15 thoughts on “2 | Feminist Research on Peace and Conflict”
Alyssa Victorino
My biggest takeaway from this week’s readings is that to be human is to be incomplete (Ba, 2022). We all enter spaces with biases formed from our identities and experiences, as influenced by social structures, and this makes our knowledge of the world and the people in it fragmented. Particularly in academia, power indifferences are often reproduced through extractive research practices that leave communities of interest devalued. An essential question to ask to prevent this is for whom the knowledge being generated is. I reflected on the tendency for research to have an aspect of self-fulfilment rather than of mutual benefit and community-building, with the former being a direct pattern of colonial violence.
I connected the readings to a piece that I read in my undergrad titled “Emotional and Ethical Quagmires in Returning to the Field” (Ellis, 1995). The researcher, Carolyn Ellis, reflected on her experiences as an ethnographer when she returned to the community she originally studied and found many community members enraged with how they were portrayed in her book. She reflected on the unequal power she had as a researcher in a small, predominantly illiterate, fishing town, recognizing the harm in leaving out information about the research to those living there. For example, she recorded conversations without their knowledge, published stories they thought were confidential, and failed to inform them of the book’s existence.
Her process resulted in her objectifying the people of this remote town, severing the trust she had built with the community for over a decade, and undermining the intelligence and agency of the people she had been researching (Abdelnour & Moghli, 2021). In seeing herself as an impartial researcher, she unjustly extracted intimate information about a group of people and published it, without their consent, to a world that excluded them. She echoes the idea of the “field” as a construct in her reflections (Cueva et al., 2024), eventually wanting to resist the imagined lines between researcher and researched, focusing instead on her relationships with the fisherfolk. She asks the question, “Is doing significant research still more important to me than respecting the lives of Fisherneckers?” To which I say, what makes research significant is ultimately the dedication to respect the lives one chooses to write about.
Her story highlighted the discomfort that can arise from reflexivity. Feminist practice means to question everything, even your own positionalities in systems of violence. It is admitting to the guilt of doing harm and finding a path forward. Reflexivity is an involved and taxing process, but that doesn’t mean it is something to run away from. Chilmeran et al. (2022) expand on the ability of reflexivity to make the researcher visible, and thus in turn, accountable to their words and ideas. This is only possible if the researcher lends themselves and their work to the personal—the messy, emotional aspects of being human and being wrong. It is clear to me now that it is an act of love for self and community to do so.
Questions:
1. In what instances is research not extractive or invasive? Are there any?
2. Specifically, how can the researcher’s presence be justified in sensitive conflict-ridden areas where many people have experienced a high degree of violence? Does the researcher’s personal relationship (or lack thereof) with the people or issue at hand change the researcher-researched dynamic? How?
While the concepts of violence and harm reduction through research practices were central to this week’s readings, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to the work of journalists, filmmakers, and international development professionals. Understanding one’s positionality, practicing political reflexivity, engaging in long-term collaborations, and being aware of “hype” around certain conflicts or communities, are all concepts that development professionals and journalists should prioritize in their work as they strive to reduce harm to the communities they attempt to support.
I was really drawn to Oumar Ba’s point about how research that reduces people to the level of a micro-organism to access information about people’s private lives, taboos, and inner worlds, is a violation against those we study and should therefore considered a violent process (551). Ba’s point, along with Boesten and Henry’s questions about what answers victim-survivors would be able to give about their experiences that researchers could not find elsewhere (580), made me think about how violent and harmful well-intentioned interviews can be. The trauma that many survivors are forced to relive in the name of research, designing development projects, or informing the public, made me think about On Her Shoulders (Alexandria Bombach, 2019) – a documentary that shares the story of Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi genocide and ISIS sexual slavery survivor.
After sharing her story before the U.N. Security Council in 2015, Nadia began to receive international media attention and was probed to retell her story to journalists and at diplomatic events. As the film progresses, Nadia is candid about how tiring this advocacy work has become and how painful it is to repeatedly share her experiences. The film serves as a commentary on the fatigue and pain that comes from retelling personal experiences of survival but is also ironically, another output that perpetuates the same re-telling. It has admittedly been a few years since I watched On Her Shoulders, so I don’t remember the specifics of how the director positioned or acknowledged herself. However, in this interview with the filmmaker, Bombach admits that at the time that she started filming, she had no idea how impacted Nadia would be from sharing her story over and over again. Bombach also talks about how she was given access to Nadia’s story through a production company and that she had to fight for the film to be a feature instead of a short. The decisions made about the film ultimately were made by executives in the production company in the Global North, who were distant from Nadia’s world.
Revisiting this film, in conjunction with the readings, is bringing up a lot of questions for me about the ethics of documentary films and media interviews. On one hand, the film raises awareness about sexual slavery and genocide but on the other hand, it feeds into the “hype” around Murad’s survival story and undoubtedly inflicts additional pain, and arguably violence, on her. This may be a part of the film that I don’t remember, but I would hope that Bombach’s positionality is reflected in the film (or at least her approach) and that there was extensive collaboration with Murad and her community throughout the filmmaking process.
My key question from this reflection is: Most researchers, filmmakers, journalists, and development professionals are at the helm of their employers and bureaucratic processes. How can they balance advocating for more personal reflexivity, collaboration, and reflection in their work without support (or even worse, when it’s discouraged) from their employers?
In engaging with the readings for this week, I think about the phrase most of us have all heard “knowledge is power”, yet “power” can have such a violent connotation, but we are still looking for it. This directly relates to what the readings this week talk about in terms of research, different ways of knowing, and the ethics surrounding the practice. In some ways, they also talk about how historically, there has been little care for the people being researched and their stories. How did we get to the point where someone’s lived experiences are sometimes nothing more than ink on a paper or a pixel on a screen.
Abdelnour and Abu Moghli talk about reductionists labels and how this contributes to the objectification of the subject. It immediately made me think the US and the never ending discourse on immigration. Particularly, how many Americans group all latin American immigrants as “Mexicans” simply because we share a border and because it is to treat the “problem” when it is homogenous group of people, instead of thinking about the actual root and fundamental causes of the issue at hand. Grouping all migrants into a single group, Ignores the context of each individual country of where they might be fleeing from as well as their own individual experiences. While they talk about political reflexivity, their section on violence normalization also reminds me about how social media has normalized in some ways the images of people in violent contexts as something that is normal, but also possibly even worse as the only way of actually getting people to talk about it. You have the example of the photo of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who drowned while trying to reach Europe to escape the civil war in Syria. There were statistics that showed that immediately after the publication of that photo, searches about the conflict in Syria as well as the so-called “European refugee crisis” skyrocketed but eventually they went down, and also how European countries. More so, as the public’s interest into this crisis started to wind down, more European countries started to crackdown on asylum seekers.
When Oumar Bâ talks about the violent nature of research, I think about how, if someone does not have access to journals through an institution like a university (for which one has to pay tuition in most cases, particularly within the North American context) or is not willing to pay the subscription to the journals, then that research cannot be read so who truly is benefitting here? Sure, you can email the researchers themselves and most will gladly send you an email with the article, but it is still not accessible in so many ways. What is the benefit of the research if it will be stuck behind a paywall? If the people whose stories, experiences, and who to a certain degree trusted the researchers into getting this knowledge out into the world, are not able to see what is being done with their histories, what even is the purpose of doing research. It also reminded me of a reading assigned in a course I took last term (Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation) about the ethics of quasi-experiments as an intervention. With these quasi-experiments (such as cash transfer programs or similar) people in the same community can see the changes and/or benefits that some people are experiencing but not necessarily themselves. Thus, they are left to wonder if they’ll ever get such an opportunity. At the end of the day, these experiments and research will end at some point, so is it ethical to even doing them in the first place?
Most of the authors talk about violent contexts, which means that there are going to be some things that are unspeakable. Not because we shouldn’t be talking about them, but because putting those experiences into words is just far too difficult and would not truly encompass the feelings around said experiences.
So my question for this week is: How do we render visible the voices with lived experiences without falling into the same pitfalls that Abdelnour, Abu Moghli and Ba talk about when engaging in research, which is a form of violence, even if we are doing so with reflexivity in mind? Is it even possible, and if not, is there anything we can do about that?
‘The Angry Survivor’ by Choman Hardi, included at the start of Abdelnour and Abu Moghli’s work, framed my understanding of all the readings. The quote, “This is my story, not yours. Long after you turn off your recorder I stay indoors and weep,” (Hardi in Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, p. 568), speaks to the lasting emotional toll on survivors of violence, contrasting sharply with the often-temporary presence of researchers. Personally, I connected this idea to the idea of temporary or symbolic justice, which does not help and in fact often harms victims or survivors of violence.
I noted in contexts like Africa or Indigenous communities, the issue of extraction also emerges strongly. I can see how the very act of research can be seen as an extension of colonial power dynamics, as scholars like Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni have argued. Research, when reduced to re-search, can become a form of violence itself, stripping people of their agency and humanity (Ba, p. 551). This mirrors the critiques of ethical frameworks imposed from external institutions, often far removed from the lived realities of the people they claim to protect. I found this was particularly evident in Lederach’s example of using Western ethics codes to preserve anonymity, wherein it became clear that the ethical code adhered to by a Western institution was in fact contributing to the silencing of important voices of resistance (p. 464). Ethics, and the how ethical research can promote justice, cannot be defined solely by distant bureaucracies. Rather, Lederach’s reading illustrates how these codes and policies must be co-constructed in alignment with the people directly impacted by the research. In alignment with this principle, I found that all of the readings implored researchers to practice reflexivity as an ongoing process, learning and developing as their understanding did of both the context in which their research was taking place, the needs of the people implicated in their research, and whether or not their research was in fact necessary, or perhaps even harmful.
