The long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher
URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa84792
DOI: 10.11143/fennia.84792
The long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the
ethnographic researcher
STEPHEN TAYLOR
Taylor, S. (2019) The long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and
the ethnographic researcher. Fennia 197(2) 183–199. https://doi.
org/10.11143/fennia.84792
As more geographers utilise ethnographic methods to explore
pressing contemporary issues such as abandonment, precarity,
and resilience, they enter into research environments often
defined by social marginality and violence. There are emotional and
psychological risks associated with embedded research in such contexts,
however these challenges have largely been ignored in existing
methodological literatures. A frank debate is needed about the emotional
and psychological burden that ethnographic research can exact upon
lone researchers and how these burdens interface with researcher
identity and positionality. Drawing on a reflexive analysis of the author’s
experience of fieldwork in South Africa, this paper highlights the emotional
consequences of conducting ethnographic research with marginal groups
in dangerous contexts. It specifically examines the ripple effect of exposure
to traumatic events that culminated in the author’s diagnosis with post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In so doing, the paper draws attention to
the acute emotional and psychological consequences of ethnographic
research, while also challenging prevalent professional attitudes within
the neoliberal university that promote the downplaying or silencing of
such repercussions. The paper concludes with a series of suggestions for
how (early career) researchers, our discipline, and institutions might
better promote and realise an ethic of collective care for field researchers.
Keywords: ethnography, emotions, mental health, subjectivity, post-
traumatic stress disorder, South Africa
Stephen Taylor, School of Geography, Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS.
United Kingdom. E-mail: stephen.taylor@qmul.ac.uk
Our fear, doubt, grief, rage, horror, and detachment, our shivers and shakes, and our paralysis and
frenzy lay bare our humanity when we are confronted with the cruelty, despair, and suffering that
humans can inflict on each other.
(Markowitz 2019, 2)
© 2019 by the author. This open access article is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
184 Research paper FENNIA 197(2) (2019)
Introduction
In Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa, Fabian (2000) brings to the
fore the many people, objects, and emotions stifled in the “heroic” travelogues and ethnographies of
the nineteenth century. Significant in these journeys, Fabian (2000, 9) uncovers, were “the effects of
alcohol, drugs, illness, sex, brutality, and terror.” In documenting the often chaotic and panicked
nature of early ethnographic knowledge production, Fabian exposes how the silencing of trials and
tribulations was a fundamental part of the discursive production of peoples and places as objects of
knowledge (Clifford & Marcus 1986). It is testament to Fabian’s contrapuntal acuity that it has now
become something of a truism to begin reflexive accounts of fieldwork with an assessment of similar
methodological silences within extant accounts of the field. This has become a common refrain for
multiple generations of early career geographers frustrated by what they see as a long-standing
inattentiveness to the practical and intellectual challenges of fieldwork (Mandel 2003; Billo & Hiemstra
2013). It is encouraging, then, to see how researchers from across the discipline of geography
increasingly respond to these provocations with detailed and constructive accounts of (overcoming)
the multifarious challenges posed by fieldwork, including negotiating “access” to closed institutions,
managing the dynamics of cross-cultural interviews, and defending the study of illicit spatial practices
(Belcher & Martin 2013; Turner 2013; Zhao 2017; Dekeyser & Garrett 2018).
Despite this clamour for greater methodological transparency in the discipline, the emotional
challenges of geographical fieldwork have historically received less attention (Widdowfield 2000; Punch
2012; Warden 2013; Drozdzewski & Dominey-Howes 2015). “Geography,” Davidson, Bondi and Smith
(2005, 1) contend, “has often had trouble expressing feelings” and has consequently “tended to deny,
avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional entanglements.” Despite an “emotional turn” within the
discipline, researchers’ emotions and anxieties often remain buried, underacknowledged, or repressed
in accounts of fieldwork in particular (Anderson & Smith 2001; Davidson et al. 2005; Pile 2010).
In this paper, I reflexively examine my experiences – as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, European,
male researcher – of conducting ethnographic doctoral research in urban South Africa. I begin by
bringing to the fore my own experiences of the many forms of emotional investment that ethnographic
research necessitates. Emotions, after all, draw us to certain topics, flow through our research
relationships, and “define the contours of the multiple worlds that are inhabited by different subjects”
(Ahmed 2004, 25). I then explore the feelings of vulnerability and insecurity that affected my fieldwork
by interrogating how acts of violence directed at both research participants and myself undercut my
sense of self and assuredness. Finally, I turn to the lasting impact of this fieldwork on my personal and
professional lives. I examine my post-fieldwork experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
the burden of mental ill-health on an ethnographer, and the emotional silences that I perpetuated to
stand out from peers and further my career. I conclude with recommendations on how individuals,
our discipline, and institutions can better prepare and care for field researchers.
Emotions silenced, traumas downplayed
The current and ongoing silencing of emotion within geographical accounts of field research, identified
as a concern by Davidson, Bondi and Smith (2005), can be traced back to two key influences. First, the
pressurised and antagonistic neoliberal university is considered to be hostile to emotion. Attempts by
geographers to “write vulnerably” (Behar 1997, 16), for example, have been decried or dismissed by
colleagues for demonstrating an “excessive emotionality” (Mehta & Bondi 1999, 75). The prevailing
view of emotionality is as a symptom of powerlessness: “to be emotional is to have one’s judgment
affected … it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous” (Ahmed 2004, 3).
