I want to begin not with theory, but with a moment.
It is early June 2016, and I am in Freetown, Sierra Leone, lying on a mattress in a room I share with eleven people. But something has shifted. The air hasn’t changed, but my breath has. I’ve just been raped. At the door stands Darren, a long-term collaborator. He says, “You need to move. Otherwise, it will grow.” He is not talking about the injury. He means the bond—the unbearable idea that something now connects me to the man who harmed me. And yet Darren’s words are not cruel. They are an offer of care.
My collaborators wanted to help me sever that bond [their word for trauma] through ritual, community, and presence. But I couldn’t. I refused what felt like a deepening of the violence. And yet, they too were trying to protect me. To hold me.
This is where I begin: at the intersection of violence and care, rupture and relation. This is not a conclusion. It’s a research note—a reflection on what it means to be undone by fieldwork and still find the strength to write, to teach, to speak. It is not about grievance. It is about possibility. It is about acknowledging that harm reshapes us—and that while mutual responsibility can reduce harm, it cannot erase it. Closure is an illusion. But perhaps vulnerability is not an end. Perhaps it is a beginning—a space from which we might imagine research and academia otherwise.
The Mirage of Control: Fear, Fragmentation, and Epistemic Violence
I used to believe other researchers were in control. That they were managing, while I twitched out of line. But over time, I came to see that these performances of control were acts of chasing a myth. This myth is institutionalized. It lives in ethics applications where emotional labor is erased. It governs our prose and CVs—cool, distanced, unaffected—as if research happened in a vacuum. As if nothing ever happened to us.
This is not built on malice, but on fear. Fear that vulnerability discredits us. That trauma makes us unprofessional. That care makes us biased. So, we split: the researcher from the person. And we pretend the split is natural, even necessary. But it is not.
This split upholds epistemic hierarchies that feminist, Black, queer, and decolonial thinkers have long challenged. It privileges knowledge that appears unmarked. Knowledge that pretends to come from nowhere. Knowledge that doesn’t have to explain its origins, because its origins are already normalized: white, male, Western, rational, “objective.”
To feel is to be flawed. To hurt is to contaminate. But care is not contamination. Neither is pain. Both are part of knowing too.
When I was raped during fieldwork by someone I was supposed to interview, I didn’t disclose it in a debrief. I couldn’t wait until I was ready. My disclosure wasn’t a choice. It was a reaction forced into motion by a red flag already attached to my name. The moment I became a person behind the label, I became a risk. Not for what happened, but for letting it show.
The response was not care. It was management. “What does this mean for your affiliation?” “Should we reconsider the field site?” “Who else knows?”
The funder opened a review. I had to prove I was still worth the investment. That I could still deliver: on time, composed, productive, contained.
Once I reassured them, the door closed. No follow-up. No support. Just the quiet return of institutional normalcy.
I was asked: “Do you really want to include this in your PhD?” “Is this how you want to be remembered?” When I insisted on transparency, I was told: Yes, but that refers to methods, not personal pain.
The split, reimposed.
The cracks my ‘becoming a person’ made in the façade of ‘the researcher’ I was expected to embody reveal the layered, often unexpected beauty of qualitative research: its inherent unpredictability. To embrace this unpredictability is not to invite danger—it is to acknowledge, with honesty, that research unfolds between people, and people are never fully predictable.
But institutions—especially those trained to protect themselves from liability—resist unpredictability. They reframe it. They rename it. They call it “risk.”
Yet risk is not a simple danger. It is a paradox. It holds both peril and potential. It opens space for connection, transformation, and discovery, but also for rupture, loss, and harm.
Institutional logics strip risk of this nuance. It is no longer relational, no longer embedded in the complexity of interaction. Instead, it is imagined as something that lives in certain individuals, in certain places, something that is embodied and thus manageable, containable, something that will not spill, so long those individuals who are deemed risky are managed, silenced, or shown the door.
The logic follows: if they leave, the risk leaves with them.
But what if we refuse that logic?
What if we recast risk not as a pathology carried by a few, but as a shared condition of relational life? What if we treated risk as inevitable, and responsibility as collective, even as it remains unevenly distributed?
Yet risk is not a simple danger. It is a paradox. It holds both peril and potential. It opens space for connection, transformation, and discovery, but also for rupture, loss, and harm.
Then a different kind of academia becomes imaginable.
Because risk is not a flaw. It is not a stain. It is part of being in the world. We enter research with bodies, memories, subjectivities, with grief, desire, and boundaries. We carry our histories into our work, and we carry our work back into our lives.
To deny this is not professionalism. It is epistemic violence.