I noted parallels to how reconciliation is often carried out in Canada, through the use of stories of victims and survivors of violence as a stepping stone to perceived peace or academic understanding, without actually substantially aiding the people most vulnerable. I remember a reading from my undergrad, “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation,” that characterized ‘reconciliation’ policies as something often imposed by and on the terms of the colonial state (Corntassel, Chaw-win-is & T’lakwadzi, 2009). The authors argued that reconciliation, when carried out without Indigenous participation, storytelling, and community involvement essentially “becomes a way for the dominant culture to reinscribe the status quo rather than to make amends for previous injustices” (p. 144). I can see reflexivity working to solve this problem. For instance, in Chilliwack the public school district has developed what I see as a form of ‘research’ that actively practices reflexivity to inform policy. They regularly meet with Indigenous youth, who voluntarily offer up their views on how they see reconciliation and indigenous ways of knowing employed in the school system, and what they would like to see. This then informs administrators as they determine what “reconciliation” is and should mean for their specific context in Chilliwack.
My questions are:
(1) If we seek to promote justice through our research, how, as researchers in a Western-lead country and institution, do we do so in a way that doesn’t replicate patterns of colonial violence?
(2) Ba discusses the complications of identity in determining one’s positionality when conducting research. As researchers working out of a Western institution, how do we determine whether it is our place to conduct research on a population, whether or not we feel as though we belong to it?
This week’s readings collectively examine the ethical challenges and power dynamics researchers encounter when studying violent contexts, emphasizing political reflexivity, ethics of representation, and the colonial roots of knowledge production. They stress the need for reflexivity—both political and positional—to ensure researchers do not unintentionally uphold the very structures of oppression they aim to study or dismantle.
Abdelnour’s concept of political reflexivity highlights three key harms researchers may unintentionally cause: objectification, violence normalization, and silencing voices. Reflecting on my own fieldwork in conflict zones, I realize it is important to question whether my work has contributed to these harms. Researchers, often without realizing it, may impose these harms by focusing too much on their research questions or thematic areas. We may prioritize linking participants’ responses to our research focus rather than truly listening to their full lived experiences, whether directly relevant or not. Even when we hear their stories, selection bias during analysis often leads to excluding some experiences, reducing participants to data points or defining them solely by their trauma. This not only risks objectifying them but also silences marginalized voices, shaping which perspectives are considered legitimate in academic discourse, even if that harm remains largely invisible.
The remedy for these harms, according to Abdelnour, is the standpoint theory as it challenges colonial and post-colonial knowledge production structures by emphasizing the experiences and voices of the most marginalized. This approach creates space for knowledge that counters dominant narratives. Lederach’s focus on the ethics of representation aligns with this, stressing that researchers must responsibly use language to accurately represent their subjects. Both authors emphasize the need for transparency and reflexivity, urging researchers to prioritize the lived experiences of those most affected by violence over their own perspectives. Ba’s critique of extractive research practices is also relevant here. The author’s discussion of epistemic extraction and the legacy of colonialism in African research, where European and American scholars misinterpret or oversimplify African contexts for Western academic consumption, speaks to the broader dynamics of power and exploitation in global knowledge production.
Boesten and Henry’s work on research fatigue in the context of conflict-related sexual violence deepens the ethical considerations surrounding this type of research. They point out that participants often become disillusioned when their involvement in research does not lead to tangible improvements in their conditions. This concern is particularly relevant to my own fieldwork experience, where I observed similar frustrations among participants in conflict zones. They are frequently eager for positive change and see research as a potential pathway to better conditions. However, when research findings do not translate into real-world benefits or visible improvements, this disconnect can lead to significant disappointment and skepticism.
This situation raises critical ethical questions about the responsibilities of researchers. It challenges us to consider whether we are inadvertently contributing to a cycle of extraction without restitution. In such a cycle, communities share their traumatic experiences and personal stories with researchers, expecting that these contributions will lead to meaningful change. Yet, if the research does not result in tangible improvements, it risks treating these communities’ experiences as mere data points, rather than as crucial inputs leading to real-world action. This dynamic underscores the need for researchers to ensure that their work goes beyond academic outputs and actively contributes to positive, concrete outcomes for the communities involved.
Given the concerns raised in this reflection, my question is: what practical steps can researchers take to ensure that their work leads to tangible improvements in participants’ lives, rather than contributing to a cycle of extraction without restitution?
Oumar’s article, “The Europeans and the Americans Don’t Know Africa,” prompted me to reflect on the true meaning of development. Her powerful writing on the name of Re-search we seek others to be seen naked made me appalled for a second. Her candid thoughts on research and reflexivity made me reconsider my own positionality in working with vulnerable women. I resonated with her insights on balancing career aspirations and ethical research integrity. It also reminded me of a senior’s advice to delay work to secure our project’s existence—a common practice in development work, where some professionals seem to prolong issues for career growth. Oumar’s frankness made me question whether I am truly working for change or merely showcasing effort.
Abdelnour’s article on researching in violent contexts resonated with me, highlighting the sad reality of normalizing victimization and silencing marginalized voices under the name of controversy. I experienced this firsthand while drafting cases for rape and domestic violence survivors. In one case involving a senior bureaucrat’s assault on a woman leader, I witnessed how the rape was downplayed as part of “women’s empowerment,” with the victim’s character being defamed to protect the system. Abdelnour’s insights made me reflect critically on how violence is often framed, labelled such as commercially sexually exploited or marginalised and projected raising questions about the narratives we accept.
Angela’s words on going “beyond the academic bubble, to take root in our land, with our social processes of peacebuilding” provoke me to internalize the idea that lived experiences provide a better understanding of issues than writings that often conceal certain truths. I relate to this through my experience as a single mom. Stepping out of the family bubble revealed the challenges of leading a simple life—something I couldn’t fully grasp while working with domestic violence survivors.
Jelke and Marsha’s article questioning the right of academic research to repeatedly capture the stories of women who have survived extreme violence gave me real goosebumps and made me question myself. I resonate with this from my work in rural India, where I conducted several household surveys on poverty indicators (atleast I visited each household for 5 to 6 times to capture data just because of the fact that the tool got revised at multiple levels), including gender-based violence. While I cannot debate what is true or whether it adds value, it’s about one’s ethical standards in how we help victims and at what cost, especially when they are associated with social stigma. Despite being highly qualified I endured domestic violence every single day for two years as I feared my social acceptance until I got the strength.
The questions that popped in my mind.
Who am I? What role will I play as a policy analyst who wants to work closely for women? Will I be the one who pursues career aspirations at the cost of selling stories of victimhood, or will I stick to my strong values and ethical standards? How do I cautiously be self aware to practice my values of feminism?
In what way do lived experiences add value to enhancing the vision of intersectionality? How can these experiences be better leveraged to bring about meaningful and impactful work?
It will soon be a year since we have witnessed firsthand the violent and deliberate decimation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—a systematic act of genocide. Over the past year (and the duration of the occupation), I have witnessed in photographs, humans mutilated, burned, abused, violated, and wailing. There was a point in which I forced myself to bear witness. To say that I owed it to the many voices that disappeared and were silenced and whom nobody heard. Perhaps we might make our amends in bearing their bodies as physical metaphors of the violence of occupation, that in doing so we might be reminded of what it means to be human. There will never be a means to amend what has been done.
Much of this week’s readings connect to this metaphor of photography. Susan Sontag has written on how to photograph is a political act, that it is a method of capturing, commemorating, and quite literally bearing witness. Judith Butler expounds on this metaphor introducing the concept of grievability (the extent of grieving a body) as the photographs “foreclose ethical responsiveness to suffering”. By choosing to look, the viewer acknowledges the existence of the suffering and, in doing so, undertakes a form of responsibility. A politically reflexive engagement with the images of Palestinian suffering would inquire how such frames serve to mobilize change rather than serve methods of 1) objectification 2) sensationalism and in extension 3) voyeurism.
‘I want you to use my name’
In October, my Palestinian friends, began to share a magnification of the losses they were enduring. An old classmate, one with whom I laughed and shared a History class had wrote that he lost 13 members of his family. This was not enduring, this was surviving. How does one wake knowing that his body is defined within a political landscape as a target in the name of conquest? And worse even how does one live knowing his neighbor does not understand or care to?
Yahya, Dalia, Dania, Mahmoud, Dania,
and so many more are the names of those navigating not just the politics of violence but a culture of reproduction—the cyclical nature of violence, suffering, and conflict as both lived and observed.
The culture is where I (and all of us) sit in the discussion and research of conflict. Moreover, in relation to conflict as an object of study, we are the viewers, the reposters, the retweeters, the cultivators of reports, the co-authors, the field researchers. We become implicated in the cycle of reproduction by how we choose to engage with or disengage from these realities.
This only affirms the level of responsibility to be had. We maintain the option to produce (and later reproduce) an entirely different method of engaging with the culture; one in which reparation and liberation are of priority. Thus I turn to ethic of representation within postcolonial theory, emerging as a response to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, by challenging how colonized peoples are portrayed, perceived, and understood. It involves both epistemology—how knowledge about the “other” is constructed—and ontology—how that knowledge shapes their existence and identity within the world. I urge us to critically interrogate both the ways we come to know and represent these subjects and the realities we accept, aiming to dismantle the colonial frameworks that have historically dehumanized and objectified them.
Questions:
(Not my question, but so beautifully written by Judith Butler in the Torture and Ethics of Photography),
“The question for me is the following: how do the norms that govern which lives will be regarded as human lives and which will not, enter into the frames through which discourse and visual representation proceed, and how do these in turn delimit and orchestrate or foreclose ethical responsiveness to suffering.”
How can social movements focused on conflict and war effectively harness digital platforms and media to raise awareness and mobilize action, without reducing the complexities of the conflict to simplistic narratives or contributing to the sensationalism often surrounding representations of violence?
