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Emotion and the Researcher: Sites, Subjectivities, and Relationships

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Studies in Qualitative Methodology

Series Editor: Sam Hillyard

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Studies in Qualitative Methodology Volume 16

Emotion and the Researcher: Sites, Subjectivities, and Relationships

EDITED BY

Tracey Loughran

University of Essex

Dawn Mannay

Cardiff University

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

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ISBN: 978-1-78714-612-9 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-611-2 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-262-8 (Epub)

ISN: 1042-3192 (Series)

Contents

List of Contributors

Sophie Bowlby is a feminist social geographer whose research focuses on care, especially in relation to access, friendship and bereavement. Whilst retired, she has continued to research at the University of Reading, UK, and as Visiting Professor at Loughborough University, UK. She is co-author of Interdependency and Care Over the Lifecourse (Routledge, 2010).

Katherine Carroll is Research Fellow at the School of Sociology, Australian National University, Australia. She conducts sociological research on the banking and donation of female-specific reproductive tissues in relationship to motherhood. She has recently received an Australian Research Council grant to extend her research with both bereaved mothers and their health professionals on the topic of lactation and milk donation after infant loss.

Andrea Davies works as a Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist in Adult Mental Health Services for Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, UK. She currently works with people admitted to a mental health ward and a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit. Andrea has a specialist interest in working with people experiencing psychosis and those deemed ‘hard to engage’.

Caroline Day is a children and youth geographer whose research focuses on transitions to adulthood, aspirations and care in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Zambia. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and has also worked as a researcher for non-governmental organisations Barnardo’s and Centrepoint.

Janet Fink is Professor of Childhood and Personal Relationships in the School of Education and Professional Development, University of Huddersfield, UK. Her research spans the disciplinary boundaries of sociology and social history and draws on mixed methods to explore the everyday relationships and experiences of children, young people and couples.

Lauren Fowler is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Greenville, SC, USA. She researches the effects of fatigue on empathy and performance in medical, military and law-enforcement personnel. She has served as a consultant for the US Air Force and has published in the journals Behavioral Neuroscience and Primate.

Aimee Grant is a Wellcome Trust ISSF Fellow at the Centre for Trials Research, Cardiff University, UK. Her interests are qualitative methods, stigma, pregnancy and motherhood. Her sole-authored methodology text Doing EXCELLENT Social Research with Documents: Practical Examples and Guidance for Qualitative Researchers will be published by Routledge in 2018.

Amie Scarlett Hodges is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Healthcare Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Her research interest focuses around the sociology of health and illness, including children, young people, families, sibling performance, social interaction, places, spaces and respiratory health. She uses participatory, creative and visual methods within her work.

Łukasz Krzyżowski is Assistant Professor at AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland. His research interests are transnational migration, old age and elderly care provisions, intergenerational solidarity, social networks and mixed-methods research.

Geraldine Latchem-Hastings is Senior Lecturer in the School of Healthcare Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Her primary research is focused on healthcare law, ethics and professional socialisation related to physiotherapy as a healthcare profession. Her secondary research focuses on creating digital learning spaces to facilitate allied health professionals, midwives and nurses learning to meet the challenges of modern healthcare practice.

Agata Lisiak teaches migration and urban studies at Bard College Berlin, Germany. She is interested in everyday urban cultures, visual cultures, spatialities and visualities of migration, and developing methodologies for researching said issues.

Tracey Loughran is Reader in History, University of Essex, UK. She is the author of Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Gayle Davis) of The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives (Palgrave, 2017).

Kate Mahoney is a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant in the Department of History, University of Essex, UK. Her research examines feminist health activism in twentieth-century Britain. Her publications include The Politics of Authenticity: Countercultures and Radical Movements across the Iron Curtain, 1968–1989 (Berghahn Books, 2018), co-edited with Joachim Häberlen and Mark Keck-Szajbel.

Dawn Mannay is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University, UK. Dawn recently edited a collection, Our Changing Land: Revisiting Gender, Class and Identity in Contemporary Wales (University of Wales Press, 2016) and wrote the sole-authored text, Visual, Narrative and Creative Research Methods: Application, Reflection and Ethics (Routledge, 2016).

