Research methods.
Working with populations affected by armed conflict raises a number of methodological issues. How do we collect data on what communities silence or deal with through metaphor or euphemism? How do we reveal, without putting the lives of our participants at risk, the way that violence shapes their daily experiences of education or any other aspect of their lives? How do we capture the silent effects of state (in)action?
To address these questions, I adapt strategies from visual anthropology to respond to the unique conditions that war represents.
In my first project, I worked with young Colombians with refugee status to understand how they made sense of their migratory status. Faced with a specific problem, that of collecting data on the relationship that young people establish with the category of “refugee” without using that term in the data collection instruments, I proposed including a visual component in the study.