Learning, researching, and writing policies to redress political violence through feminist lenses means advocating for policies that empower individuals, especially women and others marginalized, with a heavy emphasis and importance on the analyst’s or researcher’s positionality in relation to the topic or policies. Reflexivity is crucial, especially if the person learning, researching, or writing said policies does not belong to the group of people that they are advocating for. As Lederach quotes Dionisio Alarcon Fernandez (2017) in their article, ‘writing is a responsibility…because each word is powerful’ (2021, p. 455), reflexivity is vital because how individuals research and write about marginalized groups of people can have an impact on how they are viewed or understood by others. This quote personally summed up the meaning that connects all the readings for this week as it allows us to truly understand why reflexivity is important.
Another example which made me reflect on my previous experience in researching marginalized individuals is Prasad (2014)’s experience with confronting their own positionality, privilege, and prejudices while crossing a checkpoint in Palestine as discussed by Abdelnour and Moghli (2021, p. 11). This example stood out to me as it made me reflect on how my life had completely changed about seven years ago when I also had a big moment of confronting my own positionality and privilege. I remembered my first experience playing alongside my best friend and seeing how often she was harassed and mistreated in online spaces just because she identified as a woman. It made me realize how blind I was to the amount of hate people send to other individuals over the internet if they deem to belong to any “othered” or marginalized community. As a cisgendered and straight man spending time in a predominantly cis-and-straight-male-centric space, I never personally encountered hate. When I started playing with my best friend, it turned into a daily occurrence over night, and it opened my eyes to a world I was blissfully ignorant to. That moment was also the inspiration behind my passions, advocacies, and views that have shaped me into the person I am today. Due to this experience, I strive to forever be reflexive in my thoughts and words, as I understand how much weight many of them can carry.
I also want to agree with Abdelnour and Moghli’s explanation of how critical feminist scholars challenge objectivity in ontology and epistemology (2021, p. 10). I agree that our identities and positionalities play a role in the process of knowledge producing, which is why it is important to always reflect on them (Abdelnour and Moghli, 2021, p. 10). I have personally believed for a long time that no one can be completely unbiased regardless of what the context is. I believe that one should always try their best to be reflexive of their own position in any given situation as not a single person can be 100% objective.
My questions that I have from these readings are: Is there ever a situation in learning, researching, or writing policy that, no matter how reflexive an individual is of their epistemic privilege and position, they would still be unable to represent or understand a marginalized community without causing any harm? Would there ever be a situation where an individual simply has so much privilege over a group that they are researching or advocating for that no amount of critical reflexivity through a feminist or other critical lens ever nullifies their privileged position?
When I was a child, I wanted to become an author when I grew up. Once I decided that, I had to find something to write about. I had heard somewhere that you should write about what you know and I began to question what I knew – what knowledge was mine to share? Did I know anything at all? I felt that there was already so much that had been written and I wondered where my voice fit in all of it.
This led to me not writing much at all. I have gone through periods where I write, but it is usually for my eyes alone. I assumed that as I got older and collected knowledge and experiences I would eventually figure the answers to those questions and begin writing, but instead I oftentimes feel as though I know less now than I did before. And that I am losing practice and perspective.
Meanwhile, I have found that while there is a lot that has been written by people who truly had something to say and contribute, there is possibly a great deal more that has been written for other reasons. I think this is especially apparent in academic writing, where incentive mechanisms around numbers of publications and citations are what motivate many authors to write.
This week’s readings made wonder about the challenges associated with reflexivity – one being spinning your wheels without going anywhere. Or, one might use the rhetoric of reflexivity to signal one’s ethical or moral inscrutability while continuing with practices that remain largely unchanged. In the words of Inanna Hamati-Ataya, reflexivity is used as a “discursive marker” to “establish one’s legitimacy and thereby silence or shame opponents… [entitling] one to access marginalized populations, to study the other while simply flashing the self-proclaimed reflexive mantra.” (Ba, 2022, 553)
Given these and other challenges, I appreciate that the readings also tried to explore what a path forward might look like, such as entering into “collective processes,” as Angela Lederach explains. I liked the metaphor of removing the umbrella: “in order to feel that it is raining, you have to get wet.” (Lederach, 2021, 456)
Going into GP2, I wonder about how much we will be able to remove the umbrella. I wonder where our work will fall on the decoloniality continuum, as presented by Abdelnour and Moghli (2021). As Ba highlighted, “these days, similar dynamics of domination, exploitation, and extraction animate research in and on Africa… which is exacerbated by the ‘dominance or short-term trips and consultancies’” (Ba, 2022, 557). I know I will spend a lot of time think about this this year and there are no straightforward answers, but I am encouraged by Ba’s open admission of coming from a place of non-innocence. There is something significant about admitting guilt while simultaneously trying to call oneself and others to do better (and to figure out what better means).
To that end, I’ve now taped the quote Ba included from Elizabeth Dauphinee to the wall above my desk: “It is possible – fearfully possible – to love people who have committed devastating crimes. And it is possible – fearfully possible – to recognize that there is no place of innocence from which to judge those crimes.” (Ba, 2022, 559)
Questions that I asked myself this week that may be relevant to discussion include:
• How do I (we) employ reflexivity without spinning my (our) wheels or doing nothing at all?
• How do I (we) avoid the using reflexivity as a “discursive marker”?
• How do I (we) navigate reflexivity while existing within a structure that is by nature colonial, entitled, and extractive?
The necessity for different lenses of reflexivity while doing research on conflicts and political violence was a common thread in this week’s readings, and although the research context is different, I constantly recalled my Indigenous language revitalization course in undergrad while reading the authors’ works.
Oumar Ba cites Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith in “‘The Europeans and Americans Don’t Know Africa’: Of Translation, Interpretation, and Extraction,” explaining how research is “probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (p. 551). Especially considering the impact of colonialism on Indigenous languages in Canada, there was emphasis in our revitalization class about the negative impact linguistic researchers could have on Indigenous communities, who would sometimes meet them with hesitancy or refusal to participate in studies/interviews (understandably). While we were taught that it’s crucial for researchers not to disturb the communities they enter, there was not much specific direction given to us on how to avoid doing so if we wanted to conduct research in the future ourselves. In language revitalization, you can also come across the attitude of the researcher who views themselves as the saviour, particularly if there is a dialect on the brink of language death.
One piece of advice I remember getting in my language revitalization course was to collaborate with Indigenous native speakers on revitalization projects, so that the actual language teaching and sense of place around the dialect being spoken was fostered in a culturally authentic way. As we read in Angela J. Lederach’s “‘Each Word is Powerful’: Writing and the Ethics of Representation”, understanding the lived experience of a specific cultural context is key to producing research that honours the position of a group’s narrative. Learning about the necessity of cultural education alongside language revitalization in my undergrad class reflected this; traditions, foods, clothes, skills revitalization, and legends are just as important in revitalizing cultures as understanding their alphabets. Most of my class’ revitalization project proposals then became centered around finding various mediums through which Indigenous language teachers could reach a broader/younger/geographically farther audience.
Thinking back to the Oumar Ba reading, I think this was putting the burden of the research (or at least the success of the revitalization projects) on the Indigenous communities we were theoretically collaborating with. When using online data banks, it might be possible to create an online revitalization game or program, but still, this could still create harm if researchers didn’t take the time to get to know and receive feedback from the communities they were serving. Certainly, with in-person lessons that had a cultural education component, it was of the upmost importance to collaborate with the dialect’s local nation.
These Indigenous educators would be the experts and primary scholars of the revitalization programs, so my question for this week’s class is: beyond crediting a group’s efforts to research, respecting their voice (or silence) in data, providing compensation, and citing their social theories as Lederach mentions in her paper, what else can be done to emphasize their often primary role in knowledge production?
Moving forward as scholars under an anti oppressive research methodology is a goal we must strive towards, but barriers of respectability politics and the challenges within methodology are barriers to our success, as outlined by Oumar Ba’s piece ‘The Europeans and Americans don’t know Africa: Of translation, interpretation and extraction’. The fact that these systems underlie all academic research means that we need to bring reflexology into our research, however not just any kind of reflexivity; we need to approach research with a perspective of ethical reflexivity. Reflextivity should call us to action; We need to critique our systems of knowledge production and recognize that forms of western knowledge reinforce oppressive systems. For example, Ba demonstrates how African researchers working alongside Western researchers can be confined to the role of data collectors, a result of western entitlement to knowledge, rather than a reflection of knowledge or ability. A concept which feels connected to these readings is the idea of paraontology. Western ontology dictates a model through which a proper or true human existence is recognized, the idea that there is a right way to be and that that way is white, cis, and male . Marquis Bey (Bey, 2020) introduces the concept of paraontology as a means to discuss Afropessimistic discourse, however I think it can be applied in many contexts, including today’s. Bey explains that the para in para ontology invites us to think less about the confines of existence and rather consider things that might have been or could be if we used our imaginations, the idea that through dismantling systems of definition and understanding, we might actually be able to understand more.
Today’s readings demonstrated to me that understanding the violent and subjugative systems which underlie our research and knowledge production is not enough, our research needs to seek reparation and liberation, we need to seek radical equity and equality for all. The examples of sexual violence conflict related sexual violence that are in consideration today demonstrate just how important these methodologies are. In Boesten and Henry’s piece, they discuss how in the book I Rigoberta Menchú, “Menchú reveals that she must keep her community’s knowledge secret and that she cannot share or else betray her community as well as her ancestors”. This quote was really impactful to me, emphasizing that not all knowledge is meant to be shared, some knowledge is sacred to those who hold it. To me, the goal of research and knowledge production should be to understand each other and our environments more, in order to move forward in a more equitable way, however we can see that western research instead seeks to possess knowledge in order to hold dominance and power. Here is where I see the role of paraontological thinking as a tool of reflexology in order to deepen understanding without colonizing knowledge. Paraontological thinking demands that we refuse certain methods commonly utilized in modern scholarly research, in alignment with the need for anti-oppressive methodology emphasized by a number of the authors we’re considering today. Today’s reading encouraged me to consider how I can implement paraontology within my own work and as a lens through which to analyze other work I read.