Mary Morris works as a Senior Lecturer and Consultant Systemic Psychotherapist at the Family Institute in the University of South Wales, UK. She trains systemic psychotherapists and counsellors to qualifying level and beyond, as well as practicing as a psychotherapist herself. She has a particular interest in collaborative, social constructionist approaches to both education and psychotherapy, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Erin Roberts works within an interdisciplinary space in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. With a background in Human Geography, specialising in cultural, rural and energy geographies, she explores how relationships – with people, places and things –shape household energy demand across Wales.

Lisa Sheppard is a Lecturer in Welsh in Cardiff University, UK. Her research examines the portrayal of Wales’s racial, ethnic and linguistic minority communities in contemporary Welsh- and English-language literature. Her monograph on the fictional portrayal of Welsh multiculturalism since 1990 will be published by University of Wales Press in 2018.

Sally Bishop Shigley is Professor of English at Weber State University, USA. She is currently pursuing research on the role of reading literature and empathy. She has published on topics from short fiction to poetry and health humanities.

Deborah Tout-Smith is Deputy Head and Senior Curator, Home & Community, in the Humanities Department of Museums Victoria, Australia. She has curated major exhibitions including World War I: Love & Sorrow (2014) and co-curated The Melbourne Story (2008). Deborah is Vice-President of ICOM Australia.

Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott is an Assistant Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. She has published in journals such as The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, The American Behavioral Scientist and Symbolic Interaction. She is currently an Associate Editor for The Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics.

Acknowledgements

In editing this collection, Emotion and the Researcher: Sites, Subjectivities and Relationships, there are many people who should be thanked and acknowledged. As much of our initial engagement with questions of emotion, relationality and the ways in which methods travel across disciplinary boundaries began in our involvement with the Families, Identities and Gender Research Network, we will begin with this acknowledgement.

We both co-convened the interdisciplinary Families, Identities and Gender Research Network (FIG) at Cardiff University, with our colleagues Dr Siwan Rosser, Dr Melanie Bigold, Dr Katherine Shelton and Dr Stephanie Ward. We held a number of events that invited cross-disciplinary perspectives on the immensely complex topics of families, identities and gender, which foregrounded many of the issues that led to the creation of this volume. Papers presented at the series of ‘Emotion and the Researcher’ workshops, co-convened with the Women’s History Network (West of England and South Wales), generated many of the following chapters. In the later workshop series, ‘Constructing and Deconstructing Selfhood’, we were joined by Dr Agata Lisiak. We are grateful for funding for this later event from the Economic and Social Research Council’s Wales Doctoral Training Centre. We would also like to thank all of the presenters and delegates at these workshops. Even those who did not write chapters were in many ways the guiding muse for this collection.

It is also important to thank all of the individual authors for engaging with the project and offering a set of diverse and thoughtful accounts and reflections, drawing on their extensive knowledge and expertise. The authors have recounted their own experiences of research, generously sharing their approach to their craft and the uncertainties, concerns, enjoyments and questions it entails. Many of the contributors are friends and colleagues that we met through the workshops in Cardiff and at other international conferences. However, we feel that we have come to know the authors more closely through the editing process. We have a deep respect for the research and scholarship of all the authors in this collection, and we were privileged that they accepted the invitation to be part of Emotion and the Researcher. Overall, the authors’ enthusiasm for the collection and their carefully crafted responses have engendered an inspiring set of chapters, and, in reading them, we have gained a wealth of knowledge, developed more nuanced understandings of emotion and gained a deeper appreciation of its place within and beyond interdisciplinary applications.

Dr Mike Ward was particularly helpful in selecting a publisher and providing advice drawn from his own experience publishing in Emerald’s Studies in Qualitative Methodology series. We are grateful to Dr Sam Hillyard and Dr Philippa Grand for their invaluable help and guidance in developing the initial proposal for this book, and for their ongoing support and encouragement. The wider editorial team at Emerald should be acknowledged for their involvement, particularly Rachel Ward, who worked with us patiently to attend to all the essential administrative tasks that were necessary to move forward. We are also indebted to a wide range of authors and inspiring speakers and although we cannot name them all individually, much of their work is cited in the book.

Lastly, we would like to thank all our great friends and family. We are unable to acknowledge everyone, but those who are constantly involved in the emotional tapestry of our lives we would like to mention, in alphabetical order, with much love; David, Jamie, Jordon, Matthew, Sherelle, Tahlia, Taya, Tilleah, Tim, Toyah, Travis and Travis Jay.

