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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in research with communities that are pushed to the periphery. How to honour people's trust in extremely tense environments, how to report on vulnerability and resilience, how to analyse hidden discourses?

Paper long abstract:

In the African Great Lakes region, many communities are confronted with a profound reconfiguration of the space in which they are anchored. The interaction between humans and their natural lifeworld has been fundamentally reconfigured as a result of increased demographic pressure and the impact of climate change. Moreover, agrarian modernisation policies, forest conservation efforts, and ecological protection mechanisms impose new dynamics upon people’s lifeworlds. Many of the communities in question are confronted with profound reconfigurations in their livelihoods, their social tissue, and their interaction with nature.

Over the past twenty years, I have worked with such communities through in-depth qualitative research, both in individual as well as in team research initiatives. Research gave us an insight into people’s layers of vulnerability and resilience, into their hidden discourses and their inventive resistance strategies. At the same time, research confronted us with profound ethical dilemmas to which there are no simple answers. (1) How to gain access to voices in the periphery who are hostile to or affraid of outsiders? (2) How to deal with the hopes of extremely marginalised people in relation to what they think a researcher can do? (3) What to do when our scientific analysis is extremely sensitive and could potentially (even in anonymised forms) be used against vulnerable groups? This paper analyses telling anecdotes and confronts the choices we made to ex-post reflections about what it means to be a researcher.