While numerous publications have examined the challenges faced by Western academics conducting research in repressive or illiberal countries, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding the unique obstacles encountered by native academics also doing research in these countries. Although native researchers experience many of the challenges highlighted in existing research, such as surveillance, personal safety concerns, data security issues and ethical dilemmas involving vulnerable populations, they also face distinct additional risks and obstacles that have been consistently overlooked in the existing literature. This presentation aims to bridge this gap by presenting narratives from 18 scholars who conducted fieldwork in their native non-democratic or illiberal countries. These scholars encountered challenges directly related to their native status, including governmental pressure on their friends and family, legal threats from local authorities, limited consular assistance for dual nationals, the influence of personal characteristics on social interactions, and exploitation by Western colleagues. The presentation not only addresses this critical gap in the literature but also provides practical guidance for academics planning to conduct fieldwork in their native non-democratic states.

My research explores skilled performance and experimentation as a networked practice. In the context of sustainable livelihoods and local resource management, I examine the skilled and task-based performance of professionals involved in participatory interventions, and how this reinforces shared visions and objectives around of social inclusion, empowerment, or sustainability. As a case study, I focus on ‘Participatory Rangeland Management’ (PRM) in Kenya, designed as a multi-stakeholder process of strengthening local institutional capacity, in order to support sustainable management of dryland resources between pastoral communities. My fieldwork explores networks that assemble and perform PRM as a 'participatory innovation'. This is a multi-sited ethnography, drawing on approaches of ‘institutional ethnography’ and ‘ethnography of expertise’. This presentation will focus on methodology, experiences from the field, barriers that (in particular) graduate students face when investigating sites of power, and responsible strategies for building rapport, establishing legitimacy, and gaining access to the withdrawn life of practice.

This article documents the experiences and journeys of three women graduate students in international development in the context of the Canadian neoliberal university. Our research describes how our individual journeys led us to form a feminist collaborative space that grew from an individualistic approach to the graduate experience to a collaborative, feminist, sisterhood environment built on mutual support, compassion, intellectual debate and growth. Drawing on an a collaborative autoethnographical methodological approach, we map our professional and personal journeys and journey together and argue that our feminist collaborative space became a space of resistance in a highly competitive, individualistic environment within the neoliberal university. We describe how other graduate students can learn from our experience as they struggle through the normalized lonely journey of graduate studies.

Reflecting on fieldwork on women's activism in Bangladesh, this paper draws on Aziz Choudry’s (2010; 2015; 2024) writings on knowledge production, research and activism, alongside Dorothy Smith’s (1974; 1987; 1990) and George W. Smith's (1990) work on institutional ethnography and political activist ethnography, respectively, to examine how positioning activists as creative subjects – and indeed, agents of change – reverses the dichotomy in academic research between activists who create change and the scholars who theorize it. I argue that to effectively orient research toward struggles for social change, the methodology adopted by researchers must itself must be capable of generating concepts from 'active subjects' (cf. Freire, 1970; Bannerji, 1995) whose creative contributions to theory are little recognized. Honing in on this interplay between activist research and social action helps to clarify the purpose - and ultimately, the utility - of the research aimed at social transformation itself.