Frictions: Europe, America and global Transformations - Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Creator: Durdiyeva, Selbi
Title: Theorizing binaries through auto-ethnography, method, and commoning
Subtitle: Reflections from the field
DOI: 10.15457/frictions/0016
Description:
Selbi Durdiyeva offers auto-ethnographic reflection on her fieldwork conducted at the Butovo firing range memorial site, where over 20,000 people fell victim to the Stalinist regime in Soviet Russia. Since 1995, the site has been managed by the Orthodox Church. In published research, she has observed how the involvement of the Church seemed to impact on the openness of the memory culture developed there. With time, though, as reflected critically here, she has come to reconsider her authority as a researcher and the assumptions she made regarding the identity of the mainly female, Christian mourners at the site. This text traces the author’s shift from imposing rigid interpretations on her encounters in the field towards an open approach that sees scholarship as a result of common efforts of researcher and subjects. The key moment of realization was a shared meal with mourners at the local parish. Her self-reflexive approach draws on the idea of “unbuilding binaries”, the theme of the 2020 Graduate Workshop at GSOSES UR and the ScienceCampus, where she presented these ideas.
Date of publication: 2022-02-03
Subjects: Russia, auto-ethnography, commemoration, fieldwork, gender, graduate conference, memory, methodology, religion, unbuilding binaries
Section: Research Notes
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