A Tale of Three Visas: Structural Violence and Ethnography in Political Science

• In Event: Interpretive Approaches to Political Science

Abstract

Ethnographies in political science begin with accounts that immediately take us to the research site. Especially, researchers from global north appear in research sites located in global south or other peripheries, as if they were beamed down to these geographies. The trope is that we do not get to read anything about how the travel took place leading to the fact that the instruction of ethnographic research methods does not take into account how researchers travel to their field sites. In my paper, I argue that this trope is a misrepresentation of pluralism in our field by way of demonstrating how it omits the structural exclusions and institutional violence that goes into the process through which researchers from global south can move to global north for fieldwork. Because this travel requires not only passports but also visas which are arduous to obtain. The rise of global authoritarianism makes them even harder to get. For example, it took me a yearlong preparation for doing fieldwork in Europe for five weeks in 2019. My preparation took long because I had to get three visas, (Canadian, US, and Schengen), while having to navigate my own precarious labor situation I also had to endure rejections because embassies want to see financial assurances that international students cannot provide alone. My institution did not even know how to support these processes because they were also not accustomed to this sort of movement and I had to figure out everything myself.

In this paper, I use autoethnography to analyze my own experience that I documented through ethnographic journaling. I write about my experience as a PhD candidate in USA with a Turkish passport and a student visa because this experience elucidates an important component of ethnographic research methods that are not conventionally thought in seminars or described in published ethnographies. This component is that international students in North American and European PhD programs have to confront global structures of power before they could devise and conduct ethnographic field research. As I show these structures of power begin at their home institutions and extend to embassies, airports and borders. In the end, I prevailed in my efforts to get these visas and I completed my research, while confronting structural exclusion and institutional violence that political ethnographers from Global South face while doing field research. I documented these processes to write about them using autoethnography. Autoethnography is increasingly used in political science because of its unique capacity to elucidate politics through researchers’ personal experience. I add to the previous works examining gendered dynamics of our discipline by advancing an argument on how global race determines and shapes research and encumbers and disciplines researchers.

Author

• Bilgesu Sumer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst