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------------------ I am looking for panelists to join a workshop at the ASAUK (African Studies Association of the U.K.) in Brighton, U.K.., in September 2014. If you are interested to participate in this panel, please contact me off-list at heikeb@mweb.co.za. You can also access the conference website and submit paper proposals yourself at http://www.asauk.net/conferences/asauk14.shtml ASAUK, University of Sussex, 9-11 September 2014 Mutuality in the field: From fieldwork ethics to collaborative production of knowledge? Organiser: Heike Becker; University of the Western Cape How do we think about the ways in which researchers and interlocutors are engaged in processes of co-responsibility? The proposed panel is interested in new perspectives on fieldwork ethics and knowledge production in African Studies, which stem, in part, from Johannes Fabian¹s discussion of ethnography and interpretation. The past couple of decades have seen much pre-occupation with fieldwork ethics, above all in Anthropology, and also in the other humanities. For much of the time, these debates have been of a methodological nature, reading mutuality in knowledge production primarily as interpretations of facing our informants in the field. More recently, technological developments in the social media as much as debates around mutuality, inequality and reciprocity, have opened up new pathways of thinking about the collaborative production of knowledge between researchers and their Œsubjects¹ in and ³off² the field. For scholars in southern Africa the challenges of mutuality and inequality have been a particular concern, where ties of reciprocity and mutuality bind us and our interlocutors as citizens of common historical-political spaces imbued with the complexities of polyethnic, racially differentiated and grossly unequal societies. How can we rethink these ties formed between researchers and their interlocutors on the basis of shared, yet radically different social references, in southern Africa and beyond? How do we account for the power relations they entail, making sense at the same time of the inherent multiplicity and fluidity? How do we think about mutuality as a constitutive principle in interrelations that recognizes the lives of others in the field and in the labours of writing? And: how does the discussion about mutuality enable us to move beyond mere thinking about fieldwork ethics, and on toward reflections of the complex processes of knowledge production in situations of marked inequality? The panel is interested in theoretical and empirical contributions that explore questions of mutuality, inequality and reciprocity in African and Africanist knowledge production in southern, Central, East and West Africa. Heike Becker Professor of Anthropology Dept of Anthropology & Sociology University of the Western Cape P/bag X17 Bellville 7535 South Africa +27 21 959-3548/2336 Editor: Anthropology Southern Africa Heike Becker Professor of Anthropology Dept of Anthropology & Sociology University of the Western Cape P/bag X17 Bellville 7535 South Africa +27 21 959-3548/2336 Editor: Anthropology Southern Africa --
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