Vulnerabilities on the field: from wounds to openness (and back)

As researchers fully engaged in the fields we study (unions, ecological activism and squats), we have been affected in many ways by the research we have carried out. Indeed, all of us are conducting ethnographies with activist organizations in which we are also involved. Being involved as such increases the affection which stems from the attachments to the people observed, to the causes defended, to the means of action mobilized, to the stories told. These different attachments, which continue to grow stronger given the long time spent in the field, bring us closer to the committed experience that we share. Activist organizations can be seen as precarious and vulnerable organizations by definition. Indeed, always in struggle they face multiple obstacles: lack of resources, conflictual relationships with authorities and police, difficult legitimacy to build, burn-out, etc. Moreover, as Butler et al. state (2016), resisting inevitably produces vulnerability. And in this fragile context, the researcher can be all the more affected (Favret-Saada, 1990). From these preliminary reflections, we thus ask how do the vulnerabilities of the people observed on the field produce also vulnerable researchers? This question opens subsidiaries ones, as: what vulnerabilities are we talking about? How do vulnerabilities manifest and materialize themselves in the field (and beyond)? How do researchers deal with these vulnerabilities stemming from their engaged ethnography? We propose to take into account in this communication the multiple experiences of vulnerability that resistances engender both in the people who resist, but also by the researcher engaged in the field in order to better appreciate the ambiguous relationship between resistance and vulnerability. Vulnerability as a form of potential In order to better explore the subtleties of the experiences of vulnerability, we wish to go beyond a “negative” conception of it. Indeed, following the reflection of Gilson (2014) we conceive it as a potentiality, that is to say, an experience which also contains the possibility of openness. Etymologically speaking, vulnerability comes from the late Latin vulnerabilis, meaning “wounding”, “to wound, hurt, injure, maim”. Thus we do not deny this etymology and we are sensitive to wounds caused by vulnerability. However, we agree with Gilson when she writes that “vulnerability is the necessary condition of creative, critical, and novel becomings. (2014, p.140). Drawing on four aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy (potentiality, univocity, equivocity and diversity, and becoming). Gilson proposes to consider vulnerability as: a condition of potentialize the experiential reality of which is undetermined; second, a fundamental and shared underlying condition of openness to alteration; third, a condition that cannot be characterized as homogenous, but is manifest in a diversity of forms and kinds of experiences; fourth, the nature and value of which are both ambivalent and ambiguous rather than determinately and inevitably negative (2014, p.140). This conceptualization implies 1) that we embrace vulnerability rather than avoiding because its negative trait (Gilson, 2014) and 2) that we address the way different forms of vulnerability overlap and create complex relations to the field (Luna, 2009). Tales of the field: From wounds to openness (and back) Thus, we wish to explore the complex dimensions of vulnerability through a reflexive account of our three fieldworks. Indeed, the first two authors of the paper carried out research within the fields in which they were engaged. The third author, meanwhile, is starting a doctorate on squats in Brussels in which she is engaged. In regards to the first author, she was first involved as a militant and participant in the groups that she finally decided to “transform” as a field of research. Thus, it is an opposite trajectory (from commitment to research) that leads her to make the collectives in which she was involved in two ethnographic fields. The first collective is a militant group against an extractivist project and the second is a socio-ecological transition initiative that she co-initiated with several friends. The two fields are situated in a remote region in Quebec, Canada. For the purpose of his doctoral dissertation, the second author conducted a field study in the working-class community from where he originates: his research draws on a longitudinal ethnography conducted in France between 2011 and 2021 in the factory where several of his relatives and (childhood) friends are employed as workers and union activists. Building on the vivid emotions aroused by this intimate field, he analyzes over time the social repercussions of the plant restructurings as well as the transformation of working-class activism and resistances, especially among members of the main local union. Aside from her doctorate, the third author is an occupant of one of Brussels’ biggest temporary occupations. Being involved in the occupation’s milieu of Brussels allowed her to observe how diverse the practices and publics of Brussels’ occupations are. From illegal squats to funded fancy occupation, she’s studying three occupation sites as ethnographic fields for her PhD project. The interest of these three ethnographic fields is that they overlap different contemporary social struggles at different scales: the factory, the region and the city, in three different countries. The objective is not to do a comparative study, but rather to explore how these multiple struggles produce different experiences of vulnerabilities and how as researchers we were made vulnerable by our field, hence shedding a better light on the intricate relationships between resistance and vulnerability.

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