The dismissal of emotion is typified for many in the use of managerialist research assessments that
deride reflexive ethnographic writing as little more than “annotated fieldnotes” (Jeffrey 2012, 505).
Consequently, the emotional dimensions of field experiences are downplayed by those reluctant to
have their peers, managers, or assessors “penalising emotion” (Ratnam 2019, 24; Dominey-Howes
2015; Caretta et al. 2018). Beckett (2019) suggests that this marginalisation and rejection of researcher
personhood is a form of “cruelty that masquerades as intellectual rigour.” As such, there remains much
185Stephen TaylorFENNIA 197(2) (2019)
to be done to raise awareness of the emotional impacts of ethnographic research within an increasingly
neoliberal university system that does not reward – and, often, actively penalises – such emotionality.
A second, and undoubtedly linked, reason for the silencing of emotion in accounts of the field is the
prevalent masculinist epistemology of the discipline. Geographers are frequently encouraged to
overcome personal anxieties around fieldwork, sometimes in potentially violent settings, by heroically
and intrepidly embracing the “throwntogetherness” of research (Fraser 2012). Such a hubristic stance
promotes the silencing of researchers’ concerns about safety, avoids questions of disability/
impairment, and does not challenge the presumption that stoic determination in the face of adversity
is a hallmark of good research. In comparison, non-academic professionals working in such contexts
receive well-defined training on how to manage the high emotional cost of their work with traumatised
individuals in times of “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant 2011, 10).1 The preparedness of ethnographers
entering similarly unpredictable settings ought to be a significant professional concern, particularly as
data points to an increasing incidence of mental health issues in this group, but disciplinary preparation
for the emotional impacts of fieldwork remains uneven (Woon 2013; Calgaro 2015; Loyle & Simoni
2017; McGarrol 2017; Markowitz 2019). It is also important that we foreground attempts to challenge
such limited preparation by acknowledging the continued prevalence of a masculinist epistemology
within the discipline (as well as the university more broadly) that frames discussion of emotion as a
“feminine” form of weakness. The field researcher is too often assumed to be an emotion-less witness,
akin to the output-maximising researcher lauded by the neoliberal university. This masculinist
conception of the stoic geographer normalises certain experiences of the field, mockingly dismisses
those who could not “cut it,” and leaves researchers inadequately prepared for differentiated field
experiences (Pollard 2009; Billo & Hiemstra 2013; Coddington 2015).
Against such a disciplinary and institutional backdrop, one could question how far the discipline
has come from the deadened accounts of exploration unpacked by Fabian. There are, thankfully,
exceptions to the tendencies outlined above, particularly from a growing number of women
geographers breaking the silence around the emotional challenges of the field (Drozdzewski 2015;
Klocker 2015; Coddington 2017; Eriksen 2017). Calgaro (2015), for instance, reflects upon the feelings
of disorientation and horror that accompanied her longitudinal research on Thailand's unfolding
traumascapes in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Jokinen and Caretta (2016) reflexively
examine their experiences as young women postgraduate researchers with (invisible) disabilities and
discuss how isolation, fear, ableism, and gender-based violence encountered in the field undermine
disciplinary assumptions about researcher mobility and well-being. Sundberg (2005) explores how
the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality shape researcher vulnerabilities and responses to
tensions arising in the field. These accounts, rooted in a critical feminist epistemology, acknowledge
the differentiated emotional effects of fieldwork. However, with notable exceptions (e.g. Dominey-Howes
2015) and acknowledging the importance of gay, queer, and trans fieldwork perspectives (e.g. Browne
& Nash; Kedley 2019), the intersection of gender, masculinity, and emotion remains relatively
underexplored in accounts of fieldwork.
As England (1994, 85) notes, “the researcher cannot conveniently tuck away the personal behind
the professional, because fieldwork is personal.” I use this statement as a provocation to discuss the
personal consequences of my own fieldwork and, importantly, to counter male geographers’ emotional
silences to date. My intention in the rest of this paper is to contribute my own autoethnographic
reflections on doctoral research within the neoliberal university to the burgeoning interdisciplinary
and geographical literature on emotion, violence, and researcher positionality outlined above. Before
I continue, however, it is important to emphasise that all researchers encounter the field differently. I
am cognisant here of efforts to deconstruct the unproblematised EuroAmerican “we” of critical human
geography (Jazeel 2016). While I discuss my experiences in what follows, I do not claim authority to
speak definitively for others who – owing to their own positionality – may have had similar or different
experiences. Instead, the aim of the following discussion is to promote an appreciation of the often
underestimated emotional and psychological toll that research can exact upon all researchers, and to
identify lacunae in guidance and practice that could be addressed to better prepare those conducting
ethnographic research in the future.
186 Research paper FENNIA 197(2) (2019)
The research project
My doctoral study was the first major research project that I conducted as a lone researcher. The
project, funded by a competitive studentship, focused on the globalisation of clinical trials and the
challenges posed to trial recruiters of making pharmaceutical knowledge in and between new national
jurisdictions (Petryna 2009). In January 2010, I relocated to South Africa from the United Kingdom for
15 months to study efforts to enrol marginal urban populations into first-in-human clinical trials. This
was my first time in South Africa. The field location was chosen because of the burgeoning rate of trial
recruitment rather than any familiarity with the country on my part. That I received competitive
funding to do research in a country that I was entirely unfamiliar with is reflective of the ways in which
our discipline disproportionately rewards doctoral studentships to white, male candidates from
“prestigious” EuroAmerican institutions with often “edgy” but untested field ideas (Desai 2017).
