In June this year, our co-founder Kira Kreft decided to leave our initiative to follow her long-desired career path in international development cooperation. Kira has enriched our initiative in many ways, particularly with her versatile experience in working abroad, and her practical and analytical approach to risk assessment. We enjoyed building up the initiative with Kira, and we have fond memories of planning the workshops and practicing the group exercises together.

Thank you for the amazing collaboration throughout the last two years. It was great having you in the Safer Fieldwork Project, Kira!

Encouraging a wider debate on safety in (ethnographic) fieldwork has been one of our main goals since the very beginning of this initiative. To this end, we host a roundtable at the Conference of the German Anthropological Association in Munich this year! We are more than happy that researcher safety features in the conference program, and hope that our contribution will spark greater awareness of the importance of the topic.

We will talk about topics including:

– the consequences of experiences of unsafety and violence for researchers, as well as our discipline,

– safety and inclusiveness of our discipline for researchers with various intersecting positionalities, 

– the limits of our discipline if we take the emotional and physical safety of researchers as a goal of ethnographic projects

We are very much looking forward to the discussion and hope for a large and diverse audience. The roundtable will take place on July 27th from 11:00 – 12:30 in room M 209, join us if you can!

We have several new things to share! First of all – as you have noticed – our website is online. There are some things we will add in the near future, including a position paper detailing our approach to fieldwork safety, so feel free to come back soon!

Also, we currently have two workshops scheduled, one at the post-graduate program (DFG-Graduiertenkolleg) “anschließen – ausschließen” at the University of Cologne in October, and one in an undergraduate seminar at Goethe-University in December.

In Cologne, we will hold our two-day workshop “Beyond Tales of Heroism” (See our section “Our Project” to learn more!). Developing this workshop format is the first thing we did together as an initiative about one year ago, so revisiting it definitely brings back some nostalgia! At the University of Frankfurt, we are invited to join a double-session of a methodology seminar, where we will hold our three-and-a-half-hours workshop “What could possibly happen?”. While the basic structure of the workshops remains the same, we always adapt the focus and our examples according to the people who register for our workshops.

And we are of course thrilled about our roundtable “Trading Safety for Knowledge? Perspectives on Risks and Wellbeing in Fieldwork” at the 2023 conference of the German Anthropological Association! The Call for Papers is still open until December 15, we are very much looking forward to your contributions. You can find our abstract here, feel free to write us if you have any questions!