Life History Research and the Violence of War: Experiencing Binary Thinking on Pain and Privilege, Being and Knowing

Abstract

This reflective piece explores the ‘I am the evidence’ side of the process of knowing. It offers the story of the Yugoslav wars of secession (1991–1999) and their human consequences from the point of view of someone who refuses to surrender ground to the socio-political conditions of life in which ethno-national and cultural differences have to be transgressed. The core of this article is based on the life history of Maja Korac, developed in conversation with Cindy Horst. It approaches the intersections of her life and research from a narrative research perspective. We engage in a contrapuntal discussion of how Maja’s family background, gender, social class, and ethnic/national identity affected her life choices in terms of political engagement, research trajectories, and mobility paths. In doing so, we follow Barad’s argument that we do not obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are part of the world. Hence, our discussion and analysis enables the multivocal articulation of the interweaving of personal, collective, geopolitical, and historical contexts in Maja’s research. This process made Maja feel visible after a very long time, because it opened the possibility of (re)gaining the vocabulary to express who she is, and how it has been for her as a human being within a professional role and identity, as well as within an ascribed ethnic identity during a specific historic time. This opportunity for understanding and knowing while being inside the world allowed Maja to repossess her life and identity—individual, professional, collective. It also re-opened the possibility to challenge further the notion of ‘true knowledge’ that is presumably based on ‘methodologically sound paradigms’, all of which exclude the researcher as a person, as who, as a life.