Unspeakable: reflections on relational approaches to research in post-conflict settings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I offer reflections on a research project with former combatants who fathered children as the result of conflict-related sexual violence in northern Uganda. The research sought to understand how becoming a father shaped their decision making as soldiers, and reintegration experiences following demobilisation. What roles, if any, do they play in their children’s lives post-conflict, and what futures do they envision for them? I consider the ethical and methodological challenges of the research project through the concept of the unspeakable, what Judith Herman refers to as ‘traumatic events that take place outside socially validated reality.’ How does one come to know beyond what one can imagine, or that which is socially unrecognisable, such as the love of fathers associated with the perpetration of violent atrocities? I foreground a relational approach to the research encounter, one that fostered intimate, steadfast, and mutually giving relationships between the research team and participants, and opening pathways to explore intimacy between a father and child. I then reflect on what this methodology offers in terms of thinking beyond Western-centric conceptualizations of peacebuilding.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".