This presentation reflects on my experience conducting long-term feminist research with women affected by the Três Marias dam in Morada Nova de Minas, Brazil. Drawing on my doctoral research on “gender social debt” and on earlier studies of public policy, development, displacement, and access to justice, I examine the practical and ethical challenges of researching communities whose experiences have been repeatedly marginalised by state institutions and dominant development narratives. The research was conducted in an environment marked by institutional silences, fragmented documentation, unequal access to compensation, and the persistent invisibility of women’s productive, reproductive, and community labour. These conditions required methodological adaptations capable of recognising oral testimony, memory, everyday practices, and subjective cartographies as legitimate forms of knowledge. Combining interviews, documentary analysis, field observation, and audiovisual production, I sought to move beyond extractive research practices and establish relationships based on sustained listening, reciprocity, and accountability. The presentation discusses the researcher’s positionality when working across academic, legal, governmental, and community spaces. It also addresses the emotional demands of listening to narratives of displacement, loss, and institutional abandonment, particularly when participants expect research to contribute to recognition and material change. Rather than treating care as external to scientific rigour, I argue that practices of care—including respecting participants’ time, acknowledging emotional boundaries, returning research outputs to the community, and making women’s narratives publicly accessible—constitute methodological and political resources. The Brazilian case demonstrates how feminist research can challenge official accounts of development while building more ethical forms of knowledge production and solidarity with historically affected communities.
