What are you looking for?

Stodulka, Thomas

Stodulka, Thomas

Personalia

Thomas Stodulka, born in Germany, in 1976. Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin. Researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin.

EURIAS Fellow (1 Sept 2016 – 1 October 2016)

The Researcher’s Affects

Project Description

The project is part of an interdisciplinary collaboration, in which nine researchers (3 anthropologists, 3 literature scholars and 3 psychologists) study the role of fieldworker’s emotions in the process of academic knowledge production (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation). Within this larger context, the proposed project scrutinizes what has elsewhere been described as ‘the shadow side of fieldwork’. It analyses how anthropologists’ encounters with those studied translate into a globally circulated ethnographic knowledge.

Within this extensive web of methodological and epistemological challenges, the project focuses on the empirical analysis of thirty ethnographers’ emotions as they emerge during their fieldwork encounters. In a further step, the project intends to formulate a relational epistemology (working title: Empirical Affect Montage) that challenges a ‘traditional empiricism’ and highlights the

role of ethnographers’ documented emotions during fieldwork when analysing ethnographic data and writing about the so-called ‘Other’. The project targets the formulation of a methodological and epistemological paradigm, that amplifies researchers’ self-awareness during field research and enhances the transparency and quality of ethnographic writing. Since this project collaborates with over thirty junior researchers, it would greatly benefit from the advice of and discussion with fellow post-doctoral and senior researchers trained in different disciplinary and transnational research landscapes.

Selected Publications

2015a Emotion work, Ethnography and Survival Strategies on the Streets of Yogyakarta. Medical Anthropology 34(1): 84-97.

2015b Spheres of Passion: fieldwork, ethnography and the researcher’s emotions. Curare – Journal for Medical Anthropology 38(1+2): 103-116.

2014 Feelings at the Margins – Dealing with Violence, Stigma and Isolation in Indonesia (ed. with B. Röttger-Rössler). Campus. Frankfurt/New York.

Personal page