Questions
1. How can researchers use their work and platform as a tool for justice, alongside anticolonial anti-oppressive academia and research? In tangible language, building on the works we have read today, what can we understand anti-oppressive research to look?
2. How does my identity as a student, researcher, professional, influence my work? What privileges, disadvantages, and biases do I have which I need to be aware of in my work, and how can I use this privilege to amplify voices and raise visibility, rather than reinforce narratives and systems of oppression and marginalization?
(Sorry to Dr. Baines as it is well past 8 – my bad and I welcome any repercussions of such lateness)
I am not sure if the readings were meant to be read in the order they were listed, but if so, what a narrative!
Reading Oumar Bâ, I finished wanting to lie on the floor and think about why we are all really doing any of this. I did not set out into academia and research to perpetuate harms and it feels so inevitable. Particularly in international relations, deemed the “least self-reflexive” by Lapid, where the inherent distance between any one individual and the entire rest of the world (and all the international relating we are observing*) perpetuates standards of objectivity that condemn closeness as bias that clouds judgement instead of bringing about enlightenment.
Turning then to Samer Abdelnour and Mai Abu Moghli, it is comforting to be provided with tools, insight and clearly delineated information as to how to mitigate the harms so inherent to research as a practice. It reminded me of something told to me during the coffee break of a research seminar (!) by an Elder: in today’s landscape, some researchers are allies – and some, far fewer, are co-conspirators. I have thought about this almost every day for the past two years. Looking at Samer Abdelnour and Mai Abu Moghli’s decoloniality continuum clicked for me what this kind of co-conspiring looks like in research. Outside of research, in policy work, it felt clearer to understand how to push beyond allyship and seek not only equality but also redress.
Oumar Bâ draws from Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and the illustration of research “undressing other people so as to see them naked,” and this conjured for me an image of the stuffy white researcher in a 5-piece tweed suit plus accessories – as dressed up as one can possibly be. The contrast is stark, clear, and perpetuates the perceivedly desirable distance between the researcher and the “object” of research. It feels as though “we” as a discipline tried to build in as much distance as possible through processes that “[produce] the consumption of my own unhumaning” (Oumar Bâ) through invisibilización (Angela Lederach), silencing, violence normalization and objectification (Samer Abdelnour and Mai Abu Moghli). Removing the umbrella, practicing political reflexivity and uncomfortable reflexivity – it is all very uncomfortable (as it is to disrobe from a 5-piece tweed suit). I was particularly encouraged by the assurances of this discomfort. The discomfort feels inevitable but potentially productive.
I was well into my professional career before I shattered the habit of avoiding “I” in professional writing. I was puzzling words around into passive voice to avoid acknowledging my existence in my own work after slapping a positionality statement on the front page. Reading these three pieces in particular and thinking all of the proximity we seek to erase in favour of objectivity – and go to such violent lengths to do so – I feel like “we” as a discipline got totally duped. I feel trained into the belief that distance from an object begets objectivity and that closeness begets subjectivity which has no place in research. But distance creates its own subjectivity as the further you are from the humaness of both ourselves as the researchers and the “objects” of the research, the wider the gap of inequitable knowledge (re)production we are subject to and perpetuating. In other words, the distance I feel trained to seek and find is both a result of and a tool in the complicity and maintenance of violence.
*but not just observing!
Questions I am mulling upon:
– Where are the sites and opportunities for co-conspiring? How do I (we) learn to see them, behave within them and enact protection for one another in these pursuits?
– In creating environments that encourage productive discomfort, how do I (we) make policy changes in this direction?
During these readings I found myself reflecting on the ways that that so much of research & community work is governed by funding and public attention- I thought that the readings, and especially the Boeston & Henry reading, discussed a number of the complexities involved with situations where actors (academics, activists, etc) are balancing “playing the game” (Boeston & Henry) of funding and academic institutions or structures, while prioritizing the wellbeing of communities and people participating in research (and beyond those participating in research). I was thinking a lot about the need to design and go about research & work more generally with integrity, and I had a few thoughts:
– If I’m hoping to go about my work with integrity, then I need to know what my values are as a researcher, community worker, person, etc. and have an idea of how to operationalize these values. To me, this fits in with the conversation about ethical praxis in research, and reflexivity.
– Boesten & Henry talked at length about considering what the survivor actually gets out of research, and how it will benefit them and their community, while Lederach talked about similar themes of Campesinos finding (or not finding) themselves meaningfully represented in the research they participate in. I particularly appreciated Lederach’s example of publishing Campesino’s actual names or their pseudonyms, and the way that the confidentiality requirements had to be (re)negotiated in order to allow Campesino’s actual names to be disclosed as they requested. This gave me a lot of pause, because I was reflecting on the times when I’ve written grant applications that felt in many ways bogus to me, because our organization was on a tight timeline or we needed to sustain other work that was funded by that certain grant (etc, etc, etc), and so consultation took place AFTER I wrote the application and project outline and we had received the grant, where it should have taken place as part of the grant project itself at the design and conceptualization stage. During the readings I was thinking about how regretful I feel about this, and about how much we lost in these projects while we “played the game” of fundraising, and how that impacted the quality of the project and how well it served the community. I really appreciated the discussion of the limits and benefits of collaborative research and research design in these readings, and for me personally I was thinking about how there are so many other practical things that need to happen as part of this process at the very micro scale that add up to this bigger picture of “ethical praxis”- communication needs to be consistent and timely, time has to be managed so that there’s actually an opportunity to meaningfully incorporate feedback at feedback stages, the language in communication needs to be accessible… and researchers/community workers need to have the time carved out to dedicate to “doing things in a good way”, which is not always accounted for in employment plans, organization procedures, etc.
– Many of the readings talked about how research design could be handled in a more survivor-centred, collaborative, and responsive way, in order to better prioritize respect for the lives and experiences of the people being researched, even if research design is not a cure-all, and in some cases it might be better not to research at that period in time (or at all). What stood out to me particularly was the way these articles explored voyeurism experienced by people who have become the subjects of research because of their traumatic experience- as Ba writes, “the voyeuristic desire that animates humans in the face of tragedy”. I do think that we are probably all guilty of this to a certain extent, in the sense that it’s probably something that everybody needs to patrol for in their work, and I think that these authors provided some helpful tools in observing and responding to voyeurism- for example, Ba’s arguments about mitigating the instrumentalization of commodification of life, Lederach’s situated ethics and focus on choice and disrupting silencing, and Boeston & Henry’s reflection criteria for researching with survivors of violence.
I felt particularly drawn the the themes of voyeurism, agency, and consent in these readings, and so my questions are particularly related to them. My questions are actually all related to this one quote from the Ba article that I found especially thought provoking and challenging to think about. Ba argues that research is violence in and of itself, and that the informed consent of participants “does not mitigate those facts”.
What role does informed consent play in research? To what extent can it mitigate the effects of violence, if it can at all? How does our view of informed consent shape our understanding of the agency of participants in research and survivors of violence?
This week’s readings raised difficult questions about the potential harm research in conflict zones can cause, particularly for vulnerable and marginalized communities. The readings also focused on political and feminist reflexivity within violent contexts and the importance of situating one’s positionality so as not to cause further harm to those most experiencing the violent contexts.
I found the ideas presented by Abdelnour and Abu Moghli particularly interesting, as they were speaking from an informed perspective of having experienced the displacement of the Nakba. As a sidebar, I want to emphasize my appreciation for this article. That it was written by two Palestinian individuals with varying gender identities. That they speak on the potential of silencing voices when that is something that has been historically normalized in the Palestinian context.
As a Lebanese daughter of immigrants, I resonate with their reflections on how colonial histories have shaped and continue to shape research in violent contexts. Boesten, Henry, and Oumar Ba echo this idea, primarily within regions that have been subjected to occupation. These authors argue that researchers must interrogate their positionality to avoid reinforcing power structures that can create more harm. I was drawn to this reading precisely due to calling out the three forms of harm: objectification, normalization, and silencing. These ideas have been out there for generations and have been called out, criticized, studied, and reinforced. These are not abstract concepts—they are lived realities that persist in historical and contemporary contexts.
We see the evident objectification of Syrian refugees, where there is a deliberate tendency to focus on their victim of war status while minimizing their agency, resilience, or experiences. Abdelnour and Abu Moghli said it best, stating that the reductionist label “refugee crisis” fails to capture the full humanity of those affected. It not only groups individuals into a single category but also strips them of the complexity of their lived experiences. This feeds into the normalization of violence in the Middle East. Or in areas similar to the regions a historical oppressor colonized.
Growing up, I often witnessed how the Middle East was villainized and stereotyped as a perpetual war-torn region. I remember being asked as a child if I had a bomb in my backpack simply because I was Lebanese. War, and death, and sexual violence were normalized. Hurt was normalized. Something I have been struggling with is that this normalization leads to less meaningful research being conducted, or worse, research that causes further harm.
We can do all these readings and try to incorporate feminist reflexivity into our research processes. We can try to empathize and reflect on our positionality. But how can we be held accountable? How can we know we are not contributing to harm? Beyond keeping the conversation going (since these issues we are talking about have been happening for decades), what concrete actions can we take to ensure our research doesn’t perpetuate these cycles of violence and silencing? How do we create ethical, responsible research that centers marginalized voices and uplifts them in ways that challenge power dynamics? Finally, how do we ensure that our work results in compassion and understanding rather than reinforcing the systems we aim to dismantle? How can we take advantage of Western resources in research contexts without contributing to the exploitation or commodification of continuously oppressed populations (using the power from the inside?)?
