Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

The following piece is a monologue unfolding in a fictional setting as a plea to denounce research methodologies that tend to perpetuate violence. In this piece, Attorney situates the problem with academia and the academic community (thus having a strong bond with the reader through gossiping - echoing gossiping as a research methodology). At the end of the plea, the Attorney, who is revealed to be the Anthropologist, the other characters in the courtroom, the reader, hence the research community, lead this denunciation and propose ways to rethink research methodologies to consider ethics better—acknowledging one's vulnerability and fear in the field. This plea denounces systematic training and mentorship of ethnography, calls for collaborative research, acknowledges marginalized forms of knowledge, and refuses a voyeurist researcher approach to the informants. The plea calls for flexible research methods over the fixation of gathering data and thinking ethics beyond pseudonyms. This piece attempts to make sense of the absurdity of research methodology, specifically analyzing the field of academia in which violence is generated and normalized under the name of fieldwork as a slice of life. N.B. Metaphors in the plea are based on true stories

Keywords: plea, ethnography, collaborative work, colonial methodologies, systematic violence, flexible Methodologies