Short Abstract:

The panel explores ‘unwriting’ by emphasizing the ethnographer’s body to rethink relationships and (dis)connections in ethnographic practice. We invite contributions on researchers’ embodied subjectivities, fieldwork dynamics, ethnographic authority, and the discipline’s potentialities amid crises.

Long Abstract:

In exploring the broadly understood practices of ‘unwriting’, this panel argues for the centrality of the ethnographer’s body (in motion, in and out of the field) in order to rethink the relationships and (dis)connections between researchers, research participants, and the multilayered contexts of ethnographic practice. Informed by critical feminist theories such as corporeal feminism and affect theories, our production and negotiation of knowledge(s) is always situational and marked by intersectional categories such as gender, class, nationality, and ethnicity (to name a few). Bringing embodied ethnographies to the discussion can serve to unwrite and expand the hegemonic discursive and narrative traditions and also to read and understand ourselves and others, the communities we work with, and our own position within the academy. As we reflect upon the often unacknowledged and underexplored entanglement with our research world, we explore how different positionalities (race, class, nationality) during and after fieldwork affect knowledge production.

We invite methodological, theoretical, and empirical contributions which examine:

• Researchers’ diverse positions, identities, and belongings and how they challenge traditional (disciplinary) boundaries

• How we construct our own embodied ‘ethnographic’ subjectivities

• ‘Out-of-place’ bodies and ‘in-place’ bodies doing fieldwork and their effects

• ‘Authorized voices’ – questioning ethnographic authority and legitimacy in relation with others

• Reimagining the limits/limitations/potentialities of the discipline and our own voices in times of overlapping crises

This Panel has so far received 7 paper proposal(s).
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