In South Africa, I based myself in Cape Town’s peripheral townships where I examined the tactics
used by recruiters – known as “body hunters” (Shah 2007) – to enrol the precarious urban poor into
trials. I conducted ethnographic research alongside recruiters and human subjects in a key recruitment
hotspot: the Khayelitsha township. Khayelitsha, meaning “our new home” in the Xhosa language, is
located 35 kilometres south-east of the centre of Cape Town and is a sprawling mix of formal and
informal housing with high levels of unemployment and poverty (see Fig. 1). The township was
established in 1985 through the forced relocation by the apartheid regime of black residents from
other overcrowded areas of the city. Physical and social mobility was severely restricted through the
operation of the segregationist 1950 Group Areas Act and successive Pass Laws requiring “non-white”
South Africans to present official documentation when entering “white” areas. The township has
grown rapidly since the end of apartheid as a result of migration to urban areas by those in search of
work and better opportunities.
Fig. 1. A Khayelitsha street scene with informal corrugated iron shacks
densely packed together on the sandy dunes of the Cape Flats. Photo by
author.
187Stephen TaylorFENNIA 197(2) (2019)
Violence is an everyday reality for many Khayelitsha residents and shapes a local politics of fear
(Meth 2009). Recorded incidences of murder, rape, and aggravated robbery in the Khayelitsha police
precinct were ranked within the five highest reporting precincts nationally during my time in the area
(South African Police Service 2012, 11). Against this backdrop, local residents have often been excluded
and silenced within popular and academic discourse through epistemologically violent subject
positionings that have categorised the entire township as an irredeemable space.
Investing in the field
“The field,” as Sharp and Dowler (2011, 151) have argued, “is part of a much bigger institution.” In
particular, universities play a significant role in preparing graduate students for field research through
the provision of intellectual support, mentorship, and access to insurance protections. Despite
requests to both my academic department and the broader university, however, no specific training
to prepare pre-fieldwork students for the physical and emotional demands of time away from the
university was made available. Instead, I was encouraged to reflect on and anticipate risks via my
health and safety risk assessment and to discuss this with members of the departmental panel. A risk
assessment was undertaken at the commencement of the project, in consultation with the generic
university safety guidance, and was accepted without amendment within the department. The
majority of the thousand words or so of text that I contributed focused on likely risks to my physical
health, including natural disasters, exposure to disease vectors, and travel at night. The form did not
encourage reflection on risks likely to impact mental health or well-being, and these were not raised
as concerns by the scrutiny panel (Eriksen 2017). While the bureaucratic assessment was necessary to
gain insurance cover and to have the work signed-off within the department, the risk assessment
form was never discussed again.
Following news of the risk assessment approval, a member of the faculty recommended via email
that I should “drop everything, get onto the first plane you can, and move into the townships; going
immediately is the only way to finish the PhD and a couple of publications in three years.” Here, at an
early point in my graduate studies, career and publication considerations were introduced as factors
that senior colleagues felt should shape the field decisions made by a young researcher. These
considerations shaped my initial framing of the field arguably more than the anticipation of dynamic,
contingent, and uncertain risks (Houghton & Bass 2012; Berg 2015; Webster & Caretta 2019). I moved
to South Africa two months after the risk assessment and I set aside several weeks in my initial
fieldwork schedule for acclimatisation.
Ethnographic research that moves beyond mere participant observation necessitates a prolonged,
personal, and proactive investment in people and places. I had cursorily considered the initial stresses
likely to be experienced by any individual plunged into a milieu with which they are unacquainted. I
attempted to reduce the impact of this “culture shock” by registering on a Xhosa language course at a
local university, and I also used the university as a base from which to contact potential research
participants in the clinical trials industry. My initial attempts at accessing researchers and companies
involved fraught negotiations, compounded by the secretive nature of much pharmaceutical research,
and I appreciated having a familiar classroom environment to retreat to after long mornings of
frustrated emails, unanswered calls, and denials of access.
As part of my research into trial recruitment strategies, I sought to examine the everyday lives of
those living in areas being targeted by “body hunters.” Despite my colleague’s suggestion of bravado
in approaching Cape Town’s townships, I knew that accessing these communities would be
demanding. Developing contacts made on my language course, I became affiliated with a community
health non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Khayelitsha and this became a valuable space to
acclimatise to living and working in the area. The organisation was also a vocal critic of trial recruiters
operating in the township, many of whom recruited individuals out of support groups and health
clinics organised by the NGO. I participated in many NGO activities, including co-facilitating safe sex
workshops and helping to organise several actions against local government underinvestment in
community health services. Later, at the request of several local young men who had attended the
workshops and heard me speaking about my interests, I hosted a series of informal drop-in
188 Research paper FENNIA 197(2) (2019)
photography classes in the NGO office’s meeting room. The men saw photography as a potential
employment opportunity, and we spent several afternoons and evenings photographing scenes
across Khayelitsha (Fig. 2 and 3). These classes allowed me to scope the local environment and
practice my Xhosa click consonants and phonemic tones with a group of unofficial guides who
identified places of interest. Investing in dialogue- and rapport-building initiatives was an emotionally
draining, time-consuming, and yet ultimately rewarding process, as it allowed me to explore a wider
area and access a larger number of research contacts.
Fig. 2. A discarded tourniquet – eerily similar in shape to the red HIV/AIDS
international awareness ribbon – found in a shack frequented by intravenous
drug users. Photo by author.
