Secrecy and Knowledge: Methodological and Epistemological Challenges

This is the fourth session of the webinar series Secrecy and Knowledge: Social and Cultural Responses to Secrecy, which took place on 9/03/2022.
webinar 4: Methodological and Epistemological Challenges

webinar 4 details:
Chair Dr Grit Wesser (Newcastle University, UK)

Prof Mirco Göpfert (Goethe University, Frankfurt a. M., Germany)
Secrecy and the ethnographer’s will to know
Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and what was going on behind them during fieldwork, I’ll offer reflections about the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology.

Suzanne Kennedy (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada)
Engaging notions of temporality to explore meaning making when people encounter unknowable and unspeakable family knowledge.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima (University of Manchester, UK)
Humanitarian secrets: negotiating disclosure and the ethics of ethnographic writing
This paper explores the practicalities and ethics of disclosing humanitarian secrets through research on the International Committee of the Red Cross.