Travelling with Durbach: notes from a trip to South Africa researching reparations for victims of sexual violence

ABSTRACT

In January 2015, I had the privilege of accompanying Professor Andrea Durbach to conduct fieldwork in South Africa for a major Australian Research Council-funded project ‘Combating sexual violence against women post-conflict through “transformative” reparations: problems and prospects’. In this short autoethnographic paper, I offer a series of reflections on this formative fieldwork experience—the first time I had participated in the design of qualitative interviews for the purposes of academic research—and witnessed the careful way Durbach approached this trip. Throughout the piece, I interweave personal notes, correspondence and other literature, which anchor me to this place and experience. In doing so, I seek to explore the tensions of designing fieldwork when, as researchers, we cannot escape ourselves: our positionality necessarily informs both the substance and mode of any academic inquiry. During our time together in South Africa, I observed how Durbach negotiated issues of identity, access and positionality; the impact these complexities had on oft-times blurred relationships between interviewer and interlocutor; and the ways in which interrogating these questions can assist researchers to (re)produce knowledge on questions of violence in sensitive, collaborative and innovative ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual violence
• qualitative research methodologies
• positionality
• autoethnography
• mentorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported bythe author(s).

Notes

1. An excerpt of South African poet Koleka Putuma’s ‘Resurrection’, in her book, ‘Collective Amnesia’ (Putuma 2017, 108).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucy Geddes

Lucy Geddes is an Australian human rights lawyer and teaching fellow at UNSW. Previously, she was the Head of Legal Action Worldwide’s Sri Lanka office. Lucy has worked at Victoria Legal Aid, in private practice in NSW, and completed clerkships with Chief Justice Mogoeng of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and Justice Tarfusser of the International Criminal Court. Lucy was awarded best overall performance in her MSc in Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics, which she completed as a Lionel Murphy Scholar. She was also a research assistant on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Combating Sexual Violence against Women Post-conflict through “Transformative” Reparations: Problems and Prospects’.