Dancing Through the Perfect Storm: Encountering Illness and Death in the Field and Beyond

Listening to, Reconstructing, and Writing about Stories of Violence: A Research Journey Amidst Personal Loss

“…Accordingly, I propose recognizing personal experiences such as loss and pain as constitutive of knowledge production and thus placing more emphasis on "who" we are as researchers rather than "what" we are (Cavarero [1997] 2000) when we search for meaning in narrative data and reconstruct stories about violence. Here, I align myself with authors who emphasize the interplay between life and research as a central aspect of positionality and reflexivity (Behar 1997;Ellis 1999;Rehsmann 2019;Hassouna 2021) and acknowledge that both fieldwork and writing require a continuous "construction and production of self and identity" (Coffey 1999, p. 1). In this context, Cavarero ([1997Cavarero ([ ] 2000, for example, emphasizes that narratives serve precisely as instruments for providing and discovering the "who".…”

“…In doing so, I reveal the complex, usually hidden, processes involved in working with stories of violence (McLean and Leibing 2007), emphasizing feelings and subjective experiences as crucial aspects of knowledge production (Ellis 1993). This illustrates research as a hybrid endeavor between professional and private life's (Visser 2017;Rehsmann 2019) and highlights the need to de-center the 'field' as the sole, privileged site of knowledge (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).…”

“…While acknowledging the dissonance of this part with the rest of the article, this peculiarity reflects the importance of this event in my personal and professional journey. Building on this, I explore the connections or duplications between my personal experience and my engagement with stories of violence in the next section, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of intertwined personal and professional spheres in doing research (Visser 2017;Rehsmann 2019;Pearce 2021). Through this exploration, I seek to encourage introspection among researchers, echoing Behar's (1997) call for vulnerable observers to examine their experiences of loss within their work.…”

“…The 'principle of hope' is thus a demonstration of how the lives, agency, and resistance of my research participants have shaped my own life. This points to intersections where the subjective lives of the researcher and the researched converge (McLean 2007;Visser 2017;Rehsmann 2019), revealing research as a journey in which the professional and the private spheres intertwine in myriad ways.…”

“…Disclosing my research and personal experiences in this article not only "humanizes the field" (Simić 2016, p. 109), but is also an attempt to resonate with other researchers working in the field of violence and inspire them to reflect on the broad connections between their lives and their research in the role of a "vulnerable observer" (Behar 1997) who acknowledges knowledge as situated and fluid over time. As I show in this article, our interpretations of stories of violence can gain depth and complexity when we illuminate the shifting influence of feelings and emotions (Campbell 2001;Blakely 2007;Jewkes 2012;Reed and Towers 2023) and personal experiences (Ellis 1993;Ellis 1999;McLean 2007;Rehsmann 2019) on the research process and knowledge production.…”