To demand that we remain untouched by what we study is to demand that we not feel. And if we do feel, we must not show. And if we do show, it must be elsewhere—quietly, discreetly—so as not to disturb the institution’s illusion of continuity.
Care must not be treated merely as a response to crisis or harm. Care is not something that begins only when vulnerability appears, or that waits in reserve until something has gone wrong. Rather, care should be understood as a precondition for ethical research and engagement, as a mode of relating that is expansive, world-creating, and world-sustaining. It must guide our interactions from the start, in all their forms and dynamics, not only when there is rupture or visible need.
And vulnerability, too, is more than a pain point. Vulnerability is not a defect to be managed or a problem to be solved. It is a relational field—a condition of openness and interdependence—that deserves to be honored. When rupture does occur, it can offer epistemic insight—not because pain is inherently redemptive, but because it reveals what dominant systems refuse to hold.
This is not a call to valorize suffering. It is a call to take it seriously.
We cannot dismantle the myth of the invincible researcher unless we create institutions where being affected is not punished. Where vulnerability is not pathologized. Where the personal is not silenced but held—with care, with structure, and with the recognition that it, too, is part of how knowledge is made.
The Right to Risk: Whole Researchers, Not Invincible Ones
If academia punishes rupture and rewards silence, what kind of knowledge does it enable and what kind does it foreclose?
Research is often framed as a choice. But we do not all choose from the same place.
Some of us research what has touched us. Some of us are touched by what we research. Often, both are true.
Thinking and doing academia does not stay in a box. It seeps through every fiber of life. For many of us, it begins in proximity. In already knowing; not knowing in conclusion, but in resonance. This is not sameness, but attuned familiarity. A knowing that honors the limits of shared experience while refusing to pretend that we enter our work empty.
And when fieldwork deepens that knowing—when what we study echoes in our bodies, our pasts, our possible futures—that is not a methodological accident. It is an epistemological condition. It shapes what we know, how we know, and how we hurt.
When violence enters the research not as data, but as lived experience, the rupture is not only personal. It is institutional.
I found silence. Bureaucratic delay. An unspoken expectation that I would carry the violence alone. That I would carry it quietly, so the institution could carry on.
Most people I encountered cared personally. But they, too, lived in a split. Their role from their response. Their institution from their sentiment.
But institutions are people in roles who came together to build something beyond themselves. And yet through this endless splitting a structure emerges that looks neutral. A university that appears to function. A researcher who appears to be fine.
This is how scholarly invincibility is built. Not to hold researchers. But to hold the illusion of control. Not to support rupture, but to conceal it.
We cannot dismantle the myth of the invincible researcher unless we create institutions where being affected is not punished. Where vulnerability is not pathologized.
We don’t need researchers who appear invincible. We need researchers who are allowed to be affected.
To carry contradiction.
To speak from experience without being dismissed, disbelieved, or disqualified.
To break open the illusion—whole or broken—but to hold space for simultaneity.
Care as Entanglement: Listening Otherwise
A feminist ethics of care reminds us that knowing requires proximity; a proximity that is not only physical, but affective and ethical. Ethics is not a checklist but a lived entanglement. As philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa reminds us, care is not a feeling. It is a doing. A responsibility. A refusal of detachment. In this sense, care is a practice that binds us not only to those we study, but to those who shape us: our collaborators, our students, our colleagues, our ghosts.
In Sierra Leone, care did not require disclosure. Pain was considered a collective wound, a shared responsibility. Healing was communal. There was no demand for coherence or ‘growth’. Just staying. Just presence.
This taught me how care can be: cooking, sitting, giving small tasks that reminded me that I am more than the sum of that which hurts. A kind of witnessing that does not need to know what happened, nor presume what should happen next. This is what feminist and decolonial scholars ask us to do: to listen otherwise.
Eurocentric models of recovery ask for disclosure and linear progress. But many of us live nonlinear grief. Many of us need to be held before we can speak. Many of us heal in ways that do not fit.
As Ruth Nicole Brown and Susana Loza remind us, care can also bind, burden, or trouble. It is not innocent. It must be held with more than one hand.
Care, then, is not only what we offer, but what we are shaped by. It lives in what we long to receive and hope to materialize. It can support and hold, but it can also widen the gap between what is and what could be. Care may be present—as in when we are offered a place in therapy, or given a task to occupy our body and mind, but it may not take the shape we need. What we crave may be offered to someone else, just as what we offer may not fit the person we’re offering it to. Care may be an attempt to push us towards something and drag us away from something else; to mold us in the shape of someone else’s desire. And sometimes, we may not know what we need at all, and simply hope that someone, somewhere, might show us the way before we even knew we were lost.
