Description
The road to fieldwork is paved with good intentions. Sometimes everything goes fine (or so it seems…), sometimes we realize, how social science fieldwork serves an entirely extractivist purpose, thereby contributing to Eurocentric knowledge production or even to forms of epistemic violence. This is even more the case when doing fieldwork “while the world is burning”, as this translates to an even greater urge to travel to over researched conflict zones, squeeze out frontline communities, just for the sake of doing research that contributes to global decarbonization attempts. This paper is therefore exploring the nexus of decarbonization and decolonization from a methodological perspective that promotes but also problematizes activist research in ecological conflict zones.
With “fieldwork” being already a contested term, the time is ripe to unpack the troubles associated with this empirical ritual, learn about its extractivist underpinnings, and explore the effects of methodological whiteness and epistemic extractivism. Based on experiences from a PhD Course, this encounter presents research and teaching strategies that sensitize for fieldwork troubles and knowledge production by exploring problematic cases and mindsets (role of the expert, extractivist research designs, ethical controversies around randomized control trials, expert interviews, and ethnographic work, Eurocentric concepts in political science…). This is followed by a focus on our own roles as researchers, centering concepts such as situated knowledge, activist research, feminist research strategies, and decolonial research ethics.
