Paper short abstract:

“We lack the language to articulate what takes place when we are in fact at work. There seems to be a genre missing”: Following Geertz (1995:44), the creation of ‘ethnographic’ art complemented the writing of my thesis on emotional trauma in migrant women.

Paper long abstract:

In the midst of my fieldwork with 'Burmese' migrant workers in Thailand (2011-2013), I had wondered about the complexity of emotional suffering and my ability to convey it adequately in research. How could the depth of their suffering ever be translated into words? By drawing upon the visual arts (painting), I developed a more in depth grasp of the core themes to emerge from my research. Kant spoke of aesthetic philosophy and grasping art through disinterested contemplation. When an audience observes a work at a distance, the work is detached from the will and has no purpose, but is somehow purposeful in its own right: "purposiveness without purpose" (Kant, 1987: 73). Through painting, I observed the women's suffering at a distance. I did not set out to paint 'suffering'. I just painted. The act of painting shifted 'suffering', the subject matter, out of my focus and into the periphery. There in the periphery I saw it with more clarity, in contrast to when I was trying to grasp at it, make academic meaning of it, and put it into writing. The visual images that evolved through the research process will hopefully also act as an alternative point of entry through which others may access the subject matter of my thesis.