Within a couple months of starting my PhD fieldwork in San Salvador, El Salvador, in January 2018, I was disintegrating. My research was about how dangerous places are made and the stories and images of violence were coming fast and furious from every direction—during my data collection but also with every taxi driver and market trader who asked me what I was doing in the city. Normally an extrovert, I was turning inward, behaving erratically, and haunted in my sleep. After a particularly gruesome incident, I stayed up for two consecutive nights to avoid nightmares. Frazzled and frightened, I reached out to a friend who is a trauma therapist. ‘Right now it’s like you go to the library, walk toward the same shelf, take down the same book, open it to the same page, and can’t stop reading,’ she explained when I told her what was going on. ‘Healing doesn’t mean shutting the book forever. It’s about deciding when you want to read and when you want to stop.’
Striving to reclaim that agency has been some of the most demanding work I’ve ever done. But, more than anything I’ve read or any training I’ve taken, it has made me a more exacting, creative, and human researcher. This blog post chronicles that process: attending and organising workshops, writing and collaborating to imagine alternatives, and developing awareness of what poor mental health feels like in my body so I can take steps to protect myself and others.
This process began when I returned to San Salvador in June 2018 for the second part of my fieldwork. I attended a workshop on research challenges in violent contexts where I presented the first draft of a paper that used auto-ethnography as both method and motivation. In it, I harnessed my lived experience and indignation to spur action on researcher trauma: I recognised and named my distress, identified shortcomings in existing practice and protocol, and described tools I was learning to manage my exposure to traumatic material. The workshop participants were kind and rigorous in their comments, reinforcing the central claim of my paper that, ‘Breaking the silence around researcher trauma, rather than being unscientific or self-indulgent, permits clarity in the theories, concepts, and methods we develop to make sense of violence as a social phenomenon.’ Despite ongoing moments of danger and crisis in my fieldwork, the interlocking infrastructures of support I needed to keep going began to take shape.
In January 2019, with support from the Development Planning Unit at University College London, I organised a workshop on researching sensitive topics. Twenty-five people from inside and outside of academia at all stages of their careers in three countries joined to explore what secondary and vicarious trauma look and feel like, how to supervise this kind of work, and what was missing or unhelpful in existing ethics and risk protocols. I cut my closing remarks short because I couldn’t find the words to express how validated and relieved I felt.
Off the back of that workshop, I was invited to contribute an ethics guide on risk and wellbeing to what became Practising Ethics, an award-winning open-access project to aid built environment researchers and practitioners in negotiating ethical issues. Reflecting on all the things I found myself unprepared for and overwhelmed by, I formulated a series of questions that I wished I had considered more fully before my fieldwork, during data collection, and once I had finished such as, ‘Will I cause harm?’ and ‘Have I found ways of holding distressing or conflicting information?’ I also included reminders to myself because I still needed to hear them and I knew that some friends and colleagues did, too:
You may need to have uncomfortable conversations to clarify expectations, shift your research approach, change your study site, or even take measures to protect yourself or your participants…Sometimes, the adjustments you make may not fall into ‘best’ or ‘standard’ practices in research, and you may be asked to defend or explain your decisions. This can seem daunting when you made those decisions based on incomplete information or personal factors that you would prefer not to share. It is worth reminding yourself—and others—that methodology is never fixed or rigid but rather malleable, contingent, and integrative.
In 2020, I connected with the nascent Network of Women Doing Fieldwork, driven by one of those ‘personal factors that you would prefer not to share’: when I first arrived in San Salvador, a key gatekeeper withheld his assistance from me because I withheld my body from him. Accepting men’s and boys’ advances on women and girls as a fixture of life in San Salvador had, until that point, allowed me to frame the gatekeeper’s behaviour as part of the landscape rather than part of my research. The Network advocates for the ability of women and gender-diverse researchers to conduct fieldwork free from violence, with dignity and joy, and with the right support from their institutions and funders. Initially, I was interested in what they were doing because it seemed like an offshoot of what I was doing on secondary trauma. Over time, I came to understand that the topic pertained to me, too. The realisation gave me the clarity of thought to write up my experience as a case study for Practising Ethics and a chapter in an upcoming edited volume.
I am constantly reminded that collaboration and sharing accelerate systemic change. I am now a guiding member of the Network of Women Doing Fieldwork where I have co-created methodologies, chaired events, and compiled an open-access bibliography. I developed the Practising Ethics chapter with Cristian Olmos Herrera who is a visual researcher because using art to remake distress can flip the script; Cris and my conversations for the chapter were therapeutic for both of us. Similarly, I have worked with arts therapists to develop workshops encouraging children to explore the links between vulnerability and power in hopes of giving them a head start in building the skills that have been transformative for me. I also consistently celebrate good work by friends and colleagues. For example, Ellen Van Damme started Field Research Consulting to support researchers in preparing and navigating challenges in data collection, and Siofra Peeren is a commissioner on The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on lived experience in mental health. Zoë Goodman launched Rebellious Care to enable university students and staff to better care for themselves and each other through arts-based and body-centred practices.
Encouraged by Kate Ferguson at Protection Approaches, I map out my room for manoeuvre and that of the people around me to progress work that I know is important even as the world around all of us becomes more precarious and conflictual. Together we can find dignity, power, identity, and purpose amidst suffering and together we can claw our way out.
This blog post was written by Ariana Markowitz, a freelance researcher and practitioner in London who designs award-winning participatory and creative methodologies to prevent structural and chronic urban violence and drive organisational change.
[Photo: Ariana Markowitz with Cristian Olmos Herrera, ‘You look good in short skirts’: gender-based violence in fieldwork,’ in Jane Rendell, David Roberts and Yael Padan (eds), Practising Ethics: A Poethic Infrastructure for Architectural and Urban Researchers (UCL Press, forthcoming).]
