Abstract
This chapter discusses the emotional vulnerability experienced by the author during a specific fieldwork experience in an Italian women’s shelter. The fieldwork aimed to explore the shelter’s advocacy practices for migrant-origin women who have suffered domestic violence. The researcher’s emotions, engendered by her relationship with both the women shelter’s operators and the migrant-origin women, are strictly related to her former professional activity as a shelter operator. The analysis of her positionality shift and the related emotional experiences offer a complementary ethnographic understanding of the interlocutors’ life-worlds. The first perspective investigates the operators’ ethical and emotional commitment as women advocates. The second concerns the specific structural barriers that affect migrant women’s empowerment and create further sufferance and marginalization for them. Previous scholarly works on emotions have described how in affectively attuned knowledge production, the analysis of feelings such as uncertainty, disorientation, anger, frustration, and powerless creates opportunities to unveil the taken-for-granted in the positionality of both the anthropologist and her interlocutors. This analysis then contributed to a more specific research methodology and a wider comprehension of the critical aspects of any intervention that involved supportive relationships between the shelter’s operators and the migrant-origin shelter tenants.
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Notes
- 1.
Other ethical aspects concerned the ways in which the research could affect the women interviewees. Through a process of informed consent, I guaranteed anonymity and confidentiality, and thanks to my professional expertise as a shelter operator, I paid particular attention to the emotional risks to women who had lived through a traumatic experience such as domestic violence (Ellsberg and Heise, 2005, p. 38–40).
- 2.
I supported this woman during my work experience at the women shelter and afterwards she expressed her willingness to participate in the research.
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Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank Thomas Stodulka for his suggestions throughout the writing of this chapter. I also owe a great debt to Ruth Dewar for the language revision. Finally, I am grateful to the association that runs the women’s shelter where I worked for its ongoing support in my PhD research project, and the women, whom I have interviewed for offering me their trust and their experiences.
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Della Rocca, M. (2019). Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding: A Collaborative Research Project in a Women’s Shelter. In: Stodulka, T., Dinkelaker, S., Thajib, F. (eds) Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_5
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