Crisis, Catastrophe and Long-term Fieldwork with Children

In this brief text, I shall describe how, since the pandemic broke out, fifteen years after the two original disasters, the tension between what we can call ordinary and ex- traordinary crises has stood out as a major paradigm that informs my epistemological and affective relations with my Acehnese interlocutors. It was when the world was plunged into a shared material and symbolic disaster that the different timelines in the actual and subjective experiences of danger appeared as relevant aspects of my research beyond the specific contingency of the pandemic.