Ethnographies of slow violence: Epistemological alliances in fieldwork and narrating ruins

Abstract

This article explores the nexus of slow violence as a concept, research focus, and problem on the one hand, and the practices and politics of ethnographic fieldwork and writing on the other. I argue that paying more explicit attention to methodological challenges in conducting ethnographies of slow violence is both necessary and worthwhile. Ethnographies can animate the broader debates on slow violence, infuse them with new concepts and political urgencies, and relate them to new sites and problems. Conversely, the problem of slow violence can advance ethnographic debates and practices, even beyond ethnographies of slow violence in a narrower sense. I highlight two aspects. First, I explore epistemological alliances between researchers and research participants which confront forms of violence that at first remain partly elusive to both sides. Second, I argue for multi-temporal ethnographies which work through drawn-out and complex timescapes of violence and loss by tracing cross-temporal connections. Notions of fieldwork are still mainly defined in spatial terms, and so the problem of slow violence is an important reminder to pay more attention to temporal dimensions. I build this argument on ethnographic research conducted in rural Russia, and thus also show how the concept of slow violence helps to make sense of and to make visible those forms of loss and dispossession that often remain elusive in academic and public representations of the Russian countryside.

Urban trauma in the ruins of industrial culture: Miners’ Welfares of the Nottinghamshire coalfield, UK

“…In this paper, I argue for the importance of bringing recent literature on urban trauma into closer dialogue with ruins research through a focus on bodily-material dynamics (Coddington & Micieli-Voutsinas, 2017;Vorbrugg, 2019). Based on a larger research project undertaken between June 2016 and April 2018, I show the importance of two interrelated methodological approaches for illuminating these bodily-material dynamics.…”

“…Materialities and space are often the target, victims, and representations of the violence, with their ruination enacting and making visible urban traumas (Pain, 2019;Vorbrugg, 2019). Both ruins and urban trauma are increasingly seen as contingent on spatiotemporal processes of ruination and as a lens onto the politics of those spatiotemporal processes (Mah, 2012) Arguing that ruins are largely a Western discursive construct of fetishized and reified rubble, Gordillo (2014) is interested in how they provide a lens 'through which to examine space negatively: by way of the places that were negated to create the geographies of the present' (p. 10; Stoler, 2008).…”

“…However, they are still subject to processes of material, cultural, symbolic and emotional ruination. Affective memories imbue the decaying materialities of all Miners' Welfares, whether open, derelict or demolished (Dawney, 2020;Vorbrugg, 2019).…”

“…I asked participants a series of questions about their experiences of Miners' Welfares over the life course while eliciting opinions, feelings and emotions regards decay, closures and ruination. In largely free-flowing dialogues, participants nostalgically remembered Miners' Welfare, and displayed relations between present ruination, affect and memory (Vorbrugg, 2019). People legitimated or evidenced their expressed feelings with reference to past experiences and sociality and in dialogue with present day conditions of Miners' Welfares, social relations and decline.…”

Transitioning to Gender Equality

“…1 Beyond the actual control, racialized policing "takes time", as George Lipsitz writes (Lipsitz 2016, p. 126). Rob Nixon's thoughts on slow violence (Nixon 2011;Vorbrugg 2019) are useful here as he describes a form of violence that does not speak to spectacular events but rather to mundane articulations. I bring this conception into conversation with an intersectional framework ): as a tool, that does not only allow one (a) to engage with the policing of those multi-marginalized subjects, which often fall through the cracks in discussions on police brutality and violence, and (b) to analyze how racism operates alongside other relevant vectors of criminalization and punishment within racial gendered capitalism such as class, gender, sexuality, migrant status, dis/ability, etc., but further, it allows one (c) to investigate how racist policing as an institutionalized practice does not only operate within and through the institution of the police (Fassin 2013;Thompson 2018), but rather in juncture with other institutions such as juridical institutions, medical institutions, welfare institutions and the media.…”