Dear all,
Please consider contributing to the planned edited volume to be edited by Linda Green (Univ. of Arizona) and Nerina Weiss (Fafo Research Foundation).
During fieldwork, anthropologists have often become entangled in violent situations, ranging from the spectacular (warfare) to the seemingly mundane ("peacetime crimes"). Since the end of World War II  anthropologists have increasingly addressed the topic of violence in its myriad forms more directly as a plethora of ethnographies, edited collections and journal articles published in both the US and Europe attest. Besides generation of theory on the dynamics of war and peace as well as detailed analysis of specific conflicts or aspects thereof, some researchers have already engaged with the methodological and ethical issues of doing research on violence and conflict (Ansom 2010; Berreman 2007 [1996]; Kovats-Bernat 2002; McLean and Leibing 2007; Paluck 2009; Sluka 1995; Sluka 2007; Wood 2006).  A number of publications have also examined the aftermath of fieldwork and its toll on fieldworkers themselves (Pollard 2009, Macek 2014), reflected on the roles of emotions in the field (Davies and Spencer 2010), and on the ethnographic ethic of immersing oneself in the context of violence (Weiss 2014).

What is still missing, however, is a profound - and more general - discussion on how we, as anthropologists, can get better prepared, and can prepare our students, for complications and dilemmas linked to violence and conflict. We argue that whether or not researchers focus on these topics, chances of being exposed to, or witness various forms of violence are high in today's world, which itself has become increasingly brutal, especially for the people we work with. Being prepared beforehand that violence and conflict might be an integral part of our fieldwork - whether we focus on it or not - is, so we argue an essential preparation we and our students have to do. Furthermore, we need to have open conversations about violence and its aftermath not only on the lives of our interlocutors but on the lives of our students and ourselves. We know that the intense and repeated exposure to violence, social suffering and conflict in the field and through the data processing may negatively affect the researcher (Gentry, et al. 2004), both personally and her ability to analyze and reflect on the material gathered. The need for supervision and reflection has been acknowledged within NGOs as well as for aid workers stationed in conflict settings. Most researchers working in academia, however, are still left alone to cope with the personal, ethical and emotional dilemmas that can emerge in the field and when processing data.

In this volume we want to bring together research that focuses on violence and social suffering and work in which the violence might not be readily visible, nor be the focus of the research. We thus encourage papers on migration/asylum/refugees, sexual violence, surveillance conditions, poverty and racism, domestic violence or pollution as well as papers which focus particularly on conflict, violence and social suffering.
A key objective within this framing is to make public what has long been held in silence or shared guardedly with colleagues.

We therefore encourage papers that address some of the following questions:
-          What are the personal dimension of violence in fieldwork, and how can we address issues that might not be easily or even resolvable, and which more often than not are silenced?
-          What are ethics in fieldwork in such situations of violence?
-          What are its limits and limitations?
-          What are the legacies of/about violence in one's research?

Contributions may be full papers (8000 words) as well as shorter pieces, which - in various graphics, artistic, and other modes - communicate experiences of fieldwork.
We invite contributions that represent fieldwork in/about violence at different points in their careers.

Abstract of max 400 words should be sent to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> or [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by 30th August. Deadline for first draft is 1st December 2019.


Nerina Weiss, PhD
Senior Researcher
Fafo Research Foundation
Borggata 2B, 0608 Oslo, Norway
+47 45412376


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