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A special section of @CommoningE entitled 'Trial by Fire: Trauma, Vulnerability and the Heroics of Fieldwork' that I had the privilege of co-editing with @kaisirlin @CatherineTrund1 @tarapuhi is now published! #openaccess https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/index?fbclid=IwAR0Fs8Ydzwlxht9LbCBaCWhhqBLS2u07t30wcjpMQpY2PsXl3rRJAp66biI
In our introduction we we take two persistent tropes of fieldwork, the ‘trial by fire’ and the ‘heroic fieldworker’ to task. It is, we argue, necessary for fieldwork to be taught and engaged with beyond romanticised twentieth century masculinist heroics. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/6650
Yasmeen Arif (Delhi University) notes that the heroic fieldworker identity is not available to all and never has been. She stresses power inequalities between Northern scholars and those based in the Global South in her essay, 'We Don't Need Another Hero'. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/6651
Vivian Choi (St. Olaf) revisits vivid memories of the field to ask herself why she did not write much of it down; why strategies, taunts and insults were not “worthy as fieldnote material”, showing us how embedded silences are even within our own practices https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/6652
. @MythriJega returns to moments her training had her discount, forget. Written so as to bring the reader alongside her during research encounters with tea estate managers in Sri Lanka, we watch, listen, and feel our way into the field. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/6653
Madeline Donald (University of British Columbia) too is looking back on past fieldwork. 'I Said No' begins with a poem written “some years ago, in a long moment of rage and fear.” Poetry as a genre allowed her to express “what happened” during fieldwork. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/6654
. @MaliniSur gives us a palpable sense of how the sensorially rich sounds of trauma travel, seep and slip across space and time, animating writing processes, the ethnographer's body, and even her dreams. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/6655
Malvika Sharma (JNU) recounts a series of gendered encounters in the borderland of Gurez in North Kashmir to illuminate the mundane politics of fieldwork that might seem small but on which our sense of belonging comes to hinge. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/6656
