Launched in April 2018, The New Ethnographer is an inclusive online project dedicated to making fieldwork safer, healthier and more ethical for researchers around the world. Our contributors are ethnographers whose fieldwork experiences have gone far beyond what their universities prepared them for, or were willing to address in the aftermath.
Through this site, you will find essays and blog posts about fieldwork challenges related to safety and risk, health and wellbeing, ethics and gender; reading lists; information about our forthcoming events; and details of our workshops, trainings and our consultancy service.
The impact that long term research in the field can take on the health and wellbeing of those conducting fieldwork has led to concern over university preparedness for fieldwork. In the wake of several high profile cases of detainment, torture, and death of doctoral students, why is it that academic institutions are seemingly so unwilling to engage with these challenges critically, supportively or constructively? We are among many of our peers whose challenges have been met with a silence from our institutions. We find support and solidarity among our friends and peers, none of whom are ‘qualified’ to really help us navigate these issues with the weight of the academy in mind.
Ethics
Researchers’ attempts to talk about their challenging fieldwork experiences are often dismissed as being the result of bad or unethical practice, despite evidence of the ubiquity of fieldwork challenges in Anthropology (Pollard 2009). The ethical guidelines of our universities and professional associations provide us with clear directions on the conduct of anthropological research. We are rightly guided by responsibilities to our research participants, to our funders and to our colleagues and the discipline as a whole. What is less clear, is how challenges to these directions should be navigated. In our experience, many cases of ethical dilemmas during fieldwork arise without much warning, and often in contexts that we could not have pre-empted. The articles here explore the ways researchers have managed ethical challenges, and propose calls for revisions to our professional ethical guidance. In addition, this section of the blog also pays particular attention to the intersection of digital ethnographies and ethical practice, including questions of researcher privacy online; location based apps; the use of multiple accounts; and social media and informed consent.
Gender and subjective identities
The prevailing stereotype of the anthropologist as white, male, able bodied, heterosexual, single, and healthy is a tired and unrealistic trope, though this is often not reflected in methodological and pre-field training. We feel that often anthropologists’ subjective identities are only relevant in a post reflexive-turn box ticking capacity; in reality, we cannot cut them out of our fieldwork experiences, mental health, safety, and methodologies. This section invites readers to consider the unique challenges of fieldwork impacted by and upon their identities with a view to integrating relevant safety practices and methodologies into pre-field training.
Health and Wellbeing
Increasingly, anthropologists are opening up to discussing the impact of fieldwork, long term research, financial constraints, and academic pressures on their mental health. At The New Ethnographer we hope to encourage this discussion and fashion a supportive and safe space for how we can support each other and manage our health. We feel strongly that this should be a collaborative conversation that includes universities, supervisors, insurance providers, counsellors, therapists, and other healthcare providers. We also encourage readers and contributors to integrate understandings of local and medical understandings of mental health, particularly anxiety, PTSD, vicarious PTSD, and depression, into our work.
Safety and Risk
It is often impossible during fieldwork to separate out our experiences into the binary of safe/unsafe. One does not have to be staring down the barrel of a gun, or running against the wind away from teargas in order to feel in danger. University risk assessments are usually not sufficient to explore the diverse range of safety concerns facing lone ethnographers in fieldwork. They also pay little attention to the dangers we may (inadvertently) place our research participants in by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Important scholarship has sparked debate surrounding the affective dimensions of fieldwork, and the integration of these experiences into our scholarship (Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib: forthcoming 2018). Through the blog pieces shared under the theme of safety, we hope to contribute an applied component to this debate, questioning how our professional associations and universities might learn from the ways researchers deal with safety in the field, and how we might move forward in developing relevant and usable guidelines on safety and fieldwork for future research.