List of Figures

List of Abbreviations

Foreword

By Janet Fink

In an article about the role of emotions in feminist research, Kristin Blakely (2007, p. 60) asks the question:

Suppose we turn the focus inward, reflecting not on the research but actually how we respond to our research, and suppose that we feel the research instead of just thinking it?

This provocation to suppose is part of a wider argument that emotionally engaged research ‘opens up space for new questions, ideas and interpretations’ (Blakely, 2007, p. 65), and it is just such a determination to suppose that is at the core of this important new interdisciplinary collection and its careful interrogation of the place of emotions in empirical research and the production of knowledge.

Given that, if we are sufficiently attentive to their presence, the complex dynamics of emotions can be traced, inter alia, through the development of research funding bids, responses to peer reviews, applications for ethical approval, fieldwork relationships, interpretations of data and the dissemination of findings – in short, ‘the everyday’ of our research practices – it is surprising that so few collections such as this exist. It is especially so since some of the most constant features of qualitative research are the emotional labour (Hochshild, 1983) demanded by its research practices (particularly when feminist in principle) and the emotionally fraught ethical dilemmas (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004) that emerge, often unpredictably, at every stage of the research process. Yet, at the same time, it is arguably not so surprising that such collections do not have a more visible presence on our bookshelves and in our libraries. As researchers we regularly have to negotiate feelings of respect, guilt, anger or anxiety in making decisions about what is ‘the unsayable and the unspeakable’; ‘who to represent and how’ and ‘what to omit and what to include’ (Ryan-Flood & Gill, 2010, p. 3). It is not always easy to be open and transparent about such decisions or the emotions that inflect them, and so secrecy, silences and omissions can be recurrent aspects of our research, research practices and research outputs (Ryan-Flood & Gill, 2010). However, as Sara Ahmed (2010, p. xvii) reminds us:

‘secrets’ aren’t simply information or details that are passed or not passed. A secret might be something we keep from ourselves, something that is too hard or too painful to come to light.

It is noteworthy, then, that the authors in this collection have brought into the light aspects of their research and of themselves as researchers that they have found difficult to bear or to question, and they have been carefully reflexive about the reasons for this. They thus offer richly detailed examples to readers of how not only to ‘trouble’ taken-for-granted research practices, in which the researcher is assumed to maintain a neutral and objective standpoint, but also to reflect on the social, political and ethical relations of research generally. Crucially, at the core of these examples are wider theoretical and methodological debates about the meanings and study of emotions (Bailey & Barclay, 2017; Brownlie, 2014; Burkitt, 2014; Lupton, 1998; Smart, 2007) and the importance of presenting thick, vibrant accounts of research encounters and the embodied, sentient lives of research participants (Back, 2013; Gabb & Fink, 2017).

This collection thus echoes the content and concerns of papers presented at two workshops, titled ‘Emotion and the Researcher’, which were co-hosted in 2014 at Cardiff University by its Families, Identities, and Gender Research Network (FIG) and the Women’s History Network (West of England and South Wales). As a member of the audience at one of the workshops and presenter at another, these events were deeply memorable for a number of reasons. First, they provided a ‘safe place’ for presentations in which emotions generated in and by different research topics, methods and collaborations could be shared with colleagues. Second, the audience was able to respond in kind by relating their own emotional responses to the presentations and the ways their research had evoked similar or different feelings. Third, for some presenters and audience members, these interactions enabled an often long overdue opportunity to acknowledge and process feelings generated either in the field, in the archive, during analysis or when writing up findings. And fourth, the workshops illustrated that ‘emotionally sensed knowledge’ is never readily or simply attained, not least because ‘the epistemological status of such knowledge is always complex, uncertain and provisional’ (Bowlby & Day, [this volume], p. 129). The trope of ‘journeys’ was thus regularly drawn upon in discussions as a way of examining the many different and sometimes arduous paths taken to develop the skills of emotional, ethical and caring reflexivity (Rallis & Rossman, 2010) and of elucidating how emotion is woven into the spatial and temporal dimensions of qualitative research as well as academic research careers.

Like the two workshops, this edited collection will productively animate and engage those just embarking on their research careers as well as those who have undertaken multiple projects. The authors encourage us to witness how re-focusing our analytic lens onto the secret, liminal or elided emotional landscapes of our research results in richer and more complicated understandings of epistemology, methodology, reflexivity and ontology. They have thus successfully and powerfully answered Blakely’s (2007, p. 60) question about what happens when we feel the research instead of just thinking it.