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Vignette 3 - ‘Thinking about race and gender in conflict research’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2022

Althea-Maria Rivas
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
Brendan Ciarán Browne
Affiliation:
Trinity College Dublin
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Summary

Exploring the racialised and gendered nature of the structures of power and historical processes that have justified and facilitated intervention and produced conflict in many parts of the world are central to my research and that of many critical conflict scholars. A much less explored topic is how these racialised and gendered histories enter into sites of conflict to influence the research process, and the experience of the researcher, and the perceptions of the research participants and communities of the researcher when the researcher comes from a racialised community. This vignette provides a short reflection on the ways in which race can enter into the research process, and ends with a few thoughts on the need for more discussion within academic circles about intersectionality and research praxis.

School daze: I dreaded leaving the university in the evening. I had arranged a nightly car pool with another lecturer who would wait for me outside of the school entrance until my last class had finished. Outside of the gates there were always groups of students hanging around, getting ready to go home and arranging their own rides back to the suburbs of Kabul. I enjoyed and admired the energy of the students who were usually still hyper at the end of what was for many of them a full day of work at their professional jobs followed by several hours of study and classes at the university. There were also a number of armed guards who sat drinking tea or stood by looking for signs of trouble and ensuring no one lingered too long. The guards rarely moved, and although they were heavily armed after spending a decade in conflict zones I had learned to accept guns as part of everyday life. The students and the guards, however, were not what played on my mind as I prepared to go home.

No, what I dreaded was the group of neighborhood children who had begun congregating at the gate to watch me leave at night. For many of them I suspect it was not the first time they had seen a black person, as there were many African-American, mostly male, military personnel who patrolled the city on a regular basis, and there had been for many years.

Type
Chapter
Information
Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence
Fieldwork Interrupted
, pp. 135 - 142
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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