Contribution short abstract:

I would like to contribute to the workshop with exploring positionalities in mutually vulnerable field and academic encounters.

Contribution long abstract:

While researching dwelling in emptying landscapes, I have often found myself in field situations with my interlocutors that revealed our mutual vulnerabilities. Our roles and boundaries were continuously shifting and often violated. While at one point my bodily presence in the site was an invasion, a trespassing in the life of a much too scarred community, in other moments my bodied self may have been vulnerable to anger, frustration, disillusionment, or even minor aggressions from behalf of an unfriendly environment. Methodological decisions could alter the course of my research, but monitoring possible) unintended consequences of research processes was a constant necessity. While vulnerabilities in the field were both positive and negative as experiences, and both aided and made my research more difficult, bringing these concerns back from the field and into a multitude of academic contexts, was also always a risk. Mapping these relations in the context of this workshop would provide an opportunity for me to compare my experiences with those of others, and possibly challenge both my and other’s perceived positions in our respective narratives.