From ‘disaster tourist’ to ‘transfer gate’: (Self)perception of the role of research in rural Rwanda
(2012) Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa — ISBN: [978-113726374-2], p. 42-56, published
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- This chapter explores how research design may have a profound impact upon the ways in which the identity of the researcher and the utility of the research are interpreted by the local population. It compares two different field experiences in rural Rwanda. In this chapter, I focus particularly upon the hints and clues I detected on local actors’ interpretations of my research interest in their lives. After giving an outline of the research context, I first describe how local actors expressed their assessment of the utility of my research project, and how this related to different kinds of expectations of the benefits they hoped to gain from my research. In the second part, I then consider how I tried (and am still trying) to meet local actors’ expectations to function as a ‘transfer gate’ that gives leverage to their voices from ‘the bottom’ in order for them to reach higher levels of society (for example, government officials, international donors, foreign and domestic NGO representatives). Lastly, I present the ongoing challenges and dilemmas I face in the writing up and vulgarisation phase of my research. The vulgarisation of my research refers to the strategies I adopted to valorise and disperse the results of my ‘academic’ research to a non-academic policy-oriented public.
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Ansoms, A. (2012). From ‘disaster tourist’ to ‘transfer gate’: (Self)perception of the role of research in rural Rwanda. In Thomson, S., Ansoms, A. and Murison, J. (ed.), Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa (p. p. 42-56). Palgrave. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/59387