GELIFES Seminars - Jerika Loren Heinze

Jerika Loren Heinze (The Fieldwork Initiative)

Welfare in fieldwork

The FISST training explores historically absent conversations about fieldwork trauma and sexual harassment, while teaching strategies on safety and empowerment in the field. Students will additionally learn about common difficulties faced during fieldwork and boundary setting techniques. The importance of prioritizing their own wellness will be affirmed alongside the key takeaway that no one should ever have to endure uncomfortable, harassing, or potentially dangerous situations as a means for collecting data.

Biosketch
Jerika Loren Heinze is an anthropologist, trauma specialist, and the founder of the Fieldwork Initiative- currently teaching online at the University of Arizona. She is a graduate of University of California and is in the final stages of her PhD at Radboud University. Concurrently, she is a Resource Specialist at the NSVRC and is a partner network member for the National Academy of Science's Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education. She has lectured on fieldwork safety around the world- at Oxford, University of Amsterdam, NYU, UC Berkeley, and more. For more information, read Gauging the Toll: Auto-reflexivity, Sexual Violence, and Fieldwork | Society for Cultural Anthropology (culanth.org)

The Fieldwork Initiative
The Fieldwork Initiative is a grassroots network of over 3,500 students and researchers facing trauma, unsafe conditions, or sexual harassment and assault during research fieldwork; buttressed by the voices of thousands of students and researchers still in need of support and intervention. The Fieldwork Initiative seeks to maintain a network for victims who have struggled with gendered violence while conducting research, as well as proliferate pre-fieldwork training seminars that break open the blackbox of data collection and shed light on the realities of trauma, racism, and gendered violence in the field.

Link to seminar