Against Implications: Ethnographic Witnessing as Research Stance in the Lebanese Conflict Zone

Abstract

Legacies of violence—and the exigencies of care that emerge in contexts of conflict—become visible in schools and yet often remain unacknowledged. These conflicts are often elided in educational policy making and research focused on developing best practices. I step back from research oriented toward problem solving to argue for a method (ethnography), a stance (witnessing), and a refusal (to draw implications for practice). Documenting the work of teaching in one Lebanese public school, I analyze the complexities of relationships and practices that emerge as teachers live with children in a space of enduring precarity. I show how, given the enormity of the conflicts, and the impossibility of addressing them through education, teachers’ silence about the conditions of children’s lives is almost the only thing that makes sense; but in the “almost” rests space for crafting an education that weaves affiliative forms of sociality across the rifts of a conflict-ridden society.