FIELD RESEARCH IS not what it used to be. Ethnographers, oral historians and other qualitative researchers committed to years-long fieldwork are engaged in a series of ethical and emotional compromises, from design, to write up, to publication. Field researchers juggle the demands of being a researcher and of being human – in balancing the recording of data with the emotional demands of listening to, of analysing and reporting on personal and often contradictory narratives in ways that meet and, ultimately, expand the disciplinary standards of ‘the field’ through publication. Each contributor to this book embraces the complex and contradictory humanity of those who participated in their research, as well as their own, as a matter of minimum ethical practice. Indeed, simply talking to people is a process fraught with multiple ethical and methodological concerns. These concerns matter all the more for those working in violent or conflict-affected locales (Campbell 2017; Cronin-Furman and Lake 2017; Perks and Thomson 1998; Thomson et al. 2013; Wali 2018).

The overarching theme of this book is how to balance the emotional effects of fieldwork – on the researched, researcher, assistants, intermediaries and gatekeepers, community members, and others – as a central element of ethical practice. After all, it is people who commit violence, experience violence, and who recover from its effects, as individuals and as members of local and national communities. The challenge is to recognise how, and in what ways, feelings differ from emotions, something each of the chapters that follow engage with in one way or another, with each author providing insights into how their emotions become part of the research process. Understanding emotion is a central element of a reflexive practice. Each of our authors unpack what many field researchers know, but rarely discuss openly – that building relationships, doing participant observation, generating field notes, and more – are products of emotional expressions, body language, and social dynamics. To turn these aspects of fieldwork into data requires an ability to understand and explain the wider sociopolitical context, in turn requiring the researcher to distinguish feeling from emotion, as part of their reflexive practice.

BEFORE I PUBLISHED my first book in 2013, dissident Rwandans living in parts of Europe, Canada, and the United States saw me as a scholar-activist. I was ‘true’ because they thought that my research findings – which critiqued the post-genocide policy of national unity from the perspective of thirty-seven rural poor – overlapped with their political aspirations to unseat the current government. They saw me as an activist because I used my academic platforms to share my findings with non-academic audiences through media interviews, opinion editorials, and from 2010, via social media platforms such as Twitter. While the mantle did not sit well with me, I did not challenge their framing of my scholarship as ‘activist’. Indeed, as a white academic raised and educated in Canada, I did not give my activist standing a second thought, even as I spent time working with Rwandans in the diaspora, helping them write press releases and policy briefs on political issues of importance to them, and later, writing affidavits to support the asylum applications of Rwandans seeking to leave the country. Others considered me an ally because the government had shuttered my research in August 2006, claiming it was against ethnic unity. The Ministry of Local Government officials soon ordered me to participate in a citizenship re-education camp, something I did to protect the identities of the rural people I consulted as part of my project (Thomson 2009a; Thomson 2011).

When Rwandans in the diaspora learned about my forced re-education, many expressed dismay upon learning that I had been treated roughly ‘like us [dissenting] locals’, and that I now knew what ‘it felt like to be a target of the government’. I failed to fully appreciate what my experience of being forced to leave Rwanda meant to them, and how this shaped their expectations of me.

AS THE PRECEDING chapters illustrate, researchers who work and live in fragile settings are often motivated to identify the drivers of violence, to document human rights abuses, and to learn how individuals and communities recover from violence. For many researchers, including those who contributed to this book, the underlying rationale is to study and record the lives of people, who, historically speaking, would otherwise remain unknown, or whose stories are told by local elites or foreign humanitarians. Central to this mode of understanding violence from the perspective of those subject to it, are systematic and careful efforts to diminish the distinction between the researcher-as-authority and the informant-as-subject. This is the unifying theme of our collection. Each contributor presents a personal essay which illustrates the importance of understanding the Self as an instrument of knowledge production, and to better understand the ethic of self-knowledge. In so doing, our authors affirm something that all field-based researchers know – academic knowledge develops out of specific social and political contexts and in collaboration with a variety of actors, most notably the people who consent to take part in our research.

Indeed, as scholars know all too well, the production of knowledge obeys disciplinary standards; the primary one being that what we know is preceded by what we think – that is our implicit and explicit biases – which in turn determines our methodology and methods (Simon 1979. See also Macamo in this book). In other words, presumed a priori knowledge informs what is possible for us, as individuals to know, and how we think we know it determines what counts as knowledge. Context – historical, political, social, and so on – is a critical factor in challenging what we think we know, or what we think we need to know about a particular event, place, or people. As such, bringing together a diverse range of scholars from a variety of backgrounds enlivens what counts as knowledge in the confines of the Western academy, while generating new ways of thinking about what we think we know, and how through an ethic of fieldwork.

Reflexivity and Positionality in Research

We are hardly the first to centre the Self as an instrument of knowledge.