Trading Safety for Knowledge?

Jul 24, 2023

As co-leader of The Safer Fieldwork Project, I will be moderating a roundtable on risks and well-being in fieldwork at the Conference of the German Anthropological Association this Thursday (July 27th). Together with the speakers, we wrote an article with first impressions of what we want to discuss there, so have a look at our publication on boasblogs if you are interested to learn more.

Raising awareness of the importance of fieldwork safety is incredibly meaningful to me. At The Safer Fieldwork Project, we argue that researcher safety should be considered an integral part of research preparation and practice throughout the project (see the position paper of The Safer Fieldwork Project, forthcoming). We argue that this is beneficial for the researcher themselves, as well as for their project.

In recent years, more and more academics have started to make the personal consequences of traumatic experiences during fieldwork a topic. These accounts show that such incidents are not isolated and that the negative impact on the person’s physical and/or emotional well-being can outlive the research project for years.

Carrying out fieldwork in situations that entail risks for the researcher beyond a level that is reconcilable with their individual physical and/or emotional well-being also hampers their abilities to conduct research. This is true for their capacities to actively and openly engage with their research field, and to use the insights they gained in the writing phase of the project. I am convinced that we gain more thorough insights and write better papers and theses if we consider our own well-being as an important part of our research.