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- Convenors:
-
Chandana Mathur
(National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
Rosita Henry (James Cook University)
Faye Harrison (Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign )
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Human rights, Laws and Trafficking/Mondes en mouvement: Droits humains, lois et traffics
- Location:
- LMX 339
- Start time:
- 6 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel, co-convened by the WCAA Ethics Taskforce and the WCAA-IUAES Working Group on Anthropological Fieldwork and Risk in a Violent World, explores ethical questions related to anthropological fieldwork in theatres of action around the world that are deemed 'risky' or 'dangerous'.
Long Abstract:
Morality and ethics lie at the heart of how worlds are made and unmade through movement. Understanding mobility and immobility, passages and stoppages, requires research on, and in the midst of, violence. Ethics review boards are increasingly deeming such research too 'risky', thereby stigmatizing entire world regions as 'dangerous'. This panel, jointly convened by the WCAA Ethics Taskforce and the WCAA-IUAES Working Group on Anthropological Fieldwork and Risk in a Violent World, continues conversation on 'dangerous' fieldwork begun at the 2016 IUAES Inter-Congress. We invite papers from various 'horizons and traditions of the anthropological world' (Fassin 2014: 430) that address the political dimensions of fieldwork ethics in violent situations. Fassin (2014: 432-33) criticizes investigations that limit themselves to an 'alternative between the respect of rules and the realization of the self', and that do not include 'the evaluation of the consequences of what one does or does not do'. He argues that such approaches constitute 'a form of depoliticization'. Thus, this panel will reflect not only on concepts of duty, virtue and freedom (Laidlaw 2014), but will also pay close attention to consequentialist ethics and the effects of human action in the world. We will pursue comparative inquiry into dilemmas that participants face in different theatres of movement and action around the world, particularly situations of crisis and conflict.
Fassin, Didier. 2014. "The ethical turn in anthropology: promises and uncertainties." Hau 4 (1): 429-435.
Laidlaw, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: CUP
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jeffrey Sluka (Massey University)
Paper short abstract:
Addresses the threat presented by institutional ethics committees which exercise a gate-keeping function making it increasingly difficult for researchers to enter an expanding range of ‘too dangerous’ field sites, and proposes risk assessment and management protocols to deal with this.
Paper long abstract:
This paper contributes to contemporary reflection on and conversations about anthropological fieldwork in a dangerous world. It focuses specifically on ethical review processes and 'dangerous' fieldwork. In recent years, one salient consequence of the neoliberalisation of universities has been the introduction of ethics committees or Institutional Review Boards whose permission or approval academics now require in order to conduct fieldwork. Anthropologists and ethnographers have had particular difficulty with these committees because they are often based on medical or laboratory models of research ethics which are not well-suited for application to ethnographic or fieldwork-based research approaches. Another difficulty these IRBs increasingly present is that because they are involved with managerial responsibilities regarding maintaining occupational safety and health regimes they are required and empowered to restrict or prevent research which they deem may entail any risk or danger to researchers. As such, they now represent a growing epistemological threat by exercising a gate-keeping function which is making it increasingly difficult for researchers to enter an expanding range of what are perceived as 'too dangerous' field sites. While this is clothed in the language or idiom of ethics and security, a political analysis suggests that they present a form of censorship and control, a serious challenge to academic freedom, and even movement towards the recolonization of anthropology. This paper will describe and address this threat, and also offer a constructive proposal for potentially ameliorating it by development of risk assessment and management protocols for researcher survival in perilous field sites.
Rosita Henry (James Cook University)
Paper short abstract:
With reference to a field school in Papua New Guinea in 2016, this paper explores the burgeoning bureaucracy of ethics review and risk assessment within the corporate University and its implications for fieldwork in spaces that are stigmatized as ‘dangerous’.
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic research regarding many different social situations around the world is becoming heavily burdened by a burgeoning bureaucracy of institutional ethics review and risk assessment. Risk management regimes in particular constrain researchers from working in field spaces that deemed 'dangerous' for various reasons. Papua New Guinea, which generated numerous classic ethnographies during the 20th Century, and was a popular field site for many a student anthropologist is today stigmatized as too 'dangerous' a place to conduct ethnographic research, especially for women. With reference to an ethnographic field school I ran in Papua New Guinea in 2016, this paper explores risk assessment within the corporate University and its implications for fieldwork in 'dangerous' spaces.
I explore the politicized relationship between risks and rights and examine the responsibilities of care that are levied on both researchers and research participants. I argue that interrogating the neoliberal risk regime requires taking into account cultural variation in what counts as danger and exploring the different moral economies of care that are at play in our various field spaces.
Kamela Heyward-Rotimi (KERG USA; Duke University USA)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to move towards a better understanding of the potentiality of danger versus actual danger in fieldwork for the researcher and their community of study. The findings are based on research conducted in Southwestern Nigeria on 419 online scams and Nigerian communities.
Paper long abstract:
Theorization of volatile fieldwork sites—what Kovats-Bernat (2002) refers to as 'dangerous fields'—seldom considers potential danger in field sites, and its impact on various stages of fieldwork. This paper conceptualizes what I refer to as potential danger defined as possible violence in the field. The aim of this paper is to move towards a better understanding of the potentiality of danger versus actual danger in fieldwork for the researcher and their community of study. Specifically, it aims to explore how casting regional violence as a countrywide mandate to not travel thus engage with certain communities can impede researchers' movement within research sites. The findings are based on an ethnographic study I conducted which examines the socioeconomic impact of the extralegal activity of 419 online scams—also known as Yahoo-Yahoo—on Nigerian communities. This multi-sited study was conducted over three years in Southwestern Nigeria in the cities of Ile Ife, and Osogbo, both located in Osun State. Fieldwork experience demonstrated that US State Department travel warnings that cautioned US citizens against travel to any churches, malls, and other gathering spots within Nigeria thus monitor US researchers' movement failed to address that terrorist acts were concentrated in Northern Nigeria and did not pose immediate danger to Southwestern Nigeria. A nuanced exploration of potential danger and its impact on fieldwork and methodological approaches can contribute to discussions of danger in the field.
Miriam Grossi (UFSC)
Paper short abstract:
To what extent do the ethical codes of different Anthropological associations, mostly designed more than two decades ago, respond to new ethical challenges posed to Anthropologists, especially risks associated with their field studies? How do these different codes of ethics deal with the political engagement of some Anthropologists?
Paper long abstract:
To what extent do the ethical codes of different Anthropological associations, mostly designed more than two decades ago, respond to new ethical challenges posed to Anthropologists, especially concerning risks associated with their field studies? How do these different codes of ethics deal with the political engagement of some Anthropologists in the groups studied? How is the anthropological assertion "change the world", consistent with other traditional theoretical assumptions such as "scientific neutrality" and "detachment" with regard to the groups studied? This paper analyses some anthropological ethics codes in order to answer these questions. Through a comparative analysis of the texts of different codes of ethics provided by national anthropological associations, we try to understand if - and to what extent - ethical regulation has - or has not - contributed to new ways of doing anthropology in the contemporary world. We reflect upon examples drawn from some contemporary ethnographies, in fields that include issues such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnic-racial, disability, social class and other social markers of difference that also mark the identities of male and female Anthropologists in different contexts of anthropological practice, focusing particularly on contexts that are defined as risky or dangerous.