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Accepted Paper:
‘Mtu ni Watu' – Disclosing Hidden Stories of Fieldwork
Hauke-Peter Vehrs
(University of Cologne)
Richard Kiaka
(Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology)
The project 'Mtu ni Watu - Disclosing Hidden Stories of Fieldwork' is a collaborative tandem project that brings together two researchers from Kenya and Germany and some research assistants to reflect on the assistant-researcher relations and present the findings to an academic and public audience.
Paper long abstract:
The project ‘Mtu ni Watu’ aims to change the perspectives in and on anthropological fieldwork and seeks to amplify those voices that normally receive little attention. To facilitate the views of our assistants – main agents in fieldwork who are usually rendered invisible in the representation of scientific results – they will also re-present the stories of our common research and elaborate on their own reflections of past research experiences. Their narrations are the source of an alternative reading of the research story. Two different settings are considered: the research ‘at home’ (Rao 2002) of a Kenyan anthropologist in Kenya, as well as the research of a white (German) person in a pastoral community in Kenya. We developed a scientific toolbox that deals specifically with the different aspects of assistant-researcher relations from different angles and thus providing early career researchers with insights into questions that often remain undisclosed behind the myth of fieldwork. The so-called Wawili-toolbox is designed in a website format that is openly accessible and illustrates the process of assistance from both the assistants’ and the researchers’ perspectives. The format allows us to elaborate on different aspects, have a multitude of speakers contributing, creating linkages between different stories, illustrations and personal vignettes.
In this presentation, we will revise the experiences we made in the project (that started in January 2024) and reflect on issues like workload, responsibility, the character of our (work) relations, funding, amongst others.