My biggest takeaway from this week’s readings is that to be human is to be incomplete (Ba, 2022). We all enter spaces with biases formed from our identities and experiences, as influenced by social structures, and this makes our knowledge of the world and the people in it fragmented. Particularly in academia, power indifferences are often reproduced through extractive research practices that leave communities of interest devalued. An essential question to ask to prevent this is for whom the knowledge being generated is. I reflected on the tendency for research to have an aspect of self-fulfilment rather than of mutual benefit and community-building, with the former being a direct pattern of colonial violence.
I connected the readings to a piece that I read in my undergrad titled “Emotional and Ethical Quagmires in Returning to the Field” (Ellis, 1995). The researcher, Carolyn Ellis, reflected on her experiences as an ethnographer when she returned to the community she originally studied and found many community members enraged with how they were portrayed in her book. She reflected on the unequal power she had as a researcher in a small, predominantly illiterate, fishing town, recognizing the harm in leaving out information about the research to those living there. For example, she recorded conversations without their knowledge, published stories they thought were confidential, and failed to inform them of the book’s existence.
Her process resulted in her objectifying the people of this remote town, severing the trust she had built with the community for over a decade, and undermining the intelligence and agency of the people she had been researching (Abdelnour & Moghli, 2021). In seeing herself as an impartial researcher, she unjustly extracted intimate information about a group of people and published it, without their consent, to a world that excluded them. She echoes the idea of the “field” as a construct in her reflections (Cueva et al., 2024), eventually wanting to resist the imagined lines between researcher and researched, focusing instead on her relationships with the fisherfolk. She asks the question, “Is doing significant research still more important to me than respecting the lives of Fisherneckers?” To which I say, what makes research significant is ultimately the dedication to respect the lives one chooses to write about.
Her story highlighted the discomfort that can arise from reflexivity. Feminist practice means to question everything, even your own positionalities in systems of violence. It is admitting to the guilt of doing harm and finding a path forward. Reflexivity is an involved and taxing process, but that doesn’t mean it is something to run away from. Chilmeran et al. (2022) expand on the ability of reflexivity to make the researcher visible, and thus in turn, accountable to their words and ideas. This is only possible if the researcher lends themselves and their work to the personal—the messy, emotional aspects of being human and being wrong. It is clear to me now that it is an act of love for self and community to do so.
Questions:
1. In what instances is research not extractive or invasive? Are there any?
2. Specifically, how can the researcher’s presence be justified in sensitive conflict-ridden areas where many people have experienced a high degree of violence? Does the researcher’s personal relationship (or lack thereof) with the people or issue at hand change the researcher-researched dynamic? How?
While the concepts of violence and harm reduction through research practices were central to this week’s readings, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to the work of journalists, filmmakers, and international development professionals. Understanding one’s positionality, practicing political reflexivity, engaging in long-term collaborations, and being aware of “hype” around certain conflicts or communities, are all concepts that development professionals and journalists should prioritize in their work as they strive to reduce harm to the communities they attempt to support.
I was really drawn to Oumar Ba’s point about how research that reduces people to the level of a micro-organism to access information about people’s private lives, taboos, and inner worlds, is a violation against those we study and should therefore considered a violent process (551). Ba’s point, along with Boesten and Henry’s questions about what answers victim-survivors would be able to give about their experiences that researchers could not find elsewhere (580), made me think about how violent and harmful well-intentioned interviews can be. The trauma that many survivors are forced to relive in the name of research, designing development projects, or informing the public, made me think about On Her Shoulders (Alexandria Bombach, 2019) – a documentary that shares the story of Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi genocide and ISIS sexual slavery survivor.
After sharing her story before the U.N. Security Council in 2015, Nadia began to receive international media attention and was probed to retell her story to journalists and at diplomatic events. As the film progresses, Nadia is candid about how tiring this advocacy work has become and how painful it is to repeatedly share her experiences. The film serves as a commentary on the fatigue and pain that comes from retelling personal experiences of survival but is also ironically, another output that perpetuates the same re-telling. It has admittedly been a few years since I watched On Her Shoulders, so I don’t remember the specifics of how the director positioned or acknowledged herself. However, in this interview with the filmmaker, Bombach admits that at the time that she started filming, she had no idea how impacted Nadia would be from sharing her story over and over again. Bombach also talks about how she was given access to Nadia’s story through a production company and that she had to fight for the film to be a feature instead of a short. The decisions made about the film ultimately were made by executives in the production company in the Global North, who were distant from Nadia’s world.
Revisiting this film, in conjunction with the readings, is bringing up a lot of questions for me about the ethics of documentary films and media interviews. On one hand, the film raises awareness about sexual slavery and genocide but on the other hand, it feeds into the “hype” around Murad’s survival story and undoubtedly inflicts additional pain, and arguably violence, on her. This may be a part of the film that I don’t remember, but I would hope that Bombach’s positionality is reflected in the film (or at least her approach) and that there was extensive collaboration with Murad and her community throughout the filmmaking process.
My key question from this reflection is: Most researchers, filmmakers, journalists, and development professionals are at the helm of their employers and bureaucratic processes. How can they balance advocating for more personal reflexivity, collaboration, and reflection in their work without support (or even worse, when it’s discouraged) from their employers?
In engaging with the readings for this week, I think about the phrase most of us have all heard “knowledge is power”, yet “power” can have such a violent connotation, but we are still looking for it. This directly relates to what the readings this week talk about in terms of research, different ways of knowing, and the ethics surrounding the practice. In some ways, they also talk about how historically, there has been little care for the people being researched and their stories. How did we get to the point where someone’s lived experiences are sometimes nothing more than ink on a paper or a pixel on a screen.
Abdelnour and Abu Moghli talk about reductionists labels and how this contributes to the objectification of the subject. It immediately made me think the US and the never ending discourse on immigration. Particularly, how many Americans group all latin American immigrants as “Mexicans” simply because we share a border and because it is to treat the “problem” when it is homogenous group of people, instead of thinking about the actual root and fundamental causes of the issue at hand. Grouping all migrants into a single group, Ignores the context of each individual country of where they might be fleeing from as well as their own individual experiences. While they talk about political reflexivity, their section on violence normalization also reminds me about how social media has normalized in some ways the images of people in violent contexts as something that is normal, but also possibly even worse as the only way of actually getting people to talk about it. You have the example of the photo of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who drowned while trying to reach Europe to escape the civil war in Syria. There were statistics that showed that immediately after the publication of that photo, searches about the conflict in Syria as well as the so-called “European refugee crisis” skyrocketed but eventually they went down, and also how European countries. More so, as the public’s interest into this crisis started to wind down, more European countries started to crackdown on asylum seekers.
When Oumar Bâ talks about the violent nature of research, I think about how, if someone does not have access to journals through an institution like a university (for which one has to pay tuition in most cases, particularly within the North American context) or is not willing to pay the subscription to the journals, then that research cannot be read so who truly is benefitting here? Sure, you can email the researchers themselves and most will gladly send you an email with the article, but it is still not accessible in so many ways. What is the benefit of the research if it will be stuck behind a paywall? If the people whose stories, experiences, and who to a certain degree trusted the researchers into getting this knowledge out into the world, are not able to see what is being done with their histories, what even is the purpose of doing research. It also reminded me of a reading assigned in a course I took last term (Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation) about the ethics of quasi-experiments as an intervention. With these quasi-experiments (such as cash transfer programs or similar) people in the same community can see the changes and/or benefits that some people are experiencing but not necessarily themselves. Thus, they are left to wonder if they’ll ever get such an opportunity. At the end of the day, these experiments and research will end at some point, so is it ethical to even doing them in the first place?
Most of the authors talk about violent contexts, which means that there are going to be some things that are unspeakable. Not because we shouldn’t be talking about them, but because putting those experiences into words is just far too difficult and would not truly encompass the feelings around said experiences.
So my question for this week is: How do we render visible the voices with lived experiences without falling into the same pitfalls that Abdelnour, Abu Moghli and Ba talk about when engaging in research, which is a form of violence, even if we are doing so with reflexivity in mind? Is it even possible, and if not, is there anything we can do about that?
‘The Angry Survivor’ by Choman Hardi, included at the start of Abdelnour and Abu Moghli’s work, framed my understanding of all the readings. The quote, “This is my story, not yours. Long after you turn off your recorder I stay indoors and weep,” (Hardi in Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, p. 568), speaks to the lasting emotional toll on survivors of violence, contrasting sharply with the often-temporary presence of researchers. Personally, I connected this idea to the idea of temporary or symbolic justice, which does not help and in fact often harms victims or survivors of violence.
I noted in contexts like Africa or Indigenous communities, the issue of extraction also emerges strongly. I can see how the very act of research can be seen as an extension of colonial power dynamics, as scholars like Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni have argued. Research, when reduced to re-search, can become a form of violence itself, stripping people of their agency and humanity (Ba, p. 551). This mirrors the critiques of ethical frameworks imposed from external institutions, often far removed from the lived realities of the people they claim to protect. I found this was particularly evident in Lederach’s example of using Western ethics codes to preserve anonymity, wherein it became clear that the ethical code adhered to by a Western institution was in fact contributing to the silencing of important voices of resistance (p. 464). Ethics, and the how ethical research can promote justice, cannot be defined solely by distant bureaucracies. Rather, Lederach’s reading illustrates how these codes and policies must be co-constructed in alignment with the people directly impacted by the research. In alignment with this principle, I found that all of the readings implored researchers to practice reflexivity as an ongoing process, learning and developing as their understanding did of both the context in which their research was taking place, the needs of the people implicated in their research, and whether or not their research was in fact necessary, or perhaps even harmful.
