An act of gathering: Scholarship from posttotalitarian contexts

Abstract

Researching a community living through violence and its aftermath reshapes the ethical stakes of the work and challenges claims to academic objectivity by foregrounding insights drawn from the lived experience of the field. My discussion here is structured around three such insights. The first is that a community after violence is not simply a place where the researcher collects information; it has its own agency and directly advances its own ethical demands toward the researcher. The second is that colonial archives contain evidence that knowledge itself can be punished, censored, or destroyed—and that in such contexts, the researcher inevitably inherits both data from the archive and an ethical stance toward their destroyed predecessors. The final insight came through my own experience of war and displacement, which showed me that any illusions around attempts to remain beyond a context of research that is subject to conditions of violence—to instantiate a view from nowhere, as it were—are neither possible nor welcome. Together, these insights suggest that scholarship emerging from below, from the conditions of violence, carries a particular ethical and epistemological gravity—one that can deepen rather than diminish accuracy.