our material to how we write about it. This is so beacuse challenging fieldwork experiences tangibly affect our bodies and emotions in ways that must be acknowledged, as it is from our flesh that we produce the knowledge that we share.

Hence, making ourselves vulnerable and acknowledging such vulnerability alongside other flesh-related effects of doing ethnography in catastrophic contexts is an opportunity to explore how our enfleshments produce very specific kinds of knowledge. More than that, addressing such discomfort and pain enables us to account for how our entire being and lived experience become entangled with the research topics we engage with and helps us enact the world in particular ways.

I base these considerations on more than twelve years of working ethnographically on matters of the Colombian armed conflict, ranging from forensic victim identification to the search for forcibly disappeared persons. I present a reflexive, auto-ethnographic piece on my experience of my path to recover from vicarious trauma and its relationship with the world I want to contribute to enact.