Fig. 3. Assorted pieces of wood and cardboard make up the wall of an
informal shack in QQ Section (Tambo Park), Khayelitsha. Photo by author.
189FENNIA 197(2) (2019) Stephen Taylor
The personal emotional investment necessary for meaningful ethnographic access was undoubtedly
more challenging because of my position as a white, male, European researcher in a partially informal,
black-majority South African township. A sizeable body of work within geography and allied disciplines
has explored the intersections of gender, masculinity, and researcher positionality (Meth 2009; Evans
2012). The gender of male researchers, this work suggests, influences the power dynamics of a
research situation and this distortion is amplified further by other axes of difference. Despite the
petty frustrations and occasional embarrassment stemming from my far-from-perfect command of
Xhosa, I was considered to occupy a position of privilege by my research participants owing to the
colour of my skin as well as my perceived wealth (exemplified, for instance, by my digital camera). For
Rose (1997, 307), this privilege entails “greater access both to material resources and to the power
inherent in the production of knowledges about others.” Cognizant of these unsettling aspects of
privilege, I embraced my position as a reverent learner who was keen to hear more about everyday
Khayelitsha. The dynamics of these relationships evolved as research participants chose to disclose
more of their experiences of township life with me.
My time with the NGO was helpful in introducing me to the sites and spaces frequented by trial
recruiters. However, I understood that basing myself in the relative safety of their compound risked
distorting my view of trial recruitment by focusing solely on those companies seeking to recruit
through extant public health programmes (Le Marcis 2004). To gain a broader perspective on the
spectrum of sites and methods used by recruiters, I had to access more marginal sections of
Khayelitsha. I rented a room in the house of a church pastor within the QQ (Tambo Park) section of
Khayelitsha’s Site B neighbourhood. Tambo Park is one of the most underserved areas in the city,
built on squatted land underneath high-voltage electricity pylons owned by Eskom (the national
electricity utility), with few toilets and limited access to piped drinking water. This move was part of a
conscious strategy aimed at understanding the processes of violence and poverty in underserved
areas that drove many to consider high-risk trial participation as a rare source of sizeable
remuneration. From this location, I was able to explore the vitality of township life that had largely
been ignored in extant accounts of Khayelitsha.
The pursuit of such valuable perspectives was frequently hindered by acute localised violence. For
example, I made regular trips into sections where released members of Cape Town’s feared Number
prison-gangs (“26s,” “27s,” and “28s”) exert control through terror, extortion, and brutality:
I’ve had lots of nightmares after yesterday’s visits. One of the guys that I know from [the NGO] told
me that a young girl’s body was found near his house. She would not accept R30 (€2) for sex, so she
was slashed with a panga knife and pelted with stones. Apparently, that is the accepted rate for a
life. (Excerpt from field diary, 16 August 2010)
As I visited with respondents in these remoter sections of Khayelitsha, black male gang members –
suspicious of unknown white people asking questions on their territory – often grinned at me and
slowly drew their index fingers across their necks to mimic the cutting of my throat that, they
intimated, might be my fate. While this may be explained away as part of a “theatrics of intimidation”
(Pratt 2008, 767) that deliberately accentuated colonial configurations of racialised threat, it was now
clear that my affiliation with the NGO was no protection against the threat of a knife attack. I
considered my (white) body to now be a source of vulnerability, or a marker that I was unwelcome
and – in some way – out of place (Parr 2001; Sharp 2005).
Shocks to self
Negotiating the shifting terrains of violence in places like Tambo Park is a significant emotional
challenge for those ethnographers struggling to make sense of violent social worlds. While objectivity
and emotional distance are important in research, they should not be a pretext for inertia when
confronted with distress nor used as an absolution for silent acquiescence in the face of oppression
(Hart 2006; Markowitz 2019). Listening to research participants recounting incidences of violence
reminded me that life is a fragile thing, and I became more aware of this reality through frequent
contact with incidences of lives being cut short around me. Once on a short car journey around the
190 Research paper FENNIA 197(2) (2019)
outskirts of Khayelitsha, I passed the horrific scene of a collision between several overloaded taxi-vans
and a fuel tanker. In a bewildered state of fear and anxiety, it took all the emotional strength that I
could muster to pull my vehicle to the curb so that I could vomit out of the window.
Nordstrom and Robben (1995, 13) note that the emotional numbness and bewilderment that follow
the witnessing or documenting of death and violence by embedded researchers are rooted in “the
confrontation of the ethnographer’s own sense of being with lives constructed on haphazard grounds.”
Where I had set out to study clinical trials in Cape Town, I was increasingly researching – and, therefore,
experiencing – forms of everyday violence that unsettled the stoicism of my own emotional
autobiography. In light of the tanker crash and the increased reporting of emotional traumas by my
research participants in our discussions of trial participation, I found documenting violence in my field
notes to be an increasingly draining and demoralising task (Punch 2012). The leather-bound notebooks
that had once been updated every evening with vibrant memories, character-full stories, and sketches,
became erratic repositories of conflict, violence, and terror. Writing was a difficult task, and the
“transfers of medium” (Hearn 1998, 56) required in the translation from notes or voice memos to
written text were emotionally charged moments of recollection. Retreating from these notes for several
hours, days, and even weeks, became a way of escaping the realities of day-to-day life in the field –
while, of course, neglecting the documentation and retention of potentially significant research
encounters over these timescales. It was the only way I could preserve the strength to wake up the
following morning and listen to similar tales of violence yet again.
