Methodological questions in Emotional Political Ecology
How do we know emotion? In what ways are PE scholars engaging the methodological challenge posed by non-representational theories that recognise emotion can’t always be articulated in words?
Scroll to the bottom of the page for a recording of the live session for this panel, held Monday 5th September, 20:00 UTC.
Navigating the emotion - embodiment - language nexus in international research
Josie Wittmer, Queen’s University, Canada; and Mubina Qureshi, SEWA-AIFW, Minnesota, USA
A methodological framework for unraveling Andean peasant women's epistemologies
Paola Solis, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany
'We follow the law, so you’ll have to too': Adivasis, emotions, and the articulation of caste and class in central India.
Daniel Read, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, USA
Towards an emotional ethnography – engaging with reciprocal fears in violent environments
Lisa Trogisch, Wageningen University, The Netherlands
Associate Professor Kanokwan Manoroma from Ubon Ratchathani University, Thailand provides an expert response to panellists:
A recording of the live session held for this panel:
Comments 30
Josie and Mubina, thanks for a fascinating reflexive account of your collaborative field research, which I’m sure will make for great reading as a paper too. As someone who often works with an interpreter, I could relate to aspects of your account and it was great to hear both of your perspectives on your practices. I found your discussion of empathy especially interesting, and your inclusion of research from theories of practice and even Buddhist philosophy (re ‘sympathy’ vs ’empathy’). I noted the importance of your regular debriefs after specific group discussions and interviews. My question for the plenary session is about researcher-interpreter relationships in the field e.g. in a dramatic or fast-moving situation situation like the case you described, how do you manage and communicate with each other in the moment. Also, I wondered about whether there are power dynamics that exist between the researcher and interpreter e.g. in terms of framing the inquiry or fieldwork processes?
Paula, I appreciated your careful framing of your research within feminist political ecology, Indigenous scholarship and Decolonial approaches. I was especially interested in your visual methods and wanted to clarify a but further how video elicitation worked and how this related to your use of visual prompts in discussions. I am also curious about whether you will only work with sharing circles in your research, or whether you will engage with other forms of interactions with the women you are working with. It sounds like you are at an early stage in your work and this is an exciting stage at which to deeply reflection on methods – well done!
Dan, your presentation was also fascinating and I appreciated your sharing of how you ‘read’ emotions in everyday meetings and exchanges. Having listened to the panel on “Care, commoning and restoration” before this one, I was struck by some parallels between your exploration of the role of emotions in helping new subjectivities to emerge (spanning caste and class) and Sony’s paper on anti-pollution movements in Kerala, which looked at emotions in the emergence of environmental subjectivities. My question is about your methods, given the focus of this panel. Could you reflect further on how you were able to read emotions in everyday interactions, and any challenges or limitations you faced in this regard?
Thanks to all of you for a great set of papers!
Lisa, thanks for sharing these important insights from your research around the transboundary Volcanoes National Park, where you encountered an atmosphere of violence and fear, and how this led you to use fear as ‘a compass’ in your research. I thought you illuminated very clearly the importance of critical emotional reflexivity as a foundation for “emotional ethnography” and ethical choices. I agree these have an important place in political ecology. I appreciated your graphic approach to the presentation, which provides a unique clarity and perhaps an insight into some of the journaling processes that you might have used? There’s much more to say, but I might just flag a couple of things that I’d love to hear more about in plenary discussions. Could you elaborate on the specific methods you mentioned (camera diary, empathy maps)? I’d also like to see further discussion about the concept and practice of empathy, which has come up in other papers, and the provocation to consider how we can actively decolonise research. I’m looking forward to the plenary discussion!
Sango, thank you for your comments and questions. Regarding video elicitation, initially, I will film short clips during the day in settings that peasant women indicate to me as relevant for the research. If possible, due to funding for cameras/smartphones, and willingness of peasant women, they could also be the ones making short clips on farming tasks, cooking, etc. Then, when looking at the clips together, for instance after dinner, I could explain her/them what I thought they were doing, or how I thought they were feeling and from then start a conversation – or also start with her/them telling me what a clip is about.
Regarding further interactions, yes, as an anthropologist, I am used to approaching fieldwork from everyday experiences. Then, I am planning to have stays for some months in the communities I will work with.
Paola, I think recording video and then discussing it later will be really useful for understanding emotions. Prof. Manoroma had suggested that I talk more about what people’s faces looked like when they were expressing emotion, and I wish I had taken better notes or had video to be able to go back to for this purpose. It also strikes me that video elicitation could help to get at some of what Prof. Nightingale was discussing about how we qualitatively or quantitatively capture emotions. That is, the ability to go back and look at how embodied reactions change over time, how they are different between individuals, etc. could be a really powerful contribution.
