sjsca

Special Issue

Vol. 31 No. 1 (2025): Reciprocal Vulnerability: Privilege, Violence, and Solidarity from Fieldwork to Academia

It Takes More Than One To Hold Complexity: Irritation and Collective Reflexivity in Ethnographic Research

Submitted
September 22, 2023
Published
2025-11-13

Abstract

This article discusses the potentials and challenges of psychoanalytically oriented “interpretation workshops”: interpretive, collective spaces that address ethnographic fieldwork’s subconscious, emotional, and experiential aspects. While notions of scientific objectivity and epistemic violence towards interlocutors in anthropology have faced ample critiques, applied methodological tools for doing otherwise still seem scarce. Interpretation workshops offer a collectively entangled alternative to disembodied, patriarchal, and ultimately violent notions of anthropological knowing. Based on a reflection of my participation in an interpretation workshop, I discuss how reciprocal vulnerabilities were addressed in ethically and epistemologically relevant ways in this context.

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