The murder of two of my research participants – both former trial subjects – in gang violence
related to control of the local drug trade, shattered my increasingly fragile resilience to accounts of
violence. In December 2010, Sizakele2 – a crystal meth (tik) dealer – was bludgeoned to death with an
iron bar outside his shack. In January 2011, Qhamani – whose brother was a prominent gang lieutenant
– was stabbed 16 times as he opened the door of his house; he bled to death on the dusty doorstep
where we had spent many afternoons conversing about his life in the townships and his motivations
for doing first-in-human clinical trials. These were not the murders of distant strangers, whose deaths
were partly sanitised by the broadcast media, but the bloody and targeted killings of two men who
had welcomed me during my first months in Khayelitsha and shared their life stories. It would be
paternalistic of me to claim that I, as a privileged white European researcher, could have ever truly
shared their struggles with poverty and unemployment, but my research was designed to be mindful
of their well-being and also invested in positively documenting their experiences of trial recruitment
and participation. Instead, they were now dead and there was nothing in my commitments to engaged
research that would bring them back.
When I was able to open my field diary again and document my thoughts about these killings, I
began to narrate a disconnection that I saw emerging between my university colleagues, research
participants, and myself:
Everyone likes the ‘product’ when I email updates back to university, but they do not want to hear
about how much this is costing me personally. I have shared the news about participant deaths
and attending their funerals. The response? ‘Three more months, you are nearly finished!’ ‘Do not
stop now – you are doing great!’ I feel as if I am staying here because of the guilt that will come if
or when I run away home. (Excerpt from field diary, 24 January 2011)
In reflections such as this, I began to question my own competency to conduct ethnographic research,
mainly as a result of the growing sense of fear and insecurity that I perceived to be constraining my
movements and clouding my observations. How reliable, for instance, were my increasingly panicked
reflections on Khayelitsha life? Could I claim to be an ethnographer if I was retreating from certain
aspects of everyday life? I felt a sense of guilt about the intensity of my personal reactions to the
violence that my research participants were seemingly surmounting on a routine basis.
Reflecting on her own experiences of the field, Katz (1994, 67) recognises that “social scientists
inhabit a difficult and inherently unstable space of betweenness,” partly at home in the field and partly
remaining an alien to everyday experiences. Like a tourist, I knew that I would leave my research
participants, or “run away” as I labelled it above, to complete my degree at home. Mobility and the
ability to extract oneself (and one’s data) from violence is a mark of privilege against the researcher,
particularly in a South African context in which race continues to dictate everyday mobility opportunities
191FENNIA 197(2) (2019) Stephen Taylor
and restrictions (Crankshaw 2008; Caretta & Jokinen 2017). Indeed, Hammett and Hoogendoorn
(2012, 285) note that South Africa has, for too long, been treated as “a site of knowledge production
and extraction.” Aware of potentially being labelled as yet another extractive researcher profiting
from the suffering of others, I felt unable to discuss my fear and insecurity with South African
colleagues, and I rarely discussed these issues with South African friends – both inside and outside
Khayelitsha – to protect them from the rawest manifestations of my fear and guilt.
Exposure to situations of emotional duress reveals both the paralysis and productivity of
researchers struggling to cope with their surroundings. Interlocutors have since questioned how valid
or reliable my ethnographic work was in light of such reactions. An unspoken assumption behind
these queries is that data quality must be compromised when researcher objectivity is in doubt. Such
assertions, I contend, are symptomatic of the masculinist epistemologies of our discipline. It is
presumed that an objective account is one that conforms to disciplinary norms, but the fact that these
norms are premised on the covert denial of researcher personhood – an epistemological sleight of
hand exposed by Fabian – is rarely discussed. The emotional consequences of extended ethnographic
research can, instead, be an important source of critical understanding (Lund 2012; Punch 2012). Lee-
Treweek (2000, 12), for example, argues that “ignoring or repressing feelings about research is more
likely to produce distortion of data, rather than clarity.” As I have reflected on my experiences of the
field cursorily outlined above, I have come to recognise – admittedly over a distance of several years
– that the guilt I narrated above was often an unexpected way of maintaining a dialogue about my
own position within the research (de Nardi 2015; Caretta & Jokinen 2017). Emotions related to loss
and fear were, likewise, useful indicators to compare my own emotional responses to those of my
research participants (Hume 2007; Dominey-Howes 2015). Finally, empathy facilitated my own far-
from-perfect attempts at understanding the participants’ everyday experiences (Ratnam 2019). While
researcher safety is paramount, to suggest that emotional responses are not valid or are likely to
compromise critical work is to malign certain field experiences and disqualify forms of personhood
from the field of knowledge production.
It is important, in light of the above, to return to the question of my positionality. There is value in
exploring the emotional experiences of male researchers who encounter violence in the field, as these
intersections are still relatively limited within geography (Dominey-Howes 2015). As feminist
geographers have noted, men occupy positions of relative power inside and outside the field; this
leads to the assumed ability to dominate and control the field encounter. Mehta and Bondi (1999, 77),
for instance, state that men – here assumed to be heterosexual and cisgender – “take for granted their
capacity to move through a variety of urban spaces.” As I spent more time in Khayelitsha following the
murders, however, I found that my taken-for-granted ability to traverse urban terrain started to falter.