I wonder how much being video recorded would change how women respond to certain events throughout the day. That is, I know that my behavior changes a lot when I know I am being recorded. Would you plan to discuss this during the elicitation interviews? I also wonder if you have explored the possibility of landscape walks with video, in which people where a GoPro walk through the landscape or go about their days with it recording, which may reduce the amount that people change their behavior, given that there doesn’t need to be a second person there recording them. In general though, I think video is a great way to explore emotions and I look forward to seeing your results.
Thanks for the great questions, Sango, and I’m glad you enjoyed my talk. I want to engage with your question about reading emotions by describing some of my struggles in writing emotions. In an earlier draft of this paper, I struggled very much with the process of naming the emotions that I had witnessed people express. For instance, I could make a case that the women at the Gram sabha meeting were feeling indignation about not getting paid for their labor, given their hand gestures, words, volume, the collectivity with which they spoke, and the larger context of the discussion. However, not having asked them to name their feelings explicitly during that moment, this would be my own biased interpretation, and I worried about misrepresenting their experience. As an alternative, rather than name emotions, I chose instead to describe how they expressed themselves, as best as I had observed and let the emotions be inferred. This approached proved inadequate though when I submitted the paper for review, as one reviewer wrote that this approach necessitates the reader taking my hearing and recounting of emotional tones “at face value.”
When preparing for this talk, I found it somewhat easier to reenact how people spoke, as I had audio recordings of some of the later meetings. Methodologically, I would have benefitted from using video ethnography as well, as suggested by Paola, which would have allowed me to overcome the limits of my own field notes and describe changes to people’s faces, as suggested by Kanokwan.
Circling back to the questioning of reading emotions then, during fieldwork, I rarely doubted my ability to interpret people’s emotions when they expressed them, be it nervousness, fear, happiness, or something else. But when it came to writing about emotions, I struggled very much to convince myself and readers that I had “got it right.”
Dear Dan, thanks so much for your scenic reading – and all the insights that emerge when ‘active listening’: it is stunning what kind of emotions elicit from your intonations and I caught myself closing the eyes to “better understand”. I barely know about the entanglements between caste and class so I was wondering in how far your ‘class’ ascriptions to the people you spoke with are an interpretation or a ‘public secret’ or a ‘fact’? How are they articulated? And if these caste-class dynamics are so present, in how far did your presence influenced this dynamic? E.g. emotionally charged it?
I am not sure if you mentioned it if you had a research partner, translator, interpreter or else (and again: this question is based on my non-knowledge which and how many dialects are spoken around Melghat – and most importantly: what would be the Adivasi language of expression)? Maybe this is not too relevant in Central India, just from my own field experiences, my pure presence made a lot of people ‘more’ emotional – to make a point to or for me and ‘show the white lady what this is all about’. Can you relate to this effect? There is many more to ask – also about the other people’s positionality in your second scene (e.g. NGO worker)… but I am sure more details will follow on Monday. I am looking forward to it! Warmest, Lisa
Hi Lisa,
Thanks so much for your kind remarks about my presentation. With regards to how class is articulated by people in Melghat, my experience has been that people don’t necessarily talk about their movement as a ‘class’ movement, but as a ‘labor’ movement or ‘worker’s’ movement. Using these terms not only defines their constituency more inclusively, but also aligns with their efforts to seek regular wage labor employment through government right to work programs. This kind of language is largely consistent with that used in Marxist-affiliated analyses about class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, though people in Melghat are by no means self-described Marxists.
In terms of my presence influencing how they articulate caste and class, while I do not doubt it had an effect, my sense is that it was no so large an effect as to influence the overall goals of their work. That is, the activists’ goals were to implement PESA (which provides for self-governance in Scheduled districts), and gain more reliable access to right to work programs, like MGNREGA. More than the adivasis and people from Scheduled Castes that I was working with, I noticed my presence affecting how government officials and people from outside Melghat acted toward people, either in trying to convince me that people in Melghat are a certain way, or wanting to ensure that I imparted some message in my work that was sympathetic to what the government was doing.
Regarding translation, at times I worked with a translator, such as when doing more structured surveys, but at others I did not, such as participant observation. People in Melghat speak Hindi, Marathi, and Korku, and I only know conversational Hindi. Working or not working with a translator did result in some variation in how people responded to me, including what they said, how they said it, and whether they decided to talk to me. I also encountered some situations that motivated me be selective about when to work with a translator. For instance, while I always worked with translators who lived in the village where I was staying. But on one occasion, a translator and I interviewed a mid-level government official who openly insulted adivasis during the interview. Because I did not want to put anyone in that kind of situation again, I chose not to use translators when interviewing individuals who I thought were likely to have and voice the same views.
