Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Global South: A Roundtable on Methodology, Agency, and Care
The event was hosted by the IGP on 21 October 2022.
Conducting field research in the Global South comes with its own challenges in various stages: pre-field, during fieldwork, and post-fieldwork. In many cases, universities and institutions either do not adequately address the ethical and safety issues that are likely to take place or over-emphasize stereotypical issues that are seldom encountered (ie. child marriage in Pakistan, and arrests of researchers in Turkey).
As the members of Takhayyul Team have experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, seemingly universal practices such as the social distancing protocols developed in the Global North have been observed differently in the Global South.
Initiated by the Takhayyul team, the aim of this roundtable is to address some of the challenges that field researchers might encounter in the Global South. There are various levels of complex dynamics ranging from sexual harassment or imprisonment risks to ageism, class, education, shifting behaviours in different neighbourhoods, or multiple layers of intimate connections. The ethical concerns regarding the research participants are often accompanied by added emotional and intellectual burdens in particular situations, agency, and care.
During this two-hour roundtable, the members of Takhayyul Team will share their experiences and insights, shaped around their unique positions as scholars from the geographies they have developed expertise on and working in. Participants will do a 7–10-minute presentation, then we will follow with the questions and comments.
Please note that the discussion was recorded, transcribed, and edited toward publication.
Roundtable titles:
1. Challenges of researching far-right in the Global South by Dr. Sumrin Kalia
The disciplinary focus of my research is political science. Despite the cultural turn and paradigmatic shifts towards constructivism, the field of political science is still dominated by positivism and objectivist traditions. My study was designed to take the interpretivist approach because the research questions demanded an emphasis on exploring meaning making among religious groups. Additionally, parts of my study focused on far-right identity politics, unlike most studies of social movement and identity politics which have focused primarily on progressive agendas such as feminist, environmental, civil rights, LGBQT movements etc. The focus on the lived experience and attempt to understand meaning-making of activists from ideological groups bordering on extremism was inherently challenging because their views are antithetical to mine. Researching antagonistic political movements can take a toll on the emotional well-being of the researcher, a concern that has been largely ignored in the debates of research ethics.
2. Super-narrator with a Return Ticket: Field research in the Global South as Colonization of Life World by Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi
Anthropological research is typically based on the relationship between an ethnographer/ field researcher and her informants. Although field research seems quite benign, it implies certain power relations.
Field research assumes the neutrality of the researcher towards the context they work in. Such a distance creates a subjective-objective relationship. By maintaining a critical distance between the researcher/ethnographer and the “field”, this neutrality is supposed to guarantee the objectivity of the research. The researcher can extract information from a field by viewing it as a reservoir of information.
However, such a relationship is questionable. The assumption of neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. Short ethnographic visits with a return ticket can lead to misleading results and outcomes. The complexities of everyday life in the global south require deep and long engagement. What is normally called field research is related to people's life world, as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life. Life world contains multi-layered experiences, narratives, and performances that cannot be represented and reflected by the subject-object relationship between the ethnographer and the informants. Discussing the context of Iran, I will give some examples of disengaged visits and truncated narratives that emerge from anthropological research.
3. On Commitment by Dr. Mezna Qato
What kinds of obligations are mobilised when staking a claim to doing work in/from 'the global south'? How have these been historically constituted, constructed, narrowed, expanded, reformulated, transformed within and without the academy? Utilising three encounters in the field, I will try to offer a set of initial notes on the analytical, conceptual, methodological, constraints to the 'global south' frame as method - and possible reformulations.
4. Ethics without the Ethics: The Institutionalised Committees and the Question of Integrity by Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu
Reviewing the Takhayyul Teams long journey of ethics approvals by various institutional bodies in detail, this paper questions the ethics of such protocols over native scholars. It questions a number of issues formerly addressed by anthropologists, highlighting the intimate rapport required for ethnographic field research to be ‘untranslatable’ to the particular language often expected in research ethics forms. It then, following the written conversations took place between the institutional ethics committees and the team members’ reports, reflects on four main issues: 1) the problematic expectations for projects carried on geographies that are known by stereotypical probes, 2) additional requests seemingly question the native scholars’ expertise, 3) the ethical aspects of additional paperwork and its burden on native scholars, and, 4) how to change the language so that the unique position of native scholars and their deep, thorough, and intimate knowledge on the geographies they develop expertise on, would be reflected as a strength.
5. “Tensions between Intimacy and Ethnography: Turkish Coffee Talk as a Research Method” Hazal Aydin
It is commonly argued that people do not go to a therapist for their problems, but they go to their neighbours to drink Turkish coffee and share their problems to find compassion and feel relief. The Turkish coffee talk is an intimate act and a space of therapy when it comes to sharing daily problems. For an ethnographer, particularly focusing on gendered, class-based, and racialized injustices people experience in Turkey, doing ethnography inevitably shifts towards the intimacy of Turkish coffee talk. The act of telling a personal story to an ethnographer and the act of listening carefully to the storyteller generates a therapeutic relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee in the Turkish context. This relationship is necessary to establish an intimate and trustworthy relationship with the interviewee, but it also carries several emotional and ethical challenges for the ethnographer. Drawing from my interviews with Turkish theatre actors and Uzbeki women care workers, I will discuss what listening carefully means in this context, how it helps the ethnographer to build intimacy and trust, and what kind of challenges this relationship brings for the researcher.