Travelling with Durbach: notes from a trip to South Africa researching reparations for victims of sexual violence

Abstract

ABSTRACT In January 2015, I had the privilege of accompanying Professor Andrea Durbach to conduct fieldwork in South Africa for a major Australian Research Council-funded project ‘Combating sexual violence against women post-conflict through “transformative” reparations: problems and prospects’. In this short autoethnographic paper, I offer a series of reflections on this formative fieldwork experience—the first time I had participated in the design of qualitative interviews for the purposes of academic research—and witnessed the careful way Durbach approached this trip. Throughout the piece, I interweave personal notes, correspondence and other literature, which anchor me to this place and experience. In doing so, I seek to explore the tensions of designing fieldwork when, as researchers, we cannot escape ourselves: our positionality necessarily informs both the substance and mode of any academic inquiry. During our time together in South Africa, I observed how Durbach negotiated issues of identity, access and positionality; the impact these complexities had on oft-times blurred relationships between interviewer and interlocutor; and the ways in which interrogating these questions can assist researchers to (re)produce knowledge on questions of violence in sensitive, collaborative and innovative ways.