The Cost of Bearing Witness

Nena Močnik received her PhD at University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and is currently Maria Skłodowska Curie EUTOPIA (Science and Innovation) Fellow at GRITIM - UPF Barcelona and CYU Paris. She is the author of two monographs, Trauma Transmission and Sexual Violence: Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Settings (2021), and Sexuality after War Rape: From Narrative to Embodied Research (2017). Her research interest covers collective traumas, identity-based violence and non-medical trauma rehabilitation. Ahmad Ali Ghouri’s research is interdisciplinary and focussed on critical and comparative approaches to international law and transnational discourses on Islamic law. These two apparently divergent fields find metalevel convergence in his enquiries about the Islamic state practices in international law and accommodation and interpretation of Islamic law and practices by secular states. The broader issues addressed in his research come down to transnational identities and practices reflected in public and private governance having economic as well as broader societal implications.

Introduction: Re-Thinking Exposure to Trauma and Self-Care in Fieldwork-Based Social Research 1. Why Fit in When You Were Born to Stand Out? The Role of Peer Support in Preventing and Mitigating Research-Related Stress among Doctoral Researchers 2. Dialogical Research Design: Practising Ethical, Useful and Safe(r) Research 3. Gendered Embodiment of the Ethnographer during Fieldwork in a Conflict Region of India 4. Going to Work ‘High’: Negotiating Boundaries while Doing Ethnography of Drugs 5. Bearing Witness to Suffering: A Reflection on the Personal Impact of Conducting Research with Children and Grandchildren of Victims of Apartheid-era Gross Human Rights Violations in South Africa 6. ‘I Was Close to Them’: Re-experiencing War through Trauma-based Interviews 7. The Cost of Bearing Witness to the Environmental Crisis: Vicarious Traumatization and Dealing with Secondary Traumatic Stress among Environmental Researchers