Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa

Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa PDF Author: S. Thomson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113726375X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Academic literature rarely gives an account of the ethical challenges and emotional pitfalls the researcher is confronted with before, during and after being in the field. Giving personal accounts, the authors explore some of the challenges one can face when engaging in local-level research in difficult situations.

Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa

Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa PDF Author: S. Thomson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113726375X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Get Book Here

Book Description
Academic literature rarely gives an account of the ethical challenges and emotional pitfalls the researcher is confronted with before, during and after being in the field. Giving personal accounts, the authors explore some of the challenges one can face when engaging in local-level research in difficult situations.

Field Research in Africa

Field Research in Africa PDF Author: An Ansoms
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847012698
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
An essential exploration of and guide to research ethics in the field.

Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field

Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field PDF Author: Marlies Glasius
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319689665
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
This open access book offers a synthetic reflection on the authors’ fieldwork experiences in seven countries within the framework of ‘Authoritarianism in a Global Age’, a major comparative research project. It responds to the demand for increased attention to methodological rigor and transparency in qualitative research, and seeks to advance and practically support field research in authoritarian contexts. Without reducing the conundrums of authoritarian field research to a simple how-to guide, the book systematically reflects and reports on the authors’ combined experiences in (i) getting access to the field, (ii) assessing risk, (iii) navigating ‘red lines’, (iv) building relations with local collaborators and respondents, (v) handling the psychological pressures on field researchers, and (vi) balancing transparency and prudence in publishing research. It offers unique insights into this particularly challenging area of field research, makes explicit how the authors handled methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas, and offers recommendations where appropriate.

Jihad & Co.

Jihad & Co. PDF Author: Aisha Ahmad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190656794
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
For two decades, militant jihadism has been one of the world's most pressing security crises. In civil wars and insurgencies across the Muslim world, certain Islamist groups have taken advantage of the anarchy to establish political control over a broad range of territories and communities. In effect, they have built radical new jihadist proto-states. Why have some ideologically-inspired Islamists been able to build state-like polities out of civil war stalemate, while many other armed groups have failed to gain similar traction? What makes jihadists win? In Jihad & Co., Aisha Ahmad argues that there are concrete economic reasons behind Islamist success. By tracking the economic activities of jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Mali, and Iraq, she uncovers an unlikely actor in bringing Islamist groups to power: the local business community. To illuminate the nexus between business and Islamist interests in civil war, Ahmad journeys into war-torn bazaars to meet with both jihadists and the smugglers who financed their rise to power. From the arms markets in the Pakistani border region to the street markets of Mogadishu, their stories reveal a powerful economic logic behind the rise of Islamist power in civil wars. Behind the fiery rhetoric and impassioned, ideological claims is the cold, hard cash of the local war economy. Moving readers back and forth between mosques, marketplaces, and battlefields, Ahmad makes a powerful argument that economic savvy, as much as ideological fervor, explains the rise of militant jihadism across the modern Muslim world.

Research as More Than Extraction

Research as More Than Extraction PDF Author: Annie Bunting
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 082144798X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
This volume offers practical, detailed guidance and case studies on how to avoid exacerbating inequalities while researching gender-based violence and other related issues in Africa. Wartime violence and its aftermath present numerous practical, ethical, and political challenges that are especially acute for researchers working on gender-based and sexual violence. Drawing upon applied examples from across the African continent, this volume features unique contributions from researchers and practitioners with decades of experience developing research partnerships, designing and undertaking fieldwork, asking sensitive questions, negotiating access, collecting and evaluating information, and validating results. These are all endeavors that also raise pressing ethical questions, especially in relation to retraumatization, social stigma, and even payment of participants. Ethical and methodological questions cannot be separated from political and institutional considerations. Systems of privilege and marginalization cannot be wished away, so they need to be both interrogated and contested. This is where precedents and power relations established under colonialism and imperialism take center stage. Europeans have been extracting valuable resources from the African continent for centuries. Research into gender-based violence risks being yet another extractive industry. There are times when committed individuals can make valuable contributions to a more equitable future, but funding streams, knowledge hierarchies, and institutional positions continue to have powerful effects. Accordingly, the contributors to this volume also concentrate upon the layered effects of power and position, relationships between researchers, organizations, and communities, and the political economy of knowledge production; this brings into focus questions about how and why information gets generated, for which kinds of audiences, and for whose benefit.

