Emotion and the Researcher
Sites, Subjectivities, and Relationships
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- Description
- Contents
- Reviews
- About
Traditional research discourses continue to present academic work as rational, detached, objective and free from emotion. This volume argues that the presentation of research as ‘objective’ conceals the subject positions of researchers, and the emotional imperatives that often drive research. The collection engages with the emotional experiences of researchers working in different traditions, contexts and sites, and demonstrates their centrality in data production, analysis, dissemination and ethical practice.
This edited volume offers contributions from a range of well-established and early career scholars who argue for an emotional rebellion in the academic world. The authors reflect on their own experiences of research, generously sharing their approach to their craft, and the uncertainties, concerns, enjoyments, and questions it entails. The contributors are based in a range of disciplines across the humanities, social sciences and STEM, and in the museum sector. This provides a unique opportunity for reflection on differences between and similarities across disciplinary boundaries, shedding new light on common problems and opportunities stimulated by emotion in research.
The collection demonstrates how emotion can be valuable and meaningful in the activities of research, reflection and dissemination: offering authenticity to the academic voice, bringing clarity to interpretive biases, producing engaging outputs which connect with diverse readerships, and potentially reshaping disciplinary foundations and relations. Emotion and the Researcher: Sites, Subjectivities and Relationships will be an invaluable companion for researchers, postgraduate students and other academics with an interest in the emotional elements of conflict, negotiation, relationality and reflexivity, within and beyond the research encounter.
Foreword; Janet Fink
- Introduction: Why Emotion Matters; Tracey Loughran and Dawn Mannay
- Part 1: Reflexivity and Research Relationships
- Chapter 1. Role Transitions in the Field and Reflexivity: From Friend to Researcher; Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott
- Chapter 2. With a Little Help From My Colleagues: Notes on Emotional Support in a Qualitative Longitudinal Research Project; Agata Lisiak and Łukasz Krzyżowski
- Chapter 3. The Positional Self and Researcher Emotion: Destabilising Sibling Equilibrium in the Context of Cystic Fibrosis; Amie Scarlett Hodges
- Chapter 4. ‘It’s Not History. It’s My Life’: Researcher Emotions and the Production of Critical Histories of the Women’s Movement; Kate Mahoney
- Chapter 5. ‘You Just Get On With It’: Negotiating the Telling and Silencing of Trauma and Its Emotional Impacts in Interviews with Marginalised Mothers; Dawn Mannay Part 2: Emotional Topographies and Research Sites
- Chapter 6. Approaching Bereavement Research with Heartfelt Positivity; Katherine Carroll
- Chapter 7. ‘The Transient Insider’: Identity and Intimacy in Home Community Research; Erin Roberts
- Chapter 8. Emotions, Disclosures and Reflexivity: Reflections on Interviewing Young People in Zambia and Women in Midlife in the UK; Sophie Bowlby and Caroline Day
- Chapter 9. Shock and Offence Online: The Role of Emotion in Participant Absent Research; Aimee Grant
- Chapter 10. Love & Sorrow: The Role of Emotion in Exhibition Development and Visitor Experience; Deborah Touth-Smith
- Part 3: Subjectivities and Subject PositionsChapter 11. The Expectation of Empathy: Unpacking Our Epistemological Bags while Researching Empathy, Literature, and Neuroscience; Lauren Fowler and Sally Bishop Shigley
- Chapter 12. ‘Poor Old Mixed-Up Wales’: Entering the Debate about Bilingualism, Multiculturalism and Racism in Welsh Literature and Culture; Lisa Sheppard
- Chapter 13. The Emotion of ‘Doing Ethics’ in Healthcare Research: A Researcher’s Reflexive Account; Geraldine Latchem-Hastings
- Chapter 14. Being Both Researcher and Subject: Attending to Emotion within Collaborative Inquiry; Mary Morris and Andrea Davies
- Chapter 15. Blind Spots and Moments of Estrangement: Subjectivity, Class and Education in British ‘Autobiographical Histories’; Tracey Loughran
- Afterword; Tracey Loughran and Dawn Mannay
"This volume troubles, provokes and challenges, bringing into sharp relief the lived realities of social research. All of the contributions here pay attention to the emotional landscape in which our research journeys are situated and through which our research is intimately experienced. Emotions are often an absent presence in our research stories, always there but often not acknowledged, and rarely understood as part of the very essence of what makes research both social and authentic. The authors in this book are, therefore, to be commended for telling it like it is, for having the conversation and for reminding us that research is indeed about thinking, doing and feeling."
Tracey Loughran is Reader in History and Deputy Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Essex, UK. She is the author of Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain and co-editor (with Gayle Davis) of The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives.
Dawn Mannay is Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences (Psychology) at Cardiff University, UK. Dawn is editor of Our Changing Land: Revisiting Gender, Class and Identity in Contemporary Wales; and author of Visual, Narrative and Creative Research Methods: Application, Reflection and Ethics.