Entangled knowledge: Journalism,ethnography,and the risks of representation

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with journalists in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Ukraine, this article tracks the complex of aims and motivations that attend to the documentation of human suffering. Compassion and profit, reflexivity and objectivity, personal growth and professional pressure: the investments of wartime representation are often in tension. This article constellates the author’s personal encounters with war and conflict, the journalist community’s reception of the published image of a dead friend, and the discomfort of many journalists – as well as those they cover – with the ethical compromises of journalism. This constellation allows for critical assessment of the dominant tropes of conflict journalism and the limits of representation – both journalistic and ethnographic – amid catastrophe. Leveraging postcolonial and feminist scholarship, as well as ethnographic reflexivity, the article considers how journalists, ethnographers, and media consumers might account for the entanglements inherent to witnessing and narrating disaster.