Breaking the binaries in research—The Listening Guide.

What is it about?

Our study implements the Listening Guide method in analyzing the experiences of women in combat. We emphasize the merits of the Listening Guide in the context of research about complex, challenging and traumatic contexts—in our case the environment of war and armed conflicts. By implementing the Listening Guide, our findings unpack voice and undermine the binary distinctions of active vs. passive women, agency vs. fragility, women engaged in violence vs. women as victims of violence, and silence vs. voice, all through the prism of the combatants’ multilayered war experiences, as perceived by the combatants themselves. The shift between the combatants’ various voices indicated that the “psychological” is not detached from the “political.” By directing scholars to attune themselves to the ways in which interviewees present themselves before they begin to interpret the interviewees’ narratives and by guiding them in a search for parallel and silenced voices, the Listening Guide methodology helps researchers peel away the outer layers of perceptions and experiences of war and conflict, thereby allowing new angles and perspectives to emerge.

Featured Image

Photo by Dominik Sostmann on Unsplash

Photo by Dominik Sostmann on Unsplash