Ayelet Harel

Sensitive and contextually appropriate methodologies are crucial when exploring complex and multifaceted phenomena such as conflicts, violence, trauma, gender, security, and insecurity. In our studies we utilize the Listening Guide method to analyze the narratives of women from diverse positionalities in conflict situations in Israel. These women include those who experienced sexual abuse; social workers coping with trauma, injury, and death; activists striving for peace in a militarized society; and women in combat in the Israel Defense Forces. The Listening Guide allows us to produce nuanced analyses and understanding of women’s experiences within broader sociopolitical structures, revealing how personal narratives are shaped by and contribute to collective understandings of gender, power, and conflict. Our use of the Listening Guide facilitated unpacking voice and deconstructing binary distinctions. This chapter focuses on a case study to illustrate how our utilization of the Listening Guide provided a deeper understanding of combatants’ war experiences, as perceived by the combatants themselves. The Listening Guide method, as applied in our work, is part of a multidisciplinary research endeavor, unveiling the intricate interplay between the spoken and the unspoken. This method transcends conventional psychological and feminist frameworks, illuminating the delicate textures of speech - its tones, pauses, and silences - while capturing the psychological depths embedded in personal narratives. Through this lens, we conduct a rich sociopolitical and psychological analysis, grounded in a multidisciplinary perspective. We trace the fluid boundaries where the personal is both political and psychological. Simultaneously, we uncover the nuanced strategies through which speakers artfully distance the political from the personal, often enshrouding and silencing fragments of their emotional and psychological selves. * The current research was held before the horrifying 2023-2025 Israel-Gaza war.