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

This article is part of a special issue 'Stories of Violence, War, and Displacement: Intersections of Life, Research, and Knowledge Production', edited by Maja Korac. 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.