Being a Parent in the Field : Implications and Challenges of Accompanied Fieldwork

How does being a parent in the field influence a researcher's positionality and the production of ethnographic knowledge?
Based on regionally and thematically diverse cases, this collection explores methodological, theoretical, and ethical dimensions of accompanied fieldwork. The authors show how multiple familial relations and the presence of their children, partners, or other family members impact the immersion into the field and the construction of its boundaries.
Female and male authors from various career stages exemplify different research conditions, financial constraints, and family-career challenges which are decisive for academic success.

Fabienne Braukmann is a social anthropologist and PhD candidate at the University of Cologne. She has worked as a research fellow at the Asia Africa Institute, University of Hamburg, for the interdisciplinary DOBES Project Bayso/Haro. Between 2012 and 2016, she was an affiliate researcher at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. She has conducted fieldwork in the Cook Islands and, since 2010, in southern Ethiopia. Her research interests include cultural forgetting and remembering, critical heritage studies, social change, ethnicity, minority studies, culture-environment adaptation, and culture and language documentation.

Michaela Haug is Assistant Professor at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology and Senior Researcher at the Global South Studies Center at the University of Cologne. She focuses on human-environment relations, political, economic and social change, inequality and gender relations with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Her current research project explores how different and partly contradicting visions of the future affect forest use changes in Indonesian Borneo. Recent publications include the article Claiming Rights to the Forest in East Kalimantan: Challenging Power and Presenting Culture published in SOJOURN (2018) and a special issue on Translating Climate Change: Anthropology and the Travelling Idea of Climate Change in Sociologus, co-edited together with Sara de Wit and Arno Pascht (2018).

Katja Metzmacher is studying Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. She has conducted short fieldtrips in Tanzania, Namibia, and Uganda. Her bachelors thesis was about whether economic experiments are a valid way of studying fairness interculturally. In 2019, she published on research data management in the humanities.

Rosalie Stolz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Anthropology at Heidelberg University. She obtained her PhD at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. In her ethnographic research she specialises in the topics of kinship, sociality and socio-economic change. She focuses on Southeast Asia, and Laos specifically. Her postdoctoral project investigates the transformation of houses in the uplands of northern Laos. In 2018, she published Spirits Follow the Words in Social Analysis; her article Making Aspirations Concrete? will appear in Ethnos.