Lonely ethnographers? Mediation and balance of family relationships in the field (CfP) - 8th Congress of the Portuguese Anthropological Association (APA)

Raquel Mendes Pereira Discussion
Type: 
Call for Papers
Date: 
January 26, 2022 to March 18, 2022
Location: 
Portugal
Subject Fields: 
Anthropology

Dear all,

We want to invite you to join our panel Lonely ethnographers? Mediation and balance of family relationships in the field (P035) at the upcoming 8th Congress of the Portuguese Anthropological Association (APA).

The 8th Congress of the APA will take place between 6-9 September 2022 at the University of Évora, in Portugal.

The call for paper proposals is open until March 18, 2022.
To propose a paper: https://apa2022.apantropologia.org/en/chamada-comunicacoes/   

 

Panel: Lonely ethnographers? Mediation and balance of family relationships in the field (P035)
Conveners: Raquel Mendes Pereira (CRIA, ISCTE-IUL, NOVA FCSH); Rita Reis (Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) - University of Lisbon).

Short Abstract

We invite communications that analyze the participation of researchers’ families in their fieldwork, through the construction of parallel relationships, focusing on the ways in which family members contribute to access to certain social spheres in research contexts and to the mediation of the status of the anthropologist in the field.

Long Abstract
The confinement resulting from COVID-19 and the need to carry out research from home, in parallel with family management, heightened the need to deepen the debates on family involvement during the research and how these influence the development of ethnography (Newman 2019), contesting the idea of the solitary ethnographer (Flinn et al. 1998).


Although frequent, the development of ethnographic research with spouses (e.g., Rosemary and Raymond Firth; Jean and John Comaroff) has remained “invisible” (Korpela et al. 2016) in the history of anthropology, overshadowing the influences and challenges this entails. More recently, debates have focused on the presence of non-anthropologist husbands and wives, children, and other family members in the field and the challenges posed to conducting research “accompanied” (Korpela et al. 2016; Baukman et al. 2020).


We invite communications based on long-term ethnographic research that reflect on family/conjugal participation in fieldwork, through the construction of parallel relationships, focusing the ways in which family members contribute to access to certain social spheres in research contexts and to the mediation of the status of the anthropologist in the field.

 

CfP Congress: