Reciprocal Vulnerability: Violence, privilege, and solidarity from fieldwork to academia
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In this special issue, we seek to uncover the vulnerabilities of researchers in anthropological fieldwork and academia, tracing their political and epistemological potential for the creation of ethnographic knowledge that is based on practices of reciprocity and solidarity. We bring together contributions that explore how anthropologists recover from various experiences of discomfort, harm, and violence by creating bonds of care and support with others, including interlocutors and other researchers, that critically shape and reshape their perspectives and the knowledge they create. Vulnerabilities are powerful and revealing encounters with what makes us human in an entangled and unequal world. Building on reflexive and feminist anthropology, we introduce the concept of “reciprocal vulnerability”, recognizing that vulnerabilities are relational, shifting, and situational experiences and positionalities that can connect people across differences and inequalities, allowing for new forms of exchange and reciprocity to emerge and thrive in fieldwork and anthropology more generally.
DOI: 10.48620/91534
Authors: Schild, Pascale, Wiesigel, Wiebke, Juan, Paola, da Silva Araujo, Larissa
Institution: Institute for Social Anthropology
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7083471685
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