March 09, 2012 2:00 PM

The Transitional Justice Network (TJN) invites you to the eighth in a series of research seminars focusing on research methods and ethics in settings of violence.

Ethics and Methodology Amid Highly Politicized Research Settings 
Presented by Erin Jessee
 
RSVP required for advance copy of paper: echoi@exchange.ubc.ca
 
In recent years, social scientists have increasingly expanded their gaze to consider intimate accounts of extreme human experiences, such as narratives of survival and flight in response to mass atrocities. This shift in academic and practical interests begs the questions: Are there limits to qualitative methods and theory? And if so, what are these limits? This paper begins to address these questions by drawing upon fourteen months of fieldwork in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hercegovina, during which I conducted ethnographic research and multiple life history interviews with approximately one hundred survivors, ex-combatants, and perpetrators of genocide and related mass atrocities. I argue that there are limits to the application of qualitative methods particularly when working amid highly politicized research settings, a phrase that refers to those environments in which government seeks to control sociopolitical discourses by limiting what can be said in public about the government and its policies.  
 
Erin Jessee is a Human Security Postdoctoral Fellow with the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She holds a doctoral degree in the Humanities from Concordia University in Montréal, a Masters in Archaeology with a specialization in the forensic sciences, and an undergraduate degree with a double major in Archaeology and Anthropology from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Erin works primarily in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hercegovina, using qualitative methods to elicit a nuanced “view from below” of history, memory, politics, and rural life in the aftermath of genocide and related mass atrocities. In addition to several recent peer-reviewed articles, she is writing a manuscript on the political uses of history surrounding the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995. In addition, she has recently launched a new research program that assesses domestic and international efforts to locate, identify, and repatriate the victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide from the perspective of Rwandan survivors.