Research Methods and Relationships in Challenging Times
How do we conduct research in difficult and uncertain times? This seminar and roundtable will explore how war, displacement, political repression, genocide, pandemics, forced migration, environmental crises and other forms of violence and uncertainty affect researchers, participants, communities and the relationships between them. How do these effects differ across social positions and contexts?
We ask how research can avoid reproducing unequal relations of knowledge and power, and what tensions, possibilities and contradictions emerge when decolonial, feminist, intersectional, Indigenous and other critical perspectives encounter the complexities of research practice. We are particularly interested in how difficult research conditions invite us to question established assumptions about knowledge, methods, fieldwork, positionality, representation, care, responsibility and accountability.
The seminar includes experiences, questions, uncertainties, dilemmas, experiments and methodological reflections across a variety of methods and creative research practices. Contributions draw on ongoing, interrupted, completed and reimagined research.
Rather than seeking universal solutions, the seminar will create a space for collective, critical reflection on the possibilities and limits of different research practices—and on how difficult conditions may require us to rethink what research can or should be.
Last updated: 2026-10-22
Source: Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies