About the Book
Scholars and practitioners who witness violence and loss in human, animal, and ecological contexts are expected to have no emotional connection to the subjects they study. Yet is this possible? Following feminist traditions, Vulnerable Witness centers the researcher and challenges readers to reflect on how grieving is part of the research process and, by extension, is a political act. Through thirteen reflective essays the book theorizes the role of grief in the doing of research—from methodological choices, fieldwork and analysis, engagement with individuals, and places of study to the manner in which scholars write and talk about their subjects. Combining personal stories from early career scholars, advocates, and senior faculty, the book shares a breadth of emotional engagement at various career stages and explores the transformative possibilities that emerge from being enmeshed with one's own research.
About the Author
Kathryn Gillespie is a feminist geographer and critical animal studies scholar. Her work has been published in Gender, Place and Culture, Antipode, and Hypatia. She is the author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389, and she coedited, with Patricia J. Lopez, Economies of Death. Patricia J. Lopez is Assistant Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. Her work has been published in Gender, Place and Culture, and Environment and Planning. She is the coeditor, with Kathryn Gillespie, of Economies of Death.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Patricia J. Lopez and Kathryn Gillespie
1. “With You, Time Flowed Like Water”: Geographies of Grief across International Research Collaborations
Jessie Hanna Clark
2. Grieving Guinea Pigs: Refl ections on Research and Shame in Peru
María Elena García
3. An Immigrant in Academia: Navigating Grief and Privilege
Yolanda Valencia
4. The Mongoose Trap: Grief, Intervention, and the Impossibility of Professional Detachment
Elan Abrell
5. The Authentic Hypocrisy of Ecological Grief
Amy Spark
6. Scale-Blocking Grief: Witnessing the Intimate between a Confl ict Leopard and Confi nement
Kalli F. Doubleday
7. On Missing People in the Field
David Boarder Giles
8. Grieving Daughter, Grieving Witness
Abigail H. Neely
9. The Researcher-Witness of Violence against Queers: One Scholar-Activist’s Pathway through Lament
William J. Payne
10. Unsteady Hands: Care and Grief for Conservation Subjects
Jenny R. Isaacs
11. Grieving Salmon and the Politics of Collective Ecological Fieldwork
Cleo Woelfl e-Erskine
12. Witnessing Grief: Feminist Perspectives on the Loss-Body-Mind-Self-Other Nexus and Permission
to Express Feelings
Avril Maddrell and Elizabeth Olson
13. Self-Care and Trauma: Locating the Time and Space to Grieve
Dana Cuomo
Epilogue
Patricia J. Lopez and Kathryn Gillespie
Contributors
Index
