{"id":5176,"date":"2020-05-26T22:27:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-26T20:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ifas.org.za\/research\/?p=5176"},"modified":"2022-12-07T15:07:04","modified_gmt":"2022-12-07T13:07:04","slug":"researchers-during-lockdown-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ifas.org.za\/research\/blog\/researchers-during-lockdown-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers during lockdown (5)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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“Caio Sim\u00f5es de Ara\u00fajo” \u00a9 Dejyoti Ghosh <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Caio Sim\u00f5es de Ara\u00fajo<\/a> is Postdoctoral Researcher at Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA)<\/a>, Wits University. He shares his reflections on the lockdown in South Africa<\/strong> from Johannesburg.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I work at the intersections of history and anthropology. Over the last few years, I have worked on the histories of late colonialism and decolonization in the Global South, especially in Mozambique. I have also worked on transnational and intellectual histories of \u201crace\u201d and (anti-racism) in the decolonization era, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Over the last two years, I have been increasingly engaging histories of gender and sexuality in Southern Africa as well, especially queer histories in Mozambique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The social sciences are, by and large, disciplines of close contact. In the twentieth century, in particular, we saw the demise of \u201carmchair\u201d scholarship, a form of remote thinking by which (historically European male) intellectuals theorized and wrote about contexts, people and societies they had not necessarily met. This was displaced by the increasing empiricism of the social sciences. By the mid-century, the \u201cfieldwork\u201d triumphally emerged as one of the most legitimate and perfected methods of producing knowledge about the social. Largely adopted in social and cultural anthropology, the \u201cfieldwork\u201d works as a metaphor of \u201cdeep contact\u201d: of a researcher immersed in a given context of study, in direct relationship to sources, people, and information. In history, archival research \u2013 the physical immersion in an archive of papers, diaries, images, etc. \u2013 plays a similar role, that of authorizing a researcher\u2019s claims. Of course, that \u201ccontact\u201d and \u201cco-presence\u201d became the rule in social sciences research was not devoid of tensions. We now have a robust critical literature highlighting how, in the colonial situation, for instance, the \u201cfieldwork\u201d often reproduced the power hierarchies of colonialism itself. Here, the proximity between researcher and researched was not innocent. Still, now that social sciences are both institutionalized and professionalized, it is difficult to think of social research without \u201ccontact,\u201d (except, of course, for projects researching precisely virtual realities and relations).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am digressing into these background questions so we can better appreciate the many challenges posed by COVID-19 and the resultant social distancing measures for social science research. In my own experience, there are three elements to consider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n