I became increasingly wary of leaving my home, conscious of different individuals and unknown risks
in public spaces, and often ended my days fearful of noises outside my house. I tragically believed that
as “a man” I ought to be master of my own field experience – a masculine confidence and emotional
indifference that had been reinforced through my university career to date – even when I was, like
Fabian’s arrogant colonial ethnographers, in a place that I had no previous experience of before
commencing the research. My growing fear started to throw this identity into doubt. I spent the
evenings wrestling with the growing discordance between what I felt I should be doing and what I
physically and mentally could do (Caretta & Jokinen 2017). I repressed my doubts, however, as I was
wary of revealing this emotional distress to my predominantly male peer group and colleagues out of
a concern that they would question my masculinity and interpret these anxieties as a sign of weakness
(see Dominey-Howes 2015). Where some have felt wary of being labelled a “thrill seeker” while in the
field, in many respects I was reluctant to be positioned as risk averse.
Leaving the field?
Ethnographers most often return from fieldwork alone. For the researcher, the thought of finally
leaving the field can be a motivating factor to endure stressful conditions. However, the transformations
that begin in the field do not always end at the point of departure. For all the methodological concern
192 Research paper FENNIA 197(2) (2019)
with “getting in” and “getting on” in the field, there remains a noticeable silence on the challenges and
repercussions of “getting out” (Irvine & Gaffikin 2006).
When I returned to the United Kingdom at the scheduled end of my fieldwork, I was inundated with
requests from friends and colleagues alike, ranging from dinner invitations to projected dissertation
drafting schedules. There was a belief that I would slip back seamlessly into life at home and everyone,
understandably, wanted to do their best to facilitate this. In reality, I struggled to communicate with
those who had seen none of the emotional transformation that I had undergone in another hemisphere
(Theidon 2014). I felt that I had so little to say and, like anyone who has spent a significant time away
from social groups, my friends’ lives had carried on without me; I had missed these moments – new
jobs, new partners, new hangouts – and, honestly, it all seemed so insignificant in contrast to the
memories and nightmares that clouded my waking moments. Close friends asked about the bags
under my eyes and the noticeable weight loss; I explained it away as a side-effect of the stress brought
about from return to thesis deadlines, not wanting to burden them with the full story.
Often, researchers who are suffering from emotional and psychological trauma do so in silence,
giving rise to a perception that such issues are absent from research and that there is little need for
post-fieldwork institutional support or formal redress (Bloor et al. 2010). This lack of recognition
further reinforces a broader personal/professional divide in which emotional and psychological
issues are still considered to be a purely personal matter, with their place in the professionalised
space of research remaining unwelcome. Fieldwork, too, is often seen as a distinct phase in a
researcher’s personal or professional life that is disconnected from normal rhythms and routines.
The fallacy of such divides is exposed when emotional and psychological distresses arise as a direct
consequence of professional fieldwork activity.
In those first few weeks back at work, I suffered from panic attacks, bouts of uncontrollable anger,
periods of depression, teary outbursts, and recurrent nightmares; these problems did not respect any
flimsy boundary intended to parse my personal and professional lives. I remember attending a
university reception at which I broke down in the toilets, unable to keep up appearances around
colleagues and their partners. I also found it difficult to stay in contact with my South African research
participants; I felt that I had abandoned them and worried that the next social media update would
contain more news of violence directed towards them. I feared, paraphrasing Sontag’s (2003, 17) work
on the visceral power of images, an assault by email. On the days when I could force myself to work, I
began to dedicate myself to helping raise the profile of the Khayelitsha NGO as this was the only
forum where I could confront and raise awareness of the poverty and violence that I had seen.
Focusing on these tasks helped me delay the transcription of interviews and having to play and replay
audio recordings dealing with the subject of violence.
I shared little of this with my supervisor. Throughout my time in South Africa, I would email an
update each month on where progress was being made. I mentioned little of the emotional problems
that I was having – aside from the death of interviewees – and I maintained this silence when I returned
too. We debriefed my time away mainly in terms of work done and how this would be translated into
the thesis and publications. I felt comfortable narrowing our conversation around work, as I could at
least present a veneer of being a research productive individual worthy of the recognition and
affirmation I craved. I had field stories to tell, all of which skirted over the sleepless nights and the
teary moments. I also successfully avoided the issue of my mental health and yet I came to realise that
this selfishly undermined my own desire to help my respondents. How, for instance, could I claim to
be supporting the work of the NGO and practising a care-full geography when I was neglecting to
share the reality of my respondents’ everyday lives and the ways in which this had deeply affected
me? These were questions that I was too reluctant to pose to my supervisor, fearing that this would
cross a line into the therapeutic and make them uncomfortable, but these are issues that I now feel I
would have appreciated their advice and support on most of all.
At the suggestion of a friend who had begun to be concerned about my increasingly erratic behaviour,
I reluctantly spoke with a professional counsellor about my experiences three months after returning
from South Africa. At first, I am now ashamed to say, I was dismissive of the enterprise and put forth
intellectual resistance to the idea of therapy and even discussing emotions. All I wanted was to sleep
better and to work efficiently. Slowly, however, I opened up about experiences in Khayelitsha – the
193FENNIA 197(2) (2019) Stephen Taylor
dead girl, the tanker crash, the gang threats, the murders – and, following further consultations over
the course of several weeks, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
PTSD, I learned, involves the re-experiencing of actual or threatened traumatic events such as
death, serious injury, or sexual violation. The exposure must result from direct experience of a
traumatic event, witnessing of an event, recounting of an event by a close associate, or repeated
exposure to distressing details of a traumatic event (Friedman 2013). A significant number of
ethnographic research projects could expose researchers to such traumas, and ethnographers may
be vulnerable to secondary or vicarious trauma as they conduct interviews with individuals detailing
traumatic or harrowing events (Calgaro 2015; Markowitz 2019). Lerias and Byrne (2003, 130) define
secondary traumatic stress as “the response of those persons who have witnessed, been subject to
explicit knowledge of or, had the responsibility to intervene in a seriously distressing or tragic event.”
In my case, the death of research participants and repeated secondary exposure to accounts of
trauma – rather than a single catastrophic event – were found to be significant contributors to my
complex PTSD. At night, I would lay my head on my pillow and my mind would immediately cast itself
back to the steps where I had conversed with Qhamani, except this time the concrete steps were
smeared in his blood. I would lay there for hours, unable to close my eyes, often leaping out of bed at
the slightest of noises coming from the shared house beyond my bedroom door. My flashbacks
occurred thousands of miles from Khayelitsha, but they repeatedly refocused my thoughts back to a
time and a place that I could not return to, while – at the same time – the trauma colonised new spaces
at home (Coddington & Micieli-Voutsinas 2017).
PTSD is a treatable condition and treatment can be relatively short if it is diagnosed promptly. If
there is a delay in the diagnosis and treatment of PTSD, the experiences of trauma risk becoming
firmly rooted within the sufferer. Diagnostic guidelines for PTSD include four distinct behavioural
symptom diagnostic clusters: re-experiencing, avoidance, negative cognitions and arousal (American
Psychiatric Association 2013). The number of symptoms that must be identified for diagnosis depends
on the cluster, but disturbances must continue for more than one month. In my case, these symptoms
were everyday realities over the course of three months after my return before I sought help, and
were further amplified when I was exposed to stimuli that triggered violent memories, such as violence
in films, in the media, and even as I tentatively returned to my field notes. In one memorable incident
while driving to the supermarket, a driver behind me beeped his horn as I switched lanes suddenly.
Rather than let this go, I uncharacteristically leaped out of my car at the next intersection and loudly
remonstrated at the driver for daring to affront me in this way.
My own treatment only began after I had already lost the ability to moderate my own anxiety
levels, as the driving incident demonstrates, to the point that I was worried about the need to pause
my doctoral studies and thereby publicly disclose my suffering. While some medications have shown
immediate benefit in treating the symptoms of PTSD, the best long-term treatment is talking.
Through cognitive behavioural therapy, PTSD sufferers are encouraged to discuss the traumatic
events that are responsible for their negative emotions. The aim of this therapy is to normalise
speaking about trauma in such a way that feelings of panic and anxiety are no longer triggered.
Again, I initially found sharing to be a difficult experience. I avoided certain topics and refused to use
certain words that I believed were labels for an emasculating emotionality (crying, anger, fear),
instead falling back on intellectualising violence and witnessing. I was encouraged to practice humility
– something quite alien to the more prideful, assertive, and defensive posturing of masculinist
academic circles – and this took the form of examining and meditating on my own capacities and
limits (Eriksen & Ditrich 2015). The veneer of pride and busyness that I sought to project to others, I
came to understand, allowed me to avoid considering my own shortcomings. Practicing humility, in
other words, gave me the confidence to show colleagues my own flaws in the solidaric spirit of
“confessional intimacy” (Harrowell et al. 2018, 236).
A key part of practising humility has been acknowledging that my experience of the field, trauma,
and PTSD is informed by my position as a white, male researcher from a university and country
capable of dedicating significant resources to facilitating researcher support and treatment. I do not
want to “grade” my PTSD as an exceptional experience. Trauma talk, Berlant (2001, 46) suggests, is too
often captured by interests that seek to “flatten out trauma’s bumpy terrain” in order to deny or
194 Research paper FENNIA 197(2) (2019)
downplay historically sedimented forms of epistemic violence. Researchers identifying at the
intersections of axes of difference – notably gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age, and nationality
– are vulnerable to traumas arising from targeted identity-based violence, discrimination, silencing,
and exclusion in the field and at home (Malam 2004; Hume 2007; Ross 2015; Jokinen & Caretta 2016;
Hawthorne & Heitz 2018). It is essential that the discipline makes more space to acknowledge these
researcher perspectives and differentiated experiences to make sense of power relations shaping the
field. Reflexive humility for me, in this instance, involved recognising the humanising function of
fieldwork and seeking solidarity with fellow researchers in the interconnected struggles against forms
of power that reproduce violence and exclusion against research subjects and researchers alike.
After many sessions with trained counsellors, I am now in a position to better manage my own
emotions through a clearer prioritisation of care. “Care,” Mountz and colleagues (2015, 1238) argue,
“is not self-indulgent; it is radical and necessary.” Despite my successful treatment, which I was able to
complete alongside my studies rather than through interruption, I still have difficulty controlling my
response to certain triggers and this is a necessary task that I will have to contend with indefinitely.
Now when I hear a car horn behind me, I still occasionally feel rage, but I control the emotions much
better by counting down in my head and considering my breathing: ten, nine, eight, they are probably
having a bad day, seven, six, five, ignore the horn, four, three, breathe, two, one. The neurological and
hormonal changes brought about by PTSD have necessitated radical changes to my social and
professional routines. The physical transformations that accompanied my case of PTSD – significant
weight loss, propensity to severe fatigue, episodic irritability around loud noises – mean that I will
never be the same person that boarded the plane for South Africa in January 2010. I now take these
visible and invisible forms of chronic impairment into the field with me and, as I seek to adjust my
body within the field, I encounter the unseen barriers in fieldwork that my prideful self previously
chose to ignore (Kitchin 1998; Anderson 2001).
Conclusions
My experiences of negotiating the field and transitioning out of fieldwork highlight an acute need for
greater recognition of the emotional and psychological challenges of ethnographic research, and
also underline the necessity of comprehensive guidance and training for early career ethnographic
researchers entering the field (Billo & Hiemstra 2013; Loyle & Simoni 2017). Too often the emotional
consequences of professional activity have been marginalised within methodological accounts of the
field (Pollard 2009; Caretta & Jokinen 2017; Ratnam 2019). In turning a critical gaze onto my own
experiences in the field and with PTSD, I have introduced some of the consequences for early career
researchers of disciplinary and institutional cultures that valorise emotionally opaque accounts of
the field. I have also sought to counter the silencing masculinist traditions of our discipline by
examining my pre- and post-fieldwork experiences through the lens of my own positionality as a
male geographer with a mental disorder.
It has not been my intention to abrogate personal responsibility for my own choices in the field, as
I hope has been clear through discussion of mistakes and shortfalls, or to apportion blame to anyone
involved in the oversight of my research. In a spirit of humility and confessional intimacy, it is difficult
to disagree with DeLyser and Starr’s (2001, 6) characterisation that we are all “fallible field workers
negotiating challenging circumstances, not always with equal success and grace.” A number of
professional silences and expectations, however, did have a significant and complicating impact upon
that decision. These included a silence surrounding the emotional and psychological challenges of
ethnographic research in methodological literatures, and the lack of adequate professional information
and training about the potential emotional traumas of research (Evans 2012; Warden 2013; Eriksen
2017). While these expectations may now be taken for granted as the emerging contours upon which
contemporary academic research is conducted, change is urgently required in the administration of
fieldwork and the professional training of researchers to prepare them to confront some of the
emotional and psychological challenges of the field (Mountz et al. 2015; Mullings et al. 2016).
First, at an individual level, is a call to prioritise self-care both in the field and after. Working
constantly risks burnout, as Mountz and colleagues (2015) remind us. Before I leave, I now schedule a
195FENNIA 197(2) (2019) Stephen Taylor
period of local furlough part way through extended fieldwork for rest and recuperation. This feels
radical, especially as time in the field is often pressurised for many reasons, but allows me to reframe
difficult experiences outside of the immediate context of the field and humbly reflect on my own
actions (Eriksen & Ditrich 2015). Likewise, I would encourage early career ethnographers to consider
engagement with professional counselling services after return from extended periods in the field
(Beckett 2019). While many might see such appointments as an unnecessary diversion from the
pressures to begin data analysis, talking can identify causes for concern at an early stage and can also
be a helpful initial stage in reflexively examining and narrating time in the field.
Second, as a broader discipline with responsibilities for the safety and well-being of early career
researchers, we must acknowledge that self-care alone cannot solve field traumas or structural
dilemmas linked to over-work (Theidon 2014; Eriksen 2017). Our learned societies must prioritise
developing accessible guidance relating to mental distress in the field. Funded professional
development courses on dealing with emotions and mental health in the field, akin to those offered
in other sectors, must be developed and promoted as a disciplinary priority (Pearlman & Mac Ian
1995; Bloor et al. 2010). This support could be made available to early-career researchers and their
supervisory teams to ensure broad uptake of key messages and principles of support. However, our
disciplinary reflection must also extend to differentiated experiences of the field (Anderson 2001;
Sundberg 2005; Jokinen & Caretta 2016). If the masculinist and colonialist underpinnings of fieldwork
are to be challenged, there must be clearer channels of advice, mentoring/sponsorship, and peer
support, for researchers whose gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or disability makes them more vulnerable
to traumatic experiences in certain field settings (Malam 2004; Ross 2015; Webster & Caretta 2019). It
is also incumbent upon all geographers to cultivate “thick” forms of solidarity that take an anticipatory
stance towards trauma and support colleagues before, during, and after fieldwork through radical
forms of collective care (Mullings et al. 2016; Dombrowski et al. 2018).
Third, and finally, universities hosting ethnographic researchers must prioritise practical and
financial support for training and (professional) debriefing (Caretta et al. 2018). This could include
developing care curricula for doctoral researchers, updating and mandating regular review of
institutional risk assessments to have researchers identify likely emotional stressors and their
consequences for mental health, and the development of clearer, judgement-free procedures around
if, how, and when researchers (and even their supervisory teams) can pause time in the field on the
grounds of safety or well-being.
Notes
1 Exposure of clinical staff to the traumatic experiences of patients, for example, is acknowledged and
– to some extent – anticipated through professional training (Pearlman & Mac Ian 1995). Likewise,
Bloor and colleagues (2010) document the specialist pre- and post-trip intensive security briefings
that international humanitarian organisations provide for their staff travelling to high-risk countries.
2 All names used in this paper are pseudonyms.
Acknowledgements
I thank Chief Editor Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and the six peer reviewers for their extensive and generous
comments that have significantly strengthened this article. I also acknowledge the support that
colleagues at Queen Mary University of London have offered as I have come to terms with the
experiences discussed in this piece. This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council (ES/GO19061/1).
196 Research paper FENNIA 197(2) (2019)
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