Being a Parent in the Field

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. Until 2017, she worked as a research fellow at the Asia-Africa Institute, University of Hamburg, and was part of the interdisciplinary project »DoBeS documenting two endangered Afroasiatic languages and cultures. From 2012 to 2016, she was an affiliate researcher at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Her regional expertise is based on fieldwork in the Cook Islands and in southern Ethiopia, while 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 (PhD) 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. Her research focuses on human-environment relations, political, economic and social change, inequality and gender with a regional focus on Indonesian Borneo.
Katja Metzmacher studies Anthropology at the University of Cologne and has conducted fieldwork in Tanzania, Namibia, and Uganda. Her research interests include social and environmental change and transformations, human-environment relations and comparative anthropology. She works at the Data Center for the Humanities (DCH) at the University of Cologne and has published on the role of data archives and data sharing among researchers in the humanities.
Rosalie Stolz is an anthropologist at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. She has conducted research in northern Laos as a PhD scholarship holder at a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities, Cologne. Her work focuses on kinship, sociality, socio-economic change, and on the transformation of houses.