PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

While the methodological difficulties of social scientific research in conflict zones has previously been explored (Goodhand 2000; Sriram et al. 2009), especially in social psychology, there has been little attention paid to the changing identity of the researcher (Moss et al. 2019). In this chapter, we focus on the removal of the border between research and personal experience throughout a research project on the social representation of peace conducted in Turkey during the escalation of a conflict. We discuss the ways the researcher’s identity may merge with the political context of their research, as well as the effect of this merge on different stages and components of research. By separating the research project into three phases (before, during and after the conflict), we show that both open and oppressive political contexts determine the authors’ motivation and identity resulting in certain methodological obstacles as well as opportunities. Finally, we discuss how academic collective action can be crucial to feeling empowered in a fluxional context (Acar and Coşkan 2020; Erdem and Akın 2019) and how reflexivity and disciplinary self-awareness become beneficial to sustain critical knowledge production (Reicher 1997; Wilkinson 1988).