Workaround as Practice: Gauging Risk in Ethnographic Method

Abstract

This reflection questions how “trauma-informed anthropology” as a method and reflexive praxis undergirding fieldwork evolves: How do attempts to mitigate re-traumatisation shape the meanings of the relationship between researcher and interlocutor? Issues of vicarious trauma are similarly near-impossible to anticipate, and there are few existing structures in place to aid researchers during their fieldwork, particularly as it isolates them from existing structures of care in their own lives. In the steps we have both taken to ensure our safety and that of our interlocutors, we ask: Does the workaround then become part of the practice? 

Keywords: Trauma, method, positionality, risk, interviews, ethnography.