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- Convenors:
-
Marion Naeser-Lather
(University of Innsbruck)
Timo Heimerdinger (University of Freiburg)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Knowledge Production
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The panel investigates rules resp. their transgression concerning anthropological research. Such rules may regard positioning, transparency, and the acceptance of research topics. We ask about their discoursivation and their implications for researchers and field partners.
Long Abstract:
Working as ethnographers implies rules which, however, sometimes are bent or broken. This occurs especially in "sensitive" fields testing the boundaries of our discipline, like research in warzones, about tabooed topics, stigmatized groups or "people we don´t necessarily like" (Bangstad). Rules can concern our positioning towards our field (e.g. see debates on solidarity with right-wing informants or action anthropology), transparency about our intentions and results (e.g., towards authorities) and which topics are 'allowed' to research. Rules can be set by the field itself, society, statal institutions, funding organizations and by the scientific community itself. They expose gaps in our research practices, methods, and approaches. They reveal fashions, trends, political, cultural and subject-historical pressures, constraints, and paradigmata.
In this context, the panel addresses the following questions:
• What are the rules concerning anthropological research, how are they negotiated and conceptualized (as conventions or laws), and how is their transgression discoursivized?
• How are those rules connected to power relations within our fields and beyond?
• Do rules constrain or save us? What is at stake when we transgress them? Inhowfar do we empower or endanger others by doing so?
• Inhowfar do certain fields require new approaches? In which cases is breaking or transcending rules feasible, necessary, or might pose chances for the advancement of our discipline?
• Are there (un-)written imperatives to "be on the right side" within the scientific community, and how are they mediated, discussed or enforced?
We invite empirical and theoretical contributions from research settings across Europe.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss the ‘subjectivity v. positionality’ struggle when researching the far right. This is even clearer when the anti-far right movement strikes the far right event that we research. I wonder how prepared we are to be confronted for breaking political, affective and moral rules.
Paper long abstract:
During the last years, far right studies have been increasing. However, ethnography and close-up analysis are not commonly used. The difficulties of access, the very few scholars’ connections in these groups, or their hidden position in the public sphere are some possible explanations. Pilkington (2016: 13) controversially argues that this ethnographic emptiness is caused by the researchers’ desire to keep their hands clean. When progressive researchers perform an ethnography to study the far right, different internal and external problems, and controversies arise. Our subjectivity is confronted against our positionality within the field. How are we seen when we participate in far right events? How does our positionality vary and move depending on who is observing us? What moral rules are we prepared to break to successfully study the far right? How do we negotiate this rule-breaking with our ‘friends’ when we are ‘on the other side’ of the struggle? After one year of participating in different activities, rallies, and demonstrations made by the Spanish populist radical right party VOX, this contribution aims to discuss the struggle between my own subjectivity and my positionality as a scholar when researching the far right. This struggle became even more evident when the anti-far right movement struck the far right events or groups that I was researching. I wonder how prepared we, as progressive researchers, are to assume that ‘our friends’ might confront us because of breaking different political, affective, and moral rules.
Paper short abstract:
Seeking to research failure raises questions about the selection of interlocutors. If suspected in the business world, the authenticity of their experience can be prone to question. Do actors’ self-descriptions have to be taken for granted or who or what decides who has really failed?
Paper long abstract:
Originating in an interest in how people deal with experiences of failure, my research has led me into a field where speakers share their failure stories with an audience, live and on stage. These so called "fuckup-events” aim to work against a hegemonial culture of stigmatization of failure. At first glance, this can be complacently read as ‘on the right side’. However, it demonstrates its contentiousness within the scientific community when the cultural and social setting of this seemingly trendy way of dealing with failure is revealed: Startups, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Coaching. ‘If you really want to learn about failure, you have to look elsewhere.’
Whether it is the labelling of the actors as an epitome of the neoliberal (generally ‘disliked’), the reference to other fields in which the subject matter is perceived to be more ‘obvious’, or the normative rule that research attention should invariably be paid bottom-down: The selection or the authenticity of the interlocutors is contested. Is it naïve to set the actors’ self-description as ‘failed’ as a premise for research or does it follow a sacrosanct rule of ethnography? Is transgressing this rule a critical approach or the attitude of a normative investigator distinguishing between real/fake?
Following research on emotions this paper seeks not to scrutinize authenticity per se, but rather the conditions by which subjects are classified authentically failed. Reactions to the research topic, my anticipations, and defenses, provide fruitful insights into how the failed are dealt with.
Paper short abstract:
What happens when the act of being in the field itself seems like an act of violence? In my paper I will discuss the difficulties of understanding social and ethical rules and boundaries in a field where local people are scarred by recent intrusions into their community.
Paper long abstract:
“Anyway, this experience made me realise, that this whole field(work) is about breaking different levels of intimacies. I now feel that my boundaries have been violated. But perhaps I myself am violating boundaries by being here?” I wrote this in one of my e-mails while on fieldwork in a former mining village, a place and a community that has been marred by an ongoing mining dispute. (Sending e-mails was a way for me to stay sane and connected, but this activity also proved a useful method for deciphering and analysing my experiences.) The more than twenty years-long dispute and uncertainty broke up the community, tore apart families, brought about a disintegration of the formerly stable social and economic networks, and made locals acutely distrustful of and even hostile towards anyone who came to exploit them in any way – including sloppy PhD students and researchers. In my paper I will discuss the difficulties of negotiating boundaries, both spacial, psychological and bodily ones, in a field where it was always unclear whether one is in a position of power or powerlessness, and where interpreting and negotiating these positions was a necessary daily activity in the interaction between locals and Others.
Paper short abstract:
The issues of the so called difficult past require us very often to submerge in sensitive sphere of memory conflicts and cultural intimacy. How to use the archive responsibly in this situation? The case of contemporary memories of anti-communist partisans in Poland also shows this problem well.
Paper long abstract:
The issues of the difficult past, especially experience of violence and domestic conflicts require us to submerge in the world of local disputes, taboo topics, the norms, regulations and practices that usually remain within the sphere of cultural intimacy inaccessible for external observers. While collecting accounts of this topics during field studies, we gather research material that is scientifically fascinating. At the same time, we feel the burden of personal responsibility towards those who permit us to access it. Especially, when the results of archival queries give us knowledge that our interlocutors do not have. How can we act in order not to be epistemologically and morally paralyzed? Is it possible to reach Eriksen's "small world of large issues" and describe it without leaving behind scorched earth and causing the residents to be even more conflicted? The issues discussed in the presentation will be illustrated by examples derived from the research on the contemporary memory conflicts in Poland related to an fight of anti-communist partisans in the post-war period. Their activity evokes until now intense emotions, generates new forms of memory practices and provokes heated debates, in which former secret police archives (collected in the Institute of National Remebrance) play the crucial role nowadays.