Researching Protest Movements: Methodological and Ethical Challenges

Researching Protest Movements: Methodological and Ethical Challenges

Drawing on a study of the collaboration between subtitlers and filmmakers during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, this presentation will focus on the challenges posed by a fast-paced, fluid, non-hierarchical context of collaboration between relatively distinct groups (filmmakers and subtitlers) who do not interact regularly despite producing prolific output collaboratively. The discussion will also explore the difficulty of offering traditional research ‘findings’ in contexts where intense human relations and experiences are unfolding and taking unpredictable directions during the research period, rendering any notion of optimal researcher distance from the object of study both unworkable and undesirable and placing issues of trust and ethics at the centre of the research agenda. These difficulties are further exasperated by the ethos of contemporary movements of collective action, where there is often no interest in maintaining a record of individual contributions to any output or even a basic hierarchical structure that prevents any member from editing a (subtitled) video after it has been published.

Mona Baker is Affiliate Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Health Education (SHE), University of Oslo, where she is responsible for developing the Oslo Medical Corpus, co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network, and Director of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University. She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account; co-author (with Eivind Engebretsen) of Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics; editor of Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (winner of the 2016 Intranews Linguist of the Year Award); and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media. Her articles have appeared in a wide range of international journals, including Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, Social Movement Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Social Semiotics and The Translator. She posts on translation, citizen media and Palestine on her personal website and tweets at @MonaBaker11.

This event is free and open to all - This event will be held in English - Coffee, tea, pastries