Unfinished Fieldwork: Reflections on Conflict-Affected Research

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Knowledge production, displacement, and identity: Challenges, theories, and reflexive experiences from conflict and post-conflict contexts

Proposal

This paper engages with the conceptual and methodological aspects of conflict-affected fieldwork. Conducting empirical research in conflict and crisis contexts carries heightened levels of uncertainty and insecurity, often pushing researchers to adapt to evolving crises. In many instances, the result is unfinished fieldwork – instances where research is not concluded due to security concerns, participants who withdraw in the middle of the project due to threats, and cases where violence becomes prohibitive, among others. However, in analyses, reports, and publications drawing on data collected amid conflict, these pieces of unfinished fieldwork seldom come into center stage, instead shaping our analysis and theorization implicitly. Yet, the fact that pieces of fieldwork were unfinished is crucial to the research itself: all which is not feasible, which could not be researched, which could not be concluded, effectively outlines the borders of the phenomena of interest. In this paper, we introduce vignettes from three different research projects in Colombia where research resulted in unfinished fieldwork. Revisiting these experiences through a critical reflexivity lens, we ask, how does unfinished fieldwork shape the production of knowledge in conflict-affected contexts? How does it influence the researcher, the project, and the analysis?

Parallel to the growth of educational research in contexts of crisis and conflict (Burde et al., 2017; Paulson & Rappleye, 2007), there has been a growing concern with the ethical implications of this work (Barakat et al., 2024; Cremin et al., 2021; Mendenhall et al., 2022). Critically examining their experiences during fieldwork, scholars in the field have recently turned their attention to their positionality vis-à-vis their work, the overt and subtle ways in which they are implicated in the contexts where they conduct research, and the power dynamics they embody and transgress (Barakat et al., 2024; Hakkim, 2023; Mac Ginty et al., 2020; Mendenhall et al., 2022). This renewed reexamination of the everyday dynamics of conflict-affected fieldwork has led to a much-needed call to engage with ethics beyond the limits of ethics and risk assessment committees (Cerwonka & Malkki, 2008; Cremin et al., 2021; Gallien, 2021). At the same time, it has prompted a greater focus on the well-being of researchers and the acknowledgement that uncertainty is inherent to empirical research in crisis settings (Mendenhall et al., 2022).

However, most examinations of the methodological implications of doing fieldwork amid conflict focus on the interactional aspects of fieldwork, the politics and ethics of data collection, writing, and publication, or the ways in which researchers themselves influence and are influenced by the research. The ways in which research is itself shaped and delimited by conflict have received little scholarly attention. Adding to this growing body of reflexivity work, we introduce a focus on unfinished fieldwork to analyze the production of knowledge. We ground our examination on theories of researcher reflexivity (Berger, 2015; Pillow, 2003; Schwandt, 2007) and position our work in conversation with literature that has examined how interpretation relates to pragmatic, social, mundane, and ethical details of researchers’ daily lives in the field (Cerwonka & Malkki, 2008). We contribute an effort to conceptualize how interpretation can stem from the inaccessible, unknown, and unfinished.

To build this argument, we draw on vignettes from three different research projects in Colombia where research resulted in unfinished fieldwork. The experiences we share in this paper come from three projects with distinct research methods, questions, and sites. Nonetheless, they share a similar timeframe (2020-2022) and are all framed by Colombia’s six-decades-long war, its multiple frustrated attempts at negotiating peace, and the challenge of peacebuilding amid continued violence. The three projects engaged with questions about the links between education and peacebuilding, citizenship, memory-making, and transitional justice. In each case, portions of our fieldwork were left unfinished - changing or abandoning field sites - precisely because our research was intertwined with conflict. We reflect on a case where fieldwork came to full stop due to violent events affecting the lives and physical well-being of participants in Nariño, one where fieldwork had to shift sites to protect the researcher’s safety in rural Antioquia, and one where participants withdrew during data collection amid external pressures related to speaking about sensitive topics in Medellín. This paper forefronts the unfinished to examine how these instances framed the broader projects’ production of knowledge.

We introduce a framework that explicitly engages with unfinished fieldwork as a unique form of data. We argue that unfinished fieldwork is constitutive of research amid crisis and conflict and that researchers should explicitly reflect on the ways in which distinct forms of uninterpreted or unconventional data delimit research and define that which is knowable. Understanding the methodological implications and possibilities for a more conscious and responsible engagement with unfinished fieldwork can contribute relevant insight into the methodological peculiarities of conflict contexts. Moreover, a conscious and critical examination of unfinished fieldwork can contribute to scrutinizing the events through which knowledge of violence is produced.

Authors

• Paula L Mantilla Blanco, Binghamton University

• S. Garnett Russell, Columbia University Teachers College

• Daniela Romero, Teachers College, Columbia University