Grief as method: topographies of grief, care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

Abstract

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.

Keywords:

• Distance
• grief
• grief as method
• politics of care
• topography
• vulnerability

Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to the moderator and other panelists in a 2016 American Studies Association session entitled “Ambivalent Homecomings” who offered constructive feedback on an early version of this paper and encouraged me to develop my theory of ‘grief as method.’ I also want to express my gratitude to Kate Coddington, Claudia López, Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, Tsering Wangmo, Jamie Winders, and my mother, Remegia Mitchell, for their insights on this piece and their encouragement to write it. Thank you to my research contacts who shared their own grief with me and helped me to process mine, and to Susan Young, Allyn Lord, and Marie Demeroukas at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, who made a sanctuary for me with their archival space and their friendship. Finally, I want to acknowledge the editorial support from Pamela Moss and Margaret Walton-Roberts and the incredibly detailed, constructive—and indeed, kind—feedback from three anonymous reviewers. Reading and responding to the reviews was healing, in more ways than one. This kind of scholarly engagement is at the heart of what I imagine as ‘caring with’: a truly feminist approach to peer review that recognizes that good research emerges from lived experience, that reciprocates vulnerability with vulnerability, and that pushes us caringly to make our work as strong as possible. Thank you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Emily Mitchell-Eaton is a visiting assistant professor of Human Geography at Bennington College, in Bennington, VT. A feminist geographer by training, her research explores Pacific Islander migration, citizenship, race, and U.S. empire in two main areas: migration and citizenship policies in the U.S. territories and coalitional immigrant-led social movements in the U.S. She is also at work on a third project that studies the geographies of grief, mourning, separation, and distance experienced by people living in diaspora. She has published in a variety of venues including Political Geography, International Migration Review (IMR), H-Net: Migration, and Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures.