On US based academics excited about "getting back to the field" - I miss my family, colleagues, and friends in #PNG so much right now it hurts, because this week is basically when I have left for PNG every year, for the past 20+ years, for the summer months. 1/
I don't think about PNG as "the field" anymore at all. It is where half my heart lives. And not going in 2020 and now not going in 2021 has hollowed out my sense of self and work and life and connection. I miss @JohnAINI2 so much I physically hurt. 2/
I missed MS Kela's and Maimai C's funerals and I won't see my extraordinary nieces and nephews for another year. I won't visit places John and I work and I won't see the amazing work that all the people there have been doing around Indigenous land/sea sovereignty in 2021. 3/
I have the grant money to go. I have the time to go. All of it. And there is no way in heaven and earth I would go because there is a global pandemic that is raging across the planet and me and my heart and my "scholarship" and work do not matter more than peoples lives. 4/
I would like all these academics who are posting their "I'm vaccinated" pics with tags about their "field work" to stop and think before they go. I'm finding that so distressing I literally do not know what to do with it. Your work does not matter more than people's lives. 5/
And do not @ me with "I have to keep up my trajectory for tenure" because, again, we are talking about people's lives. Work on material you already have. Read so your work is better in the future. Collaborate with people THERE. Collaborate with other scholars here. 6/
Every single day I wake up and text John Aini. And we talk family, work, gossip, all of it and, wildly, inappropriately, honestly, every day post text I weep because I am not me without him. And still, I will not go until everyone is safe. So academics please stop and think.
Addition to this thread: @Liklikmasalai reminds me that some places (in PNG and elsewhere) depend on research dollars as a part of their yearly incomes. He is right about this for sure. If this is the case where you work, talk to your program officer at your granting agency. 1/
Are there ways to work with people in your "field site" using your grant money without you there? Can you develop collaborations that allow for this? Also, if junior push your committee and / or senior colleagues to see the value in collaboration and the ethics of this. 2/
Anthropology needs to be so much better about this anyway, the whole field is all "decolonize this and decolonize that" but it still runs on the fiction of the "individual ethnographer" and the idea that individuals produce knowledge. We have needed to revise the forever. 3/
I've written about how much money people in places like PNG make on research - so this is a real issue - but also how much money and social labor is expended ON researchers when they visit PNG. See next two tweets for links. First is open access second DM me for a copy. 4/
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
