Time, Co-Creation and Collaborative Research: Moving from a Sympathetic Commonality towards Empathetic Distance

Prioritizing empathetic distance over sympathetic commonalities enables inclusive and collaborative research that attends to relationships in all their forms, even those based on negative emotions or opposition. Exploring how emotions and positionalities influence rapport allows anthropologists to explore “what is” rather than solely seeking “what if” or “what ought to be.” A multi-temporal understanding of research time as commitment and relation emphasizes the importance of rapport, positionality, and depth. This raises the question of how to balance researchers’ desire to control research endeavors with institutional demands to reduce time spent on research and its follow-up, and the need to conduct fieldwork in ways that align with the values of our collaborators. How much control are we willing to relinquish to empower the people with whom we do research, and what outcomes can we expect? By sharing the benefits, risks, and challenges of relinquishing control, I examine the tension between academic epistemology and lived experience, trust and security, engaged and vulnerable ethnography, and research bureaucracy.