Difficult Biographies In Turbulent Times: Researching and Narrating Lives In Crisis and Hard-to-Access Fields

How do we research lives that are difficult to access, painful to narrate, or ethically and emotionally demanding to study? What kinds of methods, strategies, and reflexive practices help us understand biographies in difficult field settings?

This session brings together researchers working in challenging research environments and with hard-to-access populations. The focus is not only on what we learn from biographies, but on how we research them: the methods we use, the dilemmas we face, and the practical and ethical strategies developed in the field.

The session aims to explore a wide variety of difficult settings and sensitive topics. Papers may discuss experiences of interviewing high-level political actors and elites, people involved in homicide and extreme violence, genocide perpetrators and survivors, displaced people and refugees, as well as other groups whose lives are difficult to access through conventional research methods.

Rather than presenting difficulty as an obstacle, the session asks what these encounters teach us about biographical research itself. How do researchers gain trust? How do power relations shape interviews? What happens when silence, trauma, fear, denial, or justification become part of the narrative? How do researchers navigate emotional challenges, ethical tensions, and questions of positionality in the field?

By bringing together diverse cases and methodological reflections, this session aims to foster dialogue across topics, showing how very different empirical settings can generate common methodological and epistemological questions.

Papers in Spanish, English, or Portuguese.