I noted parallels to how reconciliation is often carried out in Canada, through the use of stories of victims and survivors of violence as a stepping stone to perceived peace or academic understanding, without actually substantially aiding the people most vulnerable. I remember a reading from my undergrad, “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation,” that characterized ‘reconciliation’ policies as something often imposed by and on the terms of the colonial state (Corntassel, Chaw-win-is & T’lakwadzi, 2009). The authors argued that reconciliation, when carried out without Indigenous participation, storytelling, and community involvement essentially “becomes a way for the dominant culture to reinscribe the status quo rather than to make amends for previous injustices” (p. 144). I can see reflexivity working to solve this problem. For instance, in Chilliwack the public school district has developed what I see as a form of ‘research’ that actively practices reflexivity to inform policy. They regularly meet with Indigenous youth, who voluntarily offer up their views on how they see reconciliation and indigenous ways of knowing employed in the school system, and what they would like to see. This then informs administrators as they determine what “reconciliation” is and should mean for their specific context in Chilliwack.
My questions are:
(1) If we seek to promote justice through our research, how, as researchers in a Western-lead country and institution, do we do so in a way that doesn’t replicate patterns of colonial violence?
(2) Ba discusses the complications of identity in determining one’s positionality when conducting research. As researchers working out of a Western institution, how do we determine whether it is our place to conduct research on a population, whether or not we feel as though we belong to it?
This week’s readings collectively examine the ethical challenges and power dynamics researchers encounter when studying violent contexts, emphasizing political reflexivity, ethics of representation, and the colonial roots of knowledge production. They stress the need for reflexivity—both political and positional—to ensure researchers do not unintentionally uphold the very structures of oppression they aim to study or dismantle.
Abdelnour’s concept of political reflexivity highlights three key harms researchers may unintentionally cause: objectification, violence normalization, and silencing voices. Reflecting on my own fieldwork in conflict zones, I realize it is important to question whether my work has contributed to these harms. Researchers, often without realizing it, may impose these harms by focusing too much on their research questions or thematic areas. We may prioritize linking participants’ responses to our research focus rather than truly listening to their full lived experiences, whether directly relevant or not. Even when we hear their stories, selection bias during analysis often leads to excluding some experiences, reducing participants to data points or defining them solely by their trauma. This not only risks objectifying them but also silences marginalized voices, shaping which perspectives are considered legitimate in academic discourse, even if that harm remains largely invisible.
The remedy for these harms, according to Abdelnour, is the standpoint theory as it challenges colonial and post-colonial knowledge production structures by emphasizing the experiences and voices of the most marginalized. This approach creates space for knowledge that counters dominant narratives. Lederach’s focus on the ethics of representation aligns with this, stressing that researchers must responsibly use language to accurately represent their subjects. Both authors emphasize the need for transparency and reflexivity, urging researchers to prioritize the lived experiences of those most affected by violence over their own perspectives. Ba’s critique of extractive research practices is also relevant here. The author’s discussion of epistemic extraction and the legacy of colonialism in African research, where European and American scholars misinterpret or oversimplify African contexts for Western academic consumption, speaks to the broader dynamics of power and exploitation in global knowledge production.
Boesten and Henry’s work on research fatigue in the context of conflict-related sexual violence deepens the ethical considerations surrounding this type of research. They point out that participants often become disillusioned when their involvement in research does not lead to tangible improvements in their conditions. This concern is particularly relevant to my own fieldwork experience, where I observed similar frustrations among participants in conflict zones. They are frequently eager for positive change and see research as a potential pathway to better conditions. However, when research findings do not translate into real-world benefits or visible improvements, this disconnect can lead to significant disappointment and skepticism.
This situation raises critical ethical questions about the responsibilities of researchers. It challenges us to consider whether we are inadvertently contributing to a cycle of extraction without restitution. In such a cycle, communities share their traumatic experiences and personal stories with researchers, expecting that these contributions will lead to meaningful change. Yet, if the research does not result in tangible improvements, it risks treating these communities’ experiences as mere data points, rather than as crucial inputs leading to real-world action. This dynamic underscores the need for researchers to ensure that their work goes beyond academic outputs and actively contributes to positive, concrete outcomes for the communities involved.
Given the concerns raised in this reflection, my question is: what practical steps can researchers take to ensure that their work leads to tangible improvements in participants’ lives, rather than contributing to a cycle of extraction without restitution?
Oumar’s article, “The Europeans and the Americans Don’t Know Africa,” prompted me to reflect on the true meaning of development. Her powerful writing on the name of Re-search we seek others to be seen naked made me appalled for a second. Her candid thoughts on research and reflexivity made me reconsider my own positionality in working with vulnerable women. I resonated with her insights on balancing career aspirations and ethical research integrity. It also reminded me of a senior’s advice to delay work to secure our project’s existence—a common practice in development work, where some professionals seem to prolong issues for career growth. Oumar’s frankness made me question whether I am truly working for change or merely showcasing effort.
Abdelnour’s article on researching in violent contexts resonated with me, highlighting the sad reality of normalizing victimization and silencing marginalized voices under the name of controversy. I experienced this firsthand while drafting cases for rape and domestic violence survivors. In one case involving a senior bureaucrat’s assault on a woman leader, I witnessed how the rape was downplayed as part of “women’s empowerment,” with the victim’s character being defamed to protect the system. Abdelnour’s insights made me reflect critically on how violence is often framed, labelled such as commercially sexually exploited or marginalised and projected raising questions about the narratives we accept.
Angela’s words on going “beyond the academic bubble, to take root in our land, with our social processes of peacebuilding” provoke me to internalize the idea that lived experiences provide a better understanding of issues than writings that often conceal certain truths. I relate to this through my experience as a single mom. Stepping out of the family bubble revealed the challenges of leading a simple life—something I couldn’t fully grasp while working with domestic violence survivors.
Jelke and Marsha’s article questioning the right of academic research to repeatedly capture the stories of women who have survived extreme violence gave me real goosebumps and made me question myself. I resonate with this from my work in rural India, where I conducted several household surveys on poverty indicators (atleast I visited each household for 5 to 6 times to capture data just because of the fact that the tool got revised at multiple levels), including gender-based violence. While I cannot debate what is true or whether it adds value, it’s about one’s ethical standards in how we help victims and at what cost, especially when they are associated with social stigma. Despite being highly qualified I endured domestic violence every single day for two years as I feared my social acceptance until I got the strength.
The questions that popped in my mind.
Who am I? What role will I play as a policy analyst who wants to work closely for women? Will I be the one who pursues career aspirations at the cost of selling stories of victimhood, or will I stick to my strong values and ethical standards? How do I cautiously be self aware to practice my values of feminism?
In what way do lived experiences add value to enhancing the vision of intersectionality? How can these experiences be better leveraged to bring about meaningful and impactful work?
It will soon be a year since we have witnessed firsthand the violent and deliberate decimation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—a systematic act of genocide. Over the past year (and the duration of the occupation), I have witnessed in photographs, humans mutilated, burned, abused, violated, and wailing. There was a point in which I forced myself to bear witness. To say that I owed it to the many voices that disappeared and were silenced and whom nobody heard. Perhaps we might make our amends in bearing their bodies as physical metaphors of the violence of occupation, that in doing so we might be reminded of what it means to be human. There will never be a means to amend what has been done.
Much of this week’s readings connect to this metaphor of photography. Susan Sontag has written on how to photograph is a political act, that it is a method of capturing, commemorating, and quite literally bearing witness. Judith Butler expounds on this metaphor introducing the concept of grievability (the extent of grieving a body) as the photographs “foreclose ethical responsiveness to suffering”. By choosing to look, the viewer acknowledges the existence of the suffering and, in doing so, undertakes a form of responsibility. A politically reflexive engagement with the images of Palestinian suffering would inquire how such frames serve to mobilize change rather than serve methods of 1) objectification 2) sensationalism and in extension 3) voyeurism.
‘I want you to use my name’
In October, my Palestinian friends, began to share a magnification of the losses they were enduring. An old classmate, one with whom I laughed and shared a History class had wrote that he lost 13 members of his family. This was not enduring, this was surviving. How does one wake knowing that his body is defined within a political landscape as a target in the name of conquest? And worse even how does one live knowing his neighbor does not understand or care to?
Yahya, Dalia, Dania, Mahmoud, Dania,
and so many more are the names of those navigating not just the politics of violence but a culture of reproduction—the cyclical nature of violence, suffering, and conflict as both lived and observed.
The culture is where I (and all of us) sit in the discussion and research of conflict. Moreover, in relation to conflict as an object of study, we are the viewers, the reposters, the retweeters, the cultivators of reports, the co-authors, the field researchers. We become implicated in the cycle of reproduction by how we choose to engage with or disengage from these realities.
This only affirms the level of responsibility to be had. We maintain the option to produce (and later reproduce) an entirely different method of engaging with the culture; one in which reparation and liberation are of priority. Thus I turn to ethic of representation within postcolonial theory, emerging as a response to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, by challenging how colonized peoples are portrayed, perceived, and understood. It involves both epistemology—how knowledge about the “other” is constructed—and ontology—how that knowledge shapes their existence and identity within the world. I urge us to critically interrogate both the ways we come to know and represent these subjects and the realities we accept, aiming to dismantle the colonial frameworks that have historically dehumanized and objectified them.
Questions:
(Not my question, but so beautifully written by Judith Butler in the Torture and Ethics of Photography),
“The question for me is the following: how do the norms that govern which lives will be regarded as human lives and which will not, enter into the frames through which discourse and visual representation proceed, and how do these in turn delimit and orchestrate or foreclose ethical responsiveness to suffering.”
How can social movements focused on conflict and war effectively harness digital platforms and media to raise awareness and mobilize action, without reducing the complexities of the conflict to simplistic narratives or contributing to the sensationalism often surrounding representations of violence?
Learning, researching, and writing policies to redress political violence through feminist lenses means advocating for policies that empower individuals, especially women and others marginalized, with a heavy emphasis and importance on the analyst’s or researcher’s positionality in relation to the topic or policies. Reflexivity is crucial, especially if the person learning, researching, or writing said policies does not belong to the group of people that they are advocating for. As Lederach quotes Dionisio Alarcon Fernandez (2017) in their article, ‘writing is a responsibility…because each word is powerful’ (2021, p. 455), reflexivity is vital because how individuals research and write about marginalized groups of people can have an impact on how they are viewed or understood by others. This quote personally summed up the meaning that connects all the readings for this week as it allows us to truly understand why reflexivity is important.
