Behind-the-Scenes: Conversations on Fieldwork Seminar

Crafting Refusal: The Ethics and Politics of Representation in Research 

Speaker: Deniz Yonucu (University of Newcastle)

“Drawing on my long-term ethnographic engagement with Turkey’s racialized and dissident working-class communities, among the primary targets of police violence and surveillance, I will examine in this presentation the ethics and politics of representation in fieldwork. As my research demonstrates, fieldwork—historically shaped and informed by colonial aspirations—continues to be employed by security forces to govern, control, and pacify actually or potentially rebellious populations. In other words, counterinsurgency, as argued by its theorists, is a culture-centric form of warfare that utilizes research on marginalized and targeted communities. While we are tasked with providing "thick description" in research, ensuring the ethical representation of these communities and refraining from sharing any data that can be used against them remains a complex challenge. Reflecting on the afterlives of ethnographic research and other forms of fieldwork, particularly their historical and ongoing roles in colonial governance, surveillance, and policing, I will discuss possible ways of practicing refusal while still crafting rich and in-depth narratives.”

Deniz Yonucu earned her PhD degree in Social Anthropology from Cornell University and is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her monograph Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022) is the winner of the 2023 Anthony Leeds Prize for the best book in urban anthropology. She has published extensively on topics related to policing, criminalisation, surveillance, memory, racism, and left-wing and anti-colonial resistance. Her work has appeared in various venues, including prestigious journals such as Current Anthropology, City & Society, Race & Class, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Social and Legal Studies. She is the co-editor of the Directions Section for the Political and Legal Anthropology Review and a co-founder of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network and the Under Surveillance podcast.


The session is chaired by Claire Griffiths (French & Francophone Studies).  All welcome but please note that all participants must register for the event in advance:

All are welcome to attend this free seminar, which will be held online via Microsoft Teams at 18:00 BST (UK time). You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. Please click on the Book Now button at the top of the page to register.

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is a programme of informal academic talks and events organised by the Fieldwork Research Group in the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS).  The focus of the Conversations on Fieldwork seminar series is an exploration of the processes we engage with on the journey towards producing the published research output, covering all the stages involved in fieldwork in geographical, virtual or un-sited fields. Our online seminars provide a real-time platform open to scholars from around the globe. Each session includes a short slide presentation of up to 30 minutes. Invited speakers draw from lived experiences of navigating the spaces and situations that constitute their fieldwork universe to share findings and experiences which are then discussed with participants. All attendees are invited to engage actively and supportively in the week’s Conversation sharing either from their own experiences, or for participants planning to undertake fieldwork-based research for the first time, from their own expectations.


For further information on the Behind-the-Scenes: Conversations on Fieldwork programme please contact the series convenors, Professor Claire Griffiths and Dr Kaya Davies-Hayon