The Safer Fieldwork Project’s Contributions
We are proud to have contributed to the theoretical and methodological debate on fieldwork safety beyond our workshops! Our contributions include:
Our Manifesto
Our manifesto includes our initiative’s motivations, concepts, teaching, positioning, and objectives. We began writing it to summarize the main points of our workshop introduction. However, the more we wrote, the more political our writing became. Apart from what we do and why, our manifesto states how we believe research institutions and academia should change in order to make fieldwork safer for all. We hope our manifesto moves beyond words and inspires action, and are proud of the impact it has, such as when students read it in their fieldwork methodology classes.
Our roundtable
Our roundtable at the 2023 Conference of the German Anthropological Association, titled “Trading Safety for Knowledge? Perspectives on Risks and Well-being in Fieldwork,” questioned the potential consequences – both positive and negative – of prioritizing the physical and mental health of anthropologists over research results. You can find the abstract in the conference program.
We were pleased with the lively roundtable discussion, which profited immensely from our speakers’ diverse perspectives. It was also encouraging to see that the room was nearly full, demonstrating broad recognition of the topic’s importance. The roundtable also sparked discussions on the topic throughout the conference, and we still receive emails from people who remember the roundtable as inspiring!
Our essay on Boasblogs
Together with our speakers, we published an essay on Boasblogs ahead of the GAA (DGSKA) 2023 roundtable. It introduces our key arguments, as well as the speakers’ perspectives on fieldwork safety. The essay highlights two key aspects particularly well. First, how researcher safety shapes our fieldwork practices, and thus the insights we gain. And second, how perceptions of (un)safety are deeply individual and tied to every person’s unique intersectional identity and prior life experiences.
What we really like about the essay is that it brings together perspectives from diverse research projects, highlighting that researcher safety matters regardless of normative ideas of how “safe” or “dangerous” a local context or a research topic may be.
Poster Presentation
Tamara presented a poster about our initiative at the Doctoral Forum of Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation) in April 2024. During the session, it was very interesting to see how PhD researchers from various disciplines reacted to our work. For researchers working in chemistry or biology labs, for example, safety procedures were an everyday phenomenon. To them, it seemed almost absurd that researcher safety needs to be advocated for in disciplines that heavily rely on fieldwork as a method. We hope that our work can encourage fieldworkers to take their own safety as much for granted as lab researchers do.
Laura’s Contributions on Gendered Safety Practices
Navigating fieldwork safety: Gendered violence and security practices in ethnographic research
Based on concepts derived from anthropological security studies that define safety as a complex network of different actors, groups and practices, Laura’s thesis proposes a holistic and relational view of gendered safety in fieldwork. This includes elements of both emotional and physical safety, and considers security practices before, during and after fieldwork. She shows how security networks in anthropology are constructed and expanded, and how they work together to contribute to researchers’ safety structurally and situationally. Laura also explores how people, contexts and ideals can restrict and disable such networks. The research further looks at researchers’ attempts to increase gendered safety in anthropology, and it draws attention to the ambiguous dynamics that shape academic conversations and practices around sexualized violence in fieldwork.
Predicaments of Power: Trust-based violence in ethnographic fieldwork
Establishing trust with research participants is an indispensable part of ethnographic fieldwork. Accounts of sexualized violence in the field, however, show that in some cases such trust relations can also influence situational power dynamics in the field and pose a risk to researchers. This paper proposes a way to closely engage with situational power shifts in the field by examining different underlying processes of establishing trust, assembling capital(s) of power, and exercising violence and resistance. The chapter further explains how established yet problematic tropes and methodology in ethnographic research can facilitate the occurrence of trust-based sexualized violence in fieldwork contexts.
The article was initially published in the book “Sexual Misconduct in Academia,” which was unpublished by Routledge after a legal complaint by an influential professor who publicly self-identified as accused in an autoethnographic piece within the volume. An open letter to the publisher with more than 1800 signatures did not lead to the reinstallment of the book. If you are interested to find out more about the case, we suggest reading this recent blog post.
If you are interested in reading Laura’s chapter, contact her directly at laura.thurmann[at]saferfieldworkproject.de.
Boasblog: From Anxiety to method in a global Pandemic
In a brief blogpost, Laura explores how the pandemic shed a light on considerations about ethics and risks of conducting fieldwork on emotionally challenging topics such as gendered violence.