Women’s Perspectives on Human Security

Women’s Perspectives on Human Security PDF Author: Richard Matthew
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446991
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Violent conflict, climate change, and poverty present distinct threats to women worldwide. Importantly, women are leading the way creating and sharing sustainable solutions. Women’s security is a valuable analytical tool as well as a political agenda insofar as it addresses the specific problems affecting women’s ability to live dignified, free, and secure lives. First, this collection focuses on how conflict impacts women’s lives and well-being, including rape and gendered constructions of ethnicity, race, and religion. The book’s second section looks beyond the scope of large-scale violence to examine human security in terms of environmental policy, food, water, health, and economics. Multidisciplinary in scope, these essays from new and established contributors draw from gender studies, international relations, criminology, political science, economics, sociology, biological and ecological sciences, and planning.

Researching Peacebuilding in Africa

Researching Peacebuilding in Africa PDF Author: Ismail Rashid
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100028395X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book examines the multifaceted nature of conflict and the importance of the socio-economic and political contexts of conflict and violence and shows how to support ongoing initiatives and programs to build sustainable peace on the African continent. Drawing on a range of conceptual framings in the study of peace and conflict, from gender perspectives to institutionalist to decolonial perspectives, the contributors show how peacebuilding research covers a whole range of questions that go beyond concerns for post-conflict reconstruction strategies. Chapters focus on the methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of peacebuilding and provide a toolbox of perspectives for conceptualizing and doing peacebuilding research in Africa. Anchored in African-centered perspectives, the book encourages and promotes high-quality interdisciplinary research that is conflict-sensitive, historically informed, theoretically grounded and analytically sound. This book will be of benefit to scholars, policy makers and research institutions engaged in peacebuilding in Africa.

Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence

Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence PDF Author: Rivas, Althea-Maria
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447337697
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This international, edited collection brings together personal accounts from researchers working in and on conflict and explores the roles of emotion, violence, uncertainty, identity and positionality within the process of doing research, as well as the complexity of methodological choices. It highlights the researchers’ own subjectivity and presents a nuanced view of conflict research that goes beyond the ‘messiness’ inherent in the process of research in and on violence. It addresses the uncomfortable spaces of conflict research, the potential for violence of research itself and the need for deeper reflection on these issues. This powerful book opens up spaces for new conversations about the realities of conflict research. These critical self-reflections and honest accounts provide important insights for any scholar or practitioner working in similar environments.

Publics in Africa in a Digital Age

Publics in Africa in a Digital Age PDF Author: Sharath Srinivasan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000433536
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Across Africa, digital media are providing scholars with a reason and opportunity for revisiting the question, and the analytical lens, of publics with new vigour and less normative baggage. This book brings together a rich set of empirically grounded analyses of the diverse digital spaces and networks of communication springing up across the Eastern African region. The contributions offer a plural set of reflections on whether and how we can usefully think about these spaces and networks as convening publics, where citizens come together to discuss matters of common interest. The authors make clear the need to unshackle such studies from slavish acceptance of outsiders’ prescriptions on what constitutes desirable publics. They highlight the importance of being attentive to rapidly changing everyday realities across Africa in which people are coming together around the circulation of ideas in ways that include digital means of communications. In so doing, the contributions bring forward new ways of thinking about, through and with publics, alongside other heritages in Africanist scholarship that have continued salience. Looking outwards from the region, such different perspectives on our digitally mediated world offer theoretical novelty that advances how we think about the notion of publics and their political significance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

The Finger of God

The Finger of God PDF Author: Robert R. Edgar
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813941032
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
On the morning of May 24, 1921, a force of eight hundred white policemen and soldiers confronted an African prophet, Enoch Mgijima, and some three thousand of his followers. Called the Israelites, they refused to leave their holy village of Ntabelanga, where they had been gathering since early 1919 to await the end of the world. While the Israelites maintained they were there to pray and worship in peace, the white authorities viewed them as illegally squatting on land that was not theirs. After many months of fruitless negotiations, the South African government sent an armed force to Bulhoek, a village in the Eastern Cape, to expel them. In the event that has come to be known as the Bulhoek massacre, police armed with rifles, machine guns, and cannons killed nearly two hundred Israelites wielding knobkerries, swords, and spears. In The Finger of God, Robert Edgar reveals how and why the Bulhoek massacre occurred. Edgar asks: Why did Mgijima prophesize that the end of the world was imminent, and why did he summon his followers to Ntabelanga? Why did the South African government regard the Israelite encampment as a threat? Examining this clash between a government and a millenial movement, Edgar considers the Bulhoek massacre both as a signal event in South African history and as an example of similar conflicts worldwide.