Workshop: Navigating Risks and Security in Fieldwork
- Date
- 12 May 2026, 10:15–12:00
- Location
- English Park, Eng/3-2028
- Type
- Workshop
- Lecturer
- Maria Frederika Malmström & Rosa Sansone
- Organiser
- Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
- Contact person
- Rosa Sansone
Conducting research in politically challenging environments inevitably entails risks. How can we equip researchers to better navigate precarious circumstances with a strong ethical commitment? To address challenges and secure essential resources, researchers need to be attentive to the vulnerabilities of the groups they study, but also to be attentive to their own safety. How can we ensure both the safety of participants, researchers and the feasibility of the project under challenging political conditions?
Target Group for the Workshop are Researchers at the Faculty of Arts.
The activity will be conducted in English.
Preparations
For this workshop, we would like to ask you to prepare two things:
- First, an abstract (300 words) on your experiences from fieldwork in politically challenging environments.
- Second, one or two sentences on a situation, strategy, practice etc. that you find enlightening in relation to the mitigating risks. During the workshop you will give a summary of the above (maximum 3 minutes) to initiate our collective discussion.
To prompt the discussion we also suggest reading:
- Hamdar, S. 2026. “Can I Dance Over the Bodies of the Dead? On the Impossibility of Participant Observation.” Anthropology and Humanism, 51(1): e70071.; and
- Malmström, M. F. 2021. ‘The Affects of Change: An Ethnography of the Affective Experiences of the 2013 Military Intervention in Egypt’ in Y. Berriane et al. (eds.), Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation, Anthropology, Change, and Development. London: Palgrave MacMillan