Care circulates through relations, histories, and inheritances that exceed any one encounter. It does not live outside the troubling elements of our world and is woven through its inequalities, exclusions, and contradictions.
To center care is to stay with its complexities, to let it interrupt, implicate, and transform us. It is to recognize its immense possibilities while acknowledging that its realization requires ongoing, difficult work: work that aligns our assumptions with practices of truly listening and staying with the needs of those and that which we seek to care for.
Institutional (Ir)Responsibility: the Politics of Burden
If vulnerability is a constant, then care must be structural.
But who is expected to carry that care? Too often, the burden falls on junior, racialized, queer, and precarious scholars: those who are already carrying risk.
Institutions invite us to speak. But they rarely build the infrastructures that would make that speaking possible.
Workshops and peer support groups often emerge from those who survived the absence of care. And almost always, the room is full of people who already know. Who are already affected. Already exhausted.
It becomes a kind of echo chamber. And a double bind:
Those who carry the risk are asked to carry the solution.
Those who understand the need for change are asked to deliver it.
This is not what care looks like.
Care cannot be something institutions claim to value while pushing its labor downward and outward.
It cannot be something that activates only after harm.
It cannot be optional, something that happens only if a particular person happens to care.
Care work is expertise.
To hold someone through rupture or disorientation—to recognize harm, to refer, to respond—requires training. It takes time. It takes consistency. It takes boundaries. While I am not arguing against the importance of holding space for one another, and while I do believe that care should be the quiet, versatile string through which our different tasks as academics connect and through which we connect with one another, I am critiquing the institutional practice of offloading the responsibilities to hold someone through intense pain onto supervisors and colleagues while creating a vacuum around them.
The more care is left to individual initiative, the more unequally it is distributed.
Those with less power are asked to do more.
Those who say no are marked as difficult.
Those who say yes are often overwhelmed.
Relationships that may have otherwise held, corrode quietly.
Meanwhile, the institution—its structures, policies, and protocols—remains unchanged.
Care must be understood as a practice, as a doing that operates within complexity: one that resists fixed subject positions like harmer and harmed, safe and unsafe, and instead enables support instead enables support without presumption or judgment amid the ever-shifting realities of relational life.
What also does not work is the phrase: “We’re open to ideas. Just let us know what you need.”
What this usually means is: “We’ll keep doing nothing until someone already close to harm uses their own time, energy, and vulnerability to build something better.”
I have seen PhD students and early-career researchers attempting to build this “something better”, unpaid, unsupported, and often while navigating their own pain.
This is care as unpaid labor, outsourcing, dressed as openness.
To institutionalize care is not to bureaucratize it.
It’s to say: This matters enough to plan for. To fund. To build into the foundation of universities; into job descriptions, contracts, and training structures.
And not just for “vulnerable” researchers (whatever that may be).
Not just for those working on violence.
Because everyone is vulnerable to something.
And everyone is capable of harm.
While care and vulnerability are intimately linked, care should not be narrowly tethered to vulnerability, nor should vulnerability be framed as a soft need that stands in opposition to harm. The two can be entangled. Care must be understood as a practice, as a doing that operates within complexity: one that resists fixed subject positions like harmer and harmed, safe and unsafe, and instead enables support instead enables support without presumption or judgment amid the ever-shifting realities of relational life.
Care must be structural, not situational.
Collective, not exceptional.
A condition of research—not a luxury.
So, I return to vulnerability not as weakness. Not as a personal flaw.
But as a relational fact. A political condition. A starting point.
What would the university look like if it were built around that fact?
What kinds of relationships would we have with each other, with our research, with ourselves?
What if universities began from the premise that care is not an accommodation, but the structure itself? What would classrooms look like? What would supervision become? What kinds of scholars might we attract, sustain, and believe in?
I recognize, of course, that even if such a call were taken seriously, it could generate new problems. Like many institutional efforts around ethics, care, and responsibility, it risks becoming over-bureaucratized, codified in ways that suffocate rather than connect, that exclude rather than embrace. But I also believe that constantly positioning the university as something outside ourselves—as inherently broken, inevitably failing, or incapable of change—diminishes our own capacity to shape it. It forecloses the very possibilities we claim to seek. If we begin from the stance that “this will never work,” that “the institution will never change,” then we abdicate responsibility for what we might collectively build in its place. Instead, perhaps we can treat institutional transformation not as a fixed goal or one-step solution, but as an ongoing, imperfect process, one that will sometimes overshoot, sometimes fall short, but that still holds radical potential when pursued with persistence, collectivity, and care.
Building Infrastructures of Care
We already ask researchers to undergo ethics review. We ask them to anticipate harm: What might happen to others? To participants, to vulnerable communities, to research collaborators. These are, of course, essential questions. Let us add to this the parallel: What might happen to those doing the research?
We treat harm to others as serious, foreseeable, and ethical.
We treat harm to researchers as unfortunate, incidental and personal.
We call one ethics. We call the other self-care.
The result? A bifurcated ethics framework where only half the terrain is ever truly mapped.
What would it mean to treat researcher vulnerability with the same seriousness and structural foresight?
It would mean beginning before fieldwork not after harm. Not to induce fear, but to cultivate preparedness: relationally, structurally, ethically. One of the problems with the idea of “self-care” is that it presumes we are well enough to care for ourselves. Relational care, by contrast, holds together.
To enable such care, researchers can build a web of support: a trained contact, a local ally, a check-in system. Not for panic. For presence.
These roles should be differentiated. Your partner may not be the best person to navigate an embassy. Your supervisor may not be your trauma specialist. We build a web not to burden unequally, but to ensure no one carries the whole weight alone.
A few proactive steps—clearly outlining available support, openly naming what is not in place, and specifying real, accessible resources—can prevent abandonment at the very moments researchers lose the ability to ask for help. Due diligence doesn’t mean promising more. It means promising honestly.
In my own case, my ethics approval stated I would have access to psychological support through the university. But when I reached out, I was told the service only worked in countries with stable landlines or internet. Not in Sierra Leone. Not where I was. It wasn’t malice. It was a failure of foresight. On paper, the support existed. In practice, it didn’t. And because I trusted that promise, I hadn’t built anything else.
A single line—flagging geographic limitations—could have changed everything.
Most institutions don’t mislead on purpose. But their supports—psychological care, insurance coverage, ethics procedures—are scattered across departments and platforms, dispersed across roles and bureaucracies. What looks like a safety net is too often a patchwork. And the holes only become apparent after falling through them.
Illusions of care are dangerous. They leave people exposed.
No institution can offer everything. But every institution can offer clarity. That is the core of institutional care: not improvisation in the wake of harm, but honest, accessible infrastructure that helps researchers prepare for what lies beyond its reach.
A Concrete Proposal
Concretely, I propose that every faculty conducting qualitative research employ two trained professionals, specialists in care that is politically, socially, and relationally informed, and attuned to the specific challenges of fieldwork, who are equipped to provide the support researchers need. Every researcher is required to meet with them once before, once during, and once after fieldwork.
When researchers are equipped, not alone—we begin to move from a culture of endurance to one of holding. And, as Meenakshi N. Ambujam sensitively commented, away from rewarding a culture that treats silence as resilience.
We begin to move from individual coping to shared responsibility.
Not after harm.
But before.
Not out of perfection.
But out of care.
Not to perform.
But to protect.
In parallel, I propose that we approach the creation of infrastructures of care as a living, unfinished process. This means building with attentiveness to impact, being willing to revise or recalibrate, and understanding care as iterative, as something that must be practiced, evaluated, and adapted over time. Only by treating vulnerability as a shared condition and care as a collective responsibility can we begin to institutionalize support without reproducing the harms we hope to address.
Closing: Holding Otherwise
This is not a plea for empathy. It is a call for change.
Institutions must stop collapsing roles and start resourcing them.
Let us refuse the split between person and researcher; recognize that researchers are people and support one another with ethics, structure, and dignity.
To hold contradiction.
To teach from it.
To write into it.
To risk it.
Relation is where knowledge begins and where it must return.
Care is not softness. It is tensile. It holds under weight.
And this is the care I believe in.
A care that arrives early, stays, and does not wait for harm to begin.
Abstract: What happens when violence enters research not as data, but as lived experience? This essay begins with harm during fieldwork and unfolds into a reflection on the silences, punishments, and possibilities that follow. Holding Space challenges the institutional myth of the invincible researcher. It argues that vulnerability is not a flaw but a relational condition, and that care must be understood not as crisis response, but as research infrastructure. Tracing how institutions manage risk by displacing it onto individuals, the essay critiques the structural erasure of emotional labor and the epistemic violence of enforced detachment. Instead, it calls for a radical reimagining of academia one that embraces unpredictability, centers collective responsibility, and builds the conditions for care as a tensile, anticipatory, and collective ethic of research. Holding space, here, becomes a political practice, a refusal of disavowal, an insistence on recognition, and a call to reimagine academia not as a sanctuary from risk, but as a structure capable of holding it.
Featured image by Lindy Baker on Unsplash
