Format/Structure

This workshop explores how secrecy, redaction, and institutional gatekeeping shape knowledge in political ecology. Through FOI drafting, collaborative reading, and dossier‑zine making, participants rethink research ethics and creative strategies for engaging fraught archives and difficult fieldsites

Long Abstract

The workshop addresses a pressing challenge in contemporary academic research: how to access and interpret knowledge amid institutional barriers, material degradation, and epistemic asymmetries. It centers on fraught archives—redacted documents, inaccessible records, and degraded materials that hinder inquiry into sensitive histories such as war crimes, clandestine operations, environmental violence, and institutional power structures. For many scholars, declassified records arrive blackened out, while freedom-of-information requests are routinely rejected. These bureaucratic barriers persist even as populist pundits operate freely in a post-truth climate.

The workshop examines how classification, gatekeeping, and obfuscation shape knowledge production. By historicizing redaction as a form of epistemic violence (or alethocide, the deliberate destruction of truth), it reveals how state and institutional practices undermine collective life and accountability, aligning with political ecology’s concern for crisis-driven knowledge systems and the entanglement of science and politics.

As anthropologists, political scientists, and historians increasingly “study up” by turning ethnographic attention to powerful institutions, ethical norms often lag, demanding semi-clandestine methods that risk access and emotional burnout. The workshop will therefore also explore researchers’ affective responses—anxiety, complicity, and the wish to “do good” amid moral ambiguity.

Focusing on both theory and practice, the workshop spans various political and geographic contexts through analysis of FOI processes, declassified files, and institutional ethnographies. Activities include drafting FOI requests, collectively interpreting redacted materials, and creating dossier-zines—hybrid publications combining reflection, found material, and visual annotation to reimagine how knowledge and secrecy converge. Participants will be encouraged to bring material (visual or text-based) related to their research which can be annotated/modified/collaged.