What a year!
As 2023 is ending, we thought it was a good time to reflect upon the things we managed to do – and the things we are still planning to do – to contribute to making fieldwork safer for all.
Holding workshops on researcher safety is how we started our initiative in the first place. In 2023, we held a workshop and a Q&A session with students in Marburg and Bayreuth. We always enjoy seeing how participants can apply our tools and concepts to develop their individual safety strategies.
We were also thrilled to receive emails from scholars from various disciplines who engage with researcher safety and wanted to discuss the topic with us. Given that we have developed our concepts based on our experiences with and research about anthropological fieldwork, it is great to learn that our concepts and tools are also relevant for fieldworkers from other disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, or biology.
We see safety as a topic of fieldwork methodology and have contributed to the conference of the German Anthropological Association with a roundtable in June 2023. The discussion, including the Q&A session, was fascinating and highlighted that fieldwork safety is relevant in various settings and across different career stages. Together with the roundtable speakers, we published a post on boasblogs in which we give an overview of the different perspectives.
We are also proud to have published our manifesto in November 2023! Months of hard work went into writing and revising it, and we are thrilled to provide a document summarizing our positions and objectives. It has received great resonance so far, and we hope to spread it even further in 2024!
So, with everything we have achieved in 2023, what will come in 2024? We have quite a few events planned already, and a lot of ideas for new workshop topics and formats that we hope to realize next year! Furthermore, we want to continue our current activities and contribute to more exchange between people who find the topic relevant.