| Title | Research through Passing in ****** and **** |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Emily T. Yeh(author) |
| A____ Marie Ranjbar (author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.53288/0466.1.15 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/redacted-writing-in-the-negative-space-of-the-state/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Emily T. Yeh, A____ Marie Ranjbar |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2024-10-27 |
| Long abstract | Through parallel ethnographic vignettes in Tibet and Iran, which converge at a number of points around questions of national origin, research access, surveillance, and the cutting off of ties to family members and close friends, this chapter considers “passing” in the field as a form of self-redaction. We conceptualize this type of self-redaction as a double-edged sword, simultaneously a protective response to state surveillance, which enables movement through selective erasure, and a form of complicity that reinforces authoritarian state power. Through these vignettes, we also reflect on the contradictions between the ways in which self-redaction may be an ethical choice in contexts where interlocutors do not want to be responsible for the knowledge of fieldworkers’ citizenship status, and the liberal presumptions of Institutional Research Boards about ethics. |
| Page range | pp. 209–216 |
| Print length | 8 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| Keywords |
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Emily T. Yeh is a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She conducts research on development and nature-society relations, mostly in Tibetan parts of the PRC, including the political ecology of pastoralism, conflicts over access to natural resources, vulnerability to and knowledge of climate change, the cultural and ontological politics of nature conservation, and the conjunctural production of environmental subjectivities. Her book Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development explored the intersection of the political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization. She is also editor or co-editor of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, Rural Politics in Contemporary China, and The Geoeconomics and Geopolitics of Chinese Development and Investment in Asia.
A__ Marie Ranjbar is a feminist political geographer with the Department of Women & Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Since 2012, she has conducted research in Iran that examines the political conditions that make it challenging for Iranian citizens to speak openly about human rights and how activists strategically frame rights narratives as a means of political mobilization, both locally and transnationally. Dr. Ranjbar’s work is published in Antipode; Annals of American Association of Geographers; ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies; Environment and Planning E; Gender, Place & Culture; Hypatia; and Political Geography, and her research has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ZEIT-Stiftung Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.