Another example which made me reflect on my previous experience in researching marginalized individuals is Prasad (2014)’s experience with confronting their own positionality, privilege, and prejudices while crossing a checkpoint in Palestine as discussed by Abdelnour and Moghli (2021, p. 11). This example stood out to me as it made me reflect on how my life had completely changed about seven years ago when I also had a big moment of confronting my own positionality and privilege. I remembered my first experience playing alongside my best friend and seeing how often she was harassed and mistreated in online spaces just because she identified as a woman. It made me realize how blind I was to the amount of hate people send to other individuals over the internet if they deem to belong to any “othered” or marginalized community. As a cisgendered and straight man spending time in a predominantly cis-and-straight-male-centric space, I never personally encountered hate. When I started playing with my best friend, it turned into a daily occurrence over night, and it opened my eyes to a world I was blissfully ignorant to. That moment was also the inspiration behind my passions, advocacies, and views that have shaped me into the person I am today. Due to this experience, I strive to forever be reflexive in my thoughts and words, as I understand how much weight many of them can carry.
I also want to agree with Abdelnour and Moghli’s explanation of how critical feminist scholars challenge objectivity in ontology and epistemology (2021, p. 10). I agree that our identities and positionalities play a role in the process of knowledge producing, which is why it is important to always reflect on them (Abdelnour and Moghli, 2021, p. 10). I have personally believed for a long time that no one can be completely unbiased regardless of what the context is. I believe that one should always try their best to be reflexive of their own position in any given situation as not a single person can be 100% objective.
My questions that I have from these readings are: Is there ever a situation in learning, researching, or writing policy that, no matter how reflexive an individual is of their epistemic privilege and position, they would still be unable to represent or understand a marginalized community without causing any harm? Would there ever be a situation where an individual simply has so much privilege over a group that they are researching or advocating for that no amount of critical reflexivity through a feminist or other critical lens ever nullifies their privileged position?
When I was a child, I wanted to become an author when I grew up. Once I decided that, I had to find something to write about. I had heard somewhere that you should write about what you know and I began to question what I knew – what knowledge was mine to share? Did I know anything at all? I felt that there was already so much that had been written and I wondered where my voice fit in all of it.
This led to me not writing much at all. I have gone through periods where I write, but it is usually for my eyes alone. I assumed that as I got older and collected knowledge and experiences I would eventually figure the answers to those questions and begin writing, but instead I oftentimes feel as though I know less now than I did before. And that I am losing practice and perspective.
Meanwhile, I have found that while there is a lot that has been written by people who truly had something to say and contribute, there is possibly a great deal more that has been written for other reasons. I think this is especially apparent in academic writing, where incentive mechanisms around numbers of publications and citations are what motivate many authors to write.
This week’s readings made wonder about the challenges associated with reflexivity – one being spinning your wheels without going anywhere. Or, one might use the rhetoric of reflexivity to signal one’s ethical or moral inscrutability while continuing with practices that remain largely unchanged. In the words of Inanna Hamati-Ataya, reflexivity is used as a “discursive marker” to “establish one’s legitimacy and thereby silence or shame opponents… [entitling] one to access marginalized populations, to study the other while simply flashing the self-proclaimed reflexive mantra.” (Ba, 2022, 553)
Given these and other challenges, I appreciate that the readings also tried to explore what a path forward might look like, such as entering into “collective processes,” as Angela Lederach explains. I liked the metaphor of removing the umbrella: “in order to feel that it is raining, you have to get wet.” (Lederach, 2021, 456)
Going into GP2, I wonder about how much we will be able to remove the umbrella. I wonder where our work will fall on the decoloniality continuum, as presented by Abdelnour and Moghli (2021). As Ba highlighted, “these days, similar dynamics of domination, exploitation, and extraction animate research in and on Africa… which is exacerbated by the ‘dominance or short-term trips and consultancies’” (Ba, 2022, 557). I know I will spend a lot of time think about this this year and there are no straightforward answers, but I am encouraged by Ba’s open admission of coming from a place of non-innocence. There is something significant about admitting guilt while simultaneously trying to call oneself and others to do better (and to figure out what better means).
To that end, I’ve now taped the quote Ba included from Elizabeth Dauphinee to the wall above my desk: “It is possible – fearfully possible – to love people who have committed devastating crimes. And it is possible – fearfully possible – to recognize that there is no place of innocence from which to judge those crimes.” (Ba, 2022, 559)
Questions that I asked myself this week that may be relevant to discussion include:
• How do I (we) employ reflexivity without spinning my (our) wheels or doing nothing at all?
• How do I (we) avoid the using reflexivity as a “discursive marker”?
• How do I (we) navigate reflexivity while existing within a structure that is by nature colonial, entitled, and extractive?
The necessity for different lenses of reflexivity while doing research on conflicts and political violence was a common thread in this week’s readings, and although the research context is different, I constantly recalled my Indigenous language revitalization course in undergrad while reading the authors’ works.
Oumar Ba cites Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith in “‘The Europeans and Americans Don’t Know Africa’: Of Translation, Interpretation, and Extraction,” explaining how research is “probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (p. 551). Especially considering the impact of colonialism on Indigenous languages in Canada, there was emphasis in our revitalization class about the negative impact linguistic researchers could have on Indigenous communities, who would sometimes meet them with hesitancy or refusal to participate in studies/interviews (understandably). While we were taught that it’s crucial for researchers not to disturb the communities they enter, there was not much specific direction given to us on how to avoid doing so if we wanted to conduct research in the future ourselves. In language revitalization, you can also come across the attitude of the researcher who views themselves as the saviour, particularly if there is a dialect on the brink of language death.
One piece of advice I remember getting in my language revitalization course was to collaborate with Indigenous native speakers on revitalization projects, so that the actual language teaching and sense of place around the dialect being spoken was fostered in a culturally authentic way. As we read in Angela J. Lederach’s “‘Each Word is Powerful’: Writing and the Ethics of Representation”, understanding the lived experience of a specific cultural context is key to producing research that honours the position of a group’s narrative. Learning about the necessity of cultural education alongside language revitalization in my undergrad class reflected this; traditions, foods, clothes, skills revitalization, and legends are just as important in revitalizing cultures as understanding their alphabets. Most of my class’ revitalization project proposals then became centered around finding various mediums through which Indigenous language teachers could reach a broader/younger/geographically farther audience.
Thinking back to the Oumar Ba reading, I think this was putting the burden of the research (or at least the success of the revitalization projects) on the Indigenous communities we were theoretically collaborating with. When using online data banks, it might be possible to create an online revitalization game or program, but still, this could still create harm if researchers didn’t take the time to get to know and receive feedback from the communities they were serving. Certainly, with in-person lessons that had a cultural education component, it was of the upmost importance to collaborate with the dialect’s local nation.
These Indigenous educators would be the experts and primary scholars of the revitalization programs, so my question for this week’s class is: beyond crediting a group’s efforts to research, respecting their voice (or silence) in data, providing compensation, and citing their social theories as Lederach mentions in her paper, what else can be done to emphasize their often primary role in knowledge production?
Moving forward as scholars under an anti oppressive research methodology is a goal we must strive towards, but barriers of respectability politics and the challenges within methodology are barriers to our success, as outlined by Oumar Ba’s piece ‘The Europeans and Americans don’t know Africa: Of translation, interpretation and extraction’. The fact that these systems underlie all academic research means that we need to bring reflexology into our research, however not just any kind of reflexivity; we need to approach research with a perspective of ethical reflexivity. Reflextivity should call us to action; We need to critique our systems of knowledge production and recognize that forms of western knowledge reinforce oppressive systems. For example, Ba demonstrates how African researchers working alongside Western researchers can be confined to the role of data collectors, a result of western entitlement to knowledge, rather than a reflection of knowledge or ability. A concept which feels connected to these readings is the idea of paraontology. Western ontology dictates a model through which a proper or true human existence is recognized, the idea that there is a right way to be and that that way is white, cis, and male . Marquis Bey (Bey, 2020) introduces the concept of paraontology as a means to discuss Afropessimistic discourse, however I think it can be applied in many contexts, including today’s. Bey explains that the para in para ontology invites us to think less about the confines of existence and rather consider things that might have been or could be if we used our imaginations, the idea that through dismantling systems of definition and understanding, we might actually be able to understand more.
Today’s readings demonstrated to me that understanding the violent and subjugative systems which underlie our research and knowledge production is not enough, our research needs to seek reparation and liberation, we need to seek radical equity and equality for all. The examples of sexual violence conflict related sexual violence that are in consideration today demonstrate just how important these methodologies are. In Boesten and Henry’s piece, they discuss how in the book I Rigoberta Menchú, “Menchú reveals that she must keep her community’s knowledge secret and that she cannot share or else betray her community as well as her ancestors”. This quote was really impactful to me, emphasizing that not all knowledge is meant to be shared, some knowledge is sacred to those who hold it. To me, the goal of research and knowledge production should be to understand each other and our environments more, in order to move forward in a more equitable way, however we can see that western research instead seeks to possess knowledge in order to hold dominance and power. Here is where I see the role of paraontological thinking as a tool of reflexology in order to deepen understanding without colonizing knowledge. Paraontological thinking demands that we refuse certain methods commonly utilized in modern scholarly research, in alignment with the need for anti-oppressive methodology emphasized by a number of the authors we’re considering today. Today’s reading encouraged me to consider how I can implement paraontology within my own work and as a lens through which to analyze other work I read.
Bey, M. (2020). The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.80782
Questions
1. How can researchers use their work and platform as a tool for justice, alongside anticolonial anti-oppressive academia and research? In tangible language, building on the works we have read today, what can we understand anti-oppressive research to look?
