Dr Dara Conduit1, Dr Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Professor Sarah Phillips, Dr Daniel Tower, Ms Sonia Qadir, Dr Farkhondeh Akbari
1University Of Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Dara Conduit is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Melbourne, and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C. Dr Conduit is the founding co-convener of the APSA Authoritarian and Challenging Environments Research Group, and she sits on the advisory board of the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance (AWADA).
Dr. Niamatullah Ibrahimi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Initiative for Peacebuilding of the University of Melbourne. He is the author of ‘The Hazaras and the Afghan State: Rebellion, Exclusion and Struggle for Recognition’ (London: Hurst & Co. 2017) and co-author of (with William Maley) ‘Afghanistan: Politics and Economics in a Globalising State’ (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
Sarah Phillips is Professor of Global Conflict and Development at the University of Sydney, where she is an ARC Future Fellow. Her research draws from years of in-depth fieldwork in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Kenya, and Jordan, and focuses on international intervention in the global South, knowledge production about conflict-affected states, authoritarianism, and non-state governance.
Daniel is an academic and engineer. He has done extensive field work in the Middle East including in Iraq during the ISIS conflict. Daniel completed his PhD at the University of Sydney and is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, and volunteers for non-profit organisations Iraq Body Count (IBC) and the Etuti Organisation.
Sonia Qadir is a socio-legal scholar and a PhD candidate at UNSW and a Postdoc Fellow at the Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) at UNSW..
Dr. Farkhondeh Akbari is a Research Fellow at Monash University. She received her PhD in diplomatic studies from the Australian National University. She has published journal articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces, and has a forthcoming book on Women, Peace, and Security in Afghanistan (2025).
Abstract:
This roundtable will discuss the myriad issues surrounding fieldwork as a research method in political science research today. While political polarisation, disinformation, global turbulence and the authoritarian resurgence has meant that in-person research has perhaps never been so valuable, it is also more dangerous than ever before. An increasing number of members of the OCIS research community have been personally impacted by cases in which in-person research has gone wrong, having had themselves or close colleagues threatened or even imprisoned while in the field. The traumatic consequences of such cases are far-reaching, touching not only those unjustly detained, but also their research participants, their families, colleagues, students and institutions.
In this urgent context, this roundtable, sponsored by the APSA Authoritarian and Challenging Environments Research Group, brings together scholars with significant fieldwork experience—and a diversity of viewpoints—to discuss the ethical and methodological realities of contemporary in-person political science research, and to debate its future, or lack there-of.