It’s necessary to reimagine how we “see our bodies as participating in research.”
Amandine Desille and Nina Sahraoui
09 March 2022
Published: 16 May 2022
Image by Amandine Desille.
Nina Sahraoui and Amandine Desille had been friends and colleagues as graduate students, and stayed in touch during their postdocs when they both became pregnant at the same time. Reflecting together on how caregiving wholly changed their research, they noted the new logistics they had to manage that no one had discussed before. They learned on the go, from scheduling interviews precisely between breastfeeding times, to finishing up visits with interlocutors by running to the station together to catch the train for daycare pick-up. Rethinking a project to accommodate commute needs felt “unscientific” for how personal the criteria was, against how researchers are asked to explain research design in grant proposals. It’s often unacceptable for funding bodies that researchers experience precarity and patchiness. However, they found resonance and affirmation in feminist care ethics literatures that highlighted how individuals are interdependent beings, and later in the Patchwork Ethnography Manifesto. Both demonstrate how research processes are not only intellectual. Knowledge accumulates also just by being in a research space, by experiencing emotions and feelings. It’s less about finding the “balance” between a researcher-self and personal-self, but acknowledging their entanglement and how this affects knowledge production. Such acknowledgement would mean not judging researchers for bringing care into the picture, and having training that prepares researchers for the emotional aspects of fieldwork. Nina and Amandine’s collaboration itself these days is fairly unstructured and patchy, as they strive to find time for quick calls amid days that are increasingly short. But they hope to continue these conversations together and even within a slightly larger group eventually.
Update from 2023: Amandine made a short film, “my place is in-between places,” that is inspired by and quotes the above interview. Watch it here.
Amandine Desille is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Bordeaux in France. amandine.desille[at]campus.ul.pt
Nina Sahraoui is a postdoctoral researcher at GTM-CRESPPA, CNRS. nina.sahraoui[at]gmail.com / @NinaSahraoui