2. How does my identity as a student, researcher, professional, influence my work? What privileges, disadvantages, and biases do I have which I need to be aware of in my work, and how can I use this privilege to amplify voices and raise visibility, rather than reinforce narratives and systems of oppression and marginalization?
(Sorry to Dr. Baines as it is well past 8 – my bad and I welcome any repercussions of such lateness)
I am not sure if the readings were meant to be read in the order they were listed, but if so, what a narrative!
Reading Oumar Bâ, I finished wanting to lie on the floor and think about why we are all really doing any of this. I did not set out into academia and research to perpetuate harms and it feels so inevitable. Particularly in international relations, deemed the “least self-reflexive” by Lapid, where the inherent distance between any one individual and the entire rest of the world (and all the international relating we are observing*) perpetuates standards of objectivity that condemn closeness as bias that clouds judgement instead of bringing about enlightenment.
Turning then to Samer Abdelnour and Mai Abu Moghli, it is comforting to be provided with tools, insight and clearly delineated information as to how to mitigate the harms so inherent to research as a practice. It reminded me of something told to me during the coffee break of a research seminar (!) by an Elder: in today’s landscape, some researchers are allies – and some, far fewer, are co-conspirators. I have thought about this almost every day for the past two years. Looking at Samer Abdelnour and Mai Abu Moghli’s decoloniality continuum clicked for me what this kind of co-conspiring looks like in research. Outside of research, in policy work, it felt clearer to understand how to push beyond allyship and seek not only equality but also redress.
Oumar Bâ draws from Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and the illustration of research “undressing other people so as to see them naked,” and this conjured for me an image of the stuffy white researcher in a 5-piece tweed suit plus accessories – as dressed up as one can possibly be. The contrast is stark, clear, and perpetuates the perceivedly desirable distance between the researcher and the “object” of research. It feels as though “we” as a discipline tried to build in as much distance as possible through processes that “[produce] the consumption of my own unhumaning” (Oumar Bâ) through invisibilización (Angela Lederach), silencing, violence normalization and objectification (Samer Abdelnour and Mai Abu Moghli). Removing the umbrella, practicing political reflexivity and uncomfortable reflexivity – it is all very uncomfortable (as it is to disrobe from a 5-piece tweed suit). I was particularly encouraged by the assurances of this discomfort. The discomfort feels inevitable but potentially productive.
I was well into my professional career before I shattered the habit of avoiding “I” in professional writing. I was puzzling words around into passive voice to avoid acknowledging my existence in my own work after slapping a positionality statement on the front page. Reading these three pieces in particular and thinking all of the proximity we seek to erase in favour of objectivity – and go to such violent lengths to do so – I feel like “we” as a discipline got totally duped. I feel trained into the belief that distance from an object begets objectivity and that closeness begets subjectivity which has no place in research. But distance creates its own subjectivity as the further you are from the humaness of both ourselves as the researchers and the “objects” of the research, the wider the gap of inequitable knowledge (re)production we are subject to and perpetuating. In other words, the distance I feel trained to seek and find is both a result of and a tool in the complicity and maintenance of violence.
*but not just observing!
Questions I am mulling upon:
– Where are the sites and opportunities for co-conspiring? How do I (we) learn to see them, behave within them and enact protection for one another in these pursuits?
– In creating environments that encourage productive discomfort, how do I (we) make policy changes in this direction?
Post-script:
And also, reading Angela Lederach reminded me of this phenomenal poem from Maori poet and scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville (also, UBC faculty member). It is here: https://64.media.tumblr.com/54837053e4a602c8361b5329aa6ee97f/0109f84c6f48b75b-a0/s2048x3072/e2a17973109705abdd54db5cdd0080b33f7c33b7.jpg (and in her new book not yet available on bookshelves in Canada).
During these readings I found myself reflecting on the ways that that so much of research & community work is governed by funding and public attention- I thought that the readings, and especially the Boeston & Henry reading, discussed a number of the complexities involved with situations where actors (academics, activists, etc) are balancing “playing the game” (Boeston & Henry) of funding and academic institutions or structures, while prioritizing the wellbeing of communities and people participating in research (and beyond those participating in research). I was thinking a lot about the need to design and go about research & work more generally with integrity, and I had a few thoughts:
– If I’m hoping to go about my work with integrity, then I need to know what my values are as a researcher, community worker, person, etc. and have an idea of how to operationalize these values. To me, this fits in with the conversation about ethical praxis in research, and reflexivity.
– Boesten & Henry talked at length about considering what the survivor actually gets out of research, and how it will benefit them and their community, while Lederach talked about similar themes of Campesinos finding (or not finding) themselves meaningfully represented in the research they participate in. I particularly appreciated Lederach’s example of publishing Campesino’s actual names or their pseudonyms, and the way that the confidentiality requirements had to be (re)negotiated in order to allow Campesino’s actual names to be disclosed as they requested. This gave me a lot of pause, because I was reflecting on the times when I’ve written grant applications that felt in many ways bogus to me, because our organization was on a tight timeline or we needed to sustain other work that was funded by that certain grant (etc, etc, etc), and so consultation took place AFTER I wrote the application and project outline and we had received the grant, where it should have taken place as part of the grant project itself at the design and conceptualization stage. During the readings I was thinking about how regretful I feel about this, and about how much we lost in these projects while we “played the game” of fundraising, and how that impacted the quality of the project and how well it served the community. I really appreciated the discussion of the limits and benefits of collaborative research and research design in these readings, and for me personally I was thinking about how there are so many other practical things that need to happen as part of this process at the very micro scale that add up to this bigger picture of “ethical praxis”- communication needs to be consistent and timely, time has to be managed so that there’s actually an opportunity to meaningfully incorporate feedback at feedback stages, the language in communication needs to be accessible… and researchers/community workers need to have the time carved out to dedicate to “doing things in a good way”, which is not always accounted for in employment plans, organization procedures, etc.
– Many of the readings talked about how research design could be handled in a more survivor-centred, collaborative, and responsive way, in order to better prioritize respect for the lives and experiences of the people being researched, even if research design is not a cure-all, and in some cases it might be better not to research at that period in time (or at all). What stood out to me particularly was the way these articles explored voyeurism experienced by people who have become the subjects of research because of their traumatic experience- as Ba writes, “the voyeuristic desire that animates humans in the face of tragedy”. I do think that we are probably all guilty of this to a certain extent, in the sense that it’s probably something that everybody needs to patrol for in their work, and I think that these authors provided some helpful tools in observing and responding to voyeurism- for example, Ba’s arguments about mitigating the instrumentalization of commodification of life, Lederach’s situated ethics and focus on choice and disrupting silencing, and Boeston & Henry’s reflection criteria for researching with survivors of violence.
I felt particularly drawn the the themes of voyeurism, agency, and consent in these readings, and so my questions are particularly related to them. My questions are actually all related to this one quote from the Ba article that I found especially thought provoking and challenging to think about. Ba argues that research is violence in and of itself, and that the informed consent of participants “does not mitigate those facts”.
What role does informed consent play in research? To what extent can it mitigate the effects of violence, if it can at all? How does our view of informed consent shape our understanding of the agency of participants in research and survivors of violence?
This week’s readings raised difficult questions about the potential harm research in conflict zones can cause, particularly for vulnerable and marginalized communities. The readings also focused on political and feminist reflexivity within violent contexts and the importance of situating one’s positionality so as not to cause further harm to those most experiencing the violent contexts.
I found the ideas presented by Abdelnour and Abu Moghli particularly interesting, as they were speaking from an informed perspective of having experienced the displacement of the Nakba. As a sidebar, I want to emphasize my appreciation for this article. That it was written by two Palestinian individuals with varying gender identities. That they speak on the potential of silencing voices when that is something that has been historically normalized in the Palestinian context.
As a Lebanese daughter of immigrants, I resonate with their reflections on how colonial histories have shaped and continue to shape research in violent contexts. Boesten, Henry, and Oumar Ba echo this idea, primarily within regions that have been subjected to occupation. These authors argue that researchers must interrogate their positionality to avoid reinforcing power structures that can create more harm. I was drawn to this reading precisely due to calling out the three forms of harm: objectification, normalization, and silencing. These ideas have been out there for generations and have been called out, criticized, studied, and reinforced. These are not abstract concepts—they are lived realities that persist in historical and contemporary contexts.
We see the evident objectification of Syrian refugees, where there is a deliberate tendency to focus on their victim of war status while minimizing their agency, resilience, or experiences. Abdelnour and Abu Moghli said it best, stating that the reductionist label “refugee crisis” fails to capture the full humanity of those affected. It not only groups individuals into a single category but also strips them of the complexity of their lived experiences. This feeds into the normalization of violence in the Middle East. Or in areas similar to the regions a historical oppressor colonized.
Growing up, I often witnessed how the Middle East was villainized and stereotyped as a perpetual war-torn region. I remember being asked as a child if I had a bomb in my backpack simply because I was Lebanese. War, and death, and sexual violence were normalized. Hurt was normalized. Something I have been struggling with is that this normalization leads to less meaningful research being conducted, or worse, research that causes further harm.
We can do all these readings and try to incorporate feminist reflexivity into our research processes. We can try to empathize and reflect on our positionality. But how can we be held accountable? How can we know we are not contributing to harm? Beyond keeping the conversation going (since these issues we are talking about have been happening for decades), what concrete actions can we take to ensure our research doesn’t perpetuate these cycles of violence and silencing? How do we create ethical, responsible research that centers marginalized voices and uplifts them in ways that challenge power dynamics? Finally, how do we ensure that our work results in compassion and understanding rather than reinforcing the systems we aim to dismantle? How can we take advantage of Western resources in research contexts without contributing to the exploitation or commodification of continuously oppressed populations (using the power from the inside?)?