Not sure if that answers all of your questions, but I am really looking forward to talking more with people later today!
Thank you for watching and asking some great, stimulating questions, Sango! Mubina and I can definitely speak together to your question about researcher-interpreter relationships/communications and power dynamics in the plenary session. This is something we have thought through quite a bit (in the field and since) and have a couple of interesting examples we can share of how we navigated not only the dynamics between us in approaching and engaging with respondents, but also, how respondents expressed to us their perception of our differently situated roles/dynamics in the early interviews and how these perceptions (i.e. perceived as a hierarchy of the white/foreign “employer” and a “local girl”) informed their responses. Once we started to understand this was happening in the first couple of interviews, we developed strategies to try and shift this perception and to represent ourselves in different ways as we moved through the research (i.e. more equally as collaborators and with Mubina being the ‘lead interviewer’) in the interviews/workshops.
We deleted a paragraph with a particualr example I’m thinking about from our very first interview from our presentation to save on time, so we can bring it back in on Monday! We also are in the midst of reflecting on the intersections of collaboration and friendship in research and how this also affects our work/dynamic and perception by participants as well.
Josie and Mubina
I loved your talk Josie and Mubina! I feel that despite the long engagement with emotions (as you noted in your literature table), these questions of how we connect with others, how we know others’ emotions, is unclear. This case when you have cross-cultural research with two differently situtated researchers is a great example of examining how even amongst the research team, we can have different emotional reactions.
I wondered about the question of how we account for emotional performances and socially based emotional norms that may be vastly different from a Western expression, that is, how as a foreign researcher do you know that when you are registering fear, that people are actually feeling fear. This seems obvious from your description of the people moving away from the dog, but often might be more subtle. I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on this.
Also, for Josie and Mubina – I hadn’t heard of “hungry translation’ before – I love that idea of not aiming for perfection in terms of word for word, but how broader meanings and emotions are core to translation. And I found myself nodding along when you talked about how it is not just getting people to trust you but about being worthy of that trust, not distancing people sympathetically but sitting alongside with humility and empathy. I can imagine we can have a further discussion about the challenges in doing this without drowning – what seems like a difficult line to walk?
I also wondered if amongst your encounters you draw on when you write the article, you could include not only those with participants but also encounters between the two of you, eg while doing your collaborative transcription, as this way of working seems core to your understanding
Thanks for these thought-provoking questions, Alice! These kinds of questions and the conversation we anticipate for Monday are precisely why we have been waiting to finalize our draft paper until after this symposium!
This question of how we can know others’ emotions, especially in cross-cultural contexts is a great one- and a difficult one! I loved Dr. Nightingale’s keynote in prompting us to think about what it is that we are capturing when we are studying emotion, where we think we find emotions, and the work of political ecology in remaining explicitly situated/ in context.
For me, it’s interesting to think about perceiving/understanding others’ emotions both embedded within the cultural context and the interpersonal and embodied moment in the research. As you mention, sometimes emotions come across really clearly through the body and words – like our example of fear with the dog in the park. I can certainly reflect on attuning to body language, voice/tone/language (as Daniel really keenly highlighted in his presentation), and observing the setting/context of the interaction and what was going on around us in trying to understand what was being communicated to us via language and the body in all encounters.
When emotions/language were really not so obvious in their delivery or even contradictory, this was an area where I had to rely on Mubina to explain the subtleties of an encounter, often briefly or in a shorthand way in the moment and/or later, in our debriefings of what had happened in the day’s interview(s). This is one of the main challenges we are thinking through in writing our paper – how the more subtle meanings and emotions informing storytelling in the research is complicated and mediated by the interpretation and translation across languages and our strategies/challenges in doing working through it! I’m sure that Mubina has some really great insights to offer the group on Monday, as this is a key question/challenge they have been reflecting on in working together!
Also, for Josie and Mubina – I hadn’t heard of “hungry translation’ before – I love that idea of not aiming for perfection in terms of word for word, but how broader meanings and emotions are core to translation. And I found myself nodding along when you talked about how it is not just getting people to trust you but about being worthy of that trust, not distancing people sympathetically but sitting alongside with humility and empathy. I can imagine we can have a further discussion about the challenges in doing this without drowning – what seems like a difficult line to walk?
I also wondered if amongst your encounters you draw on when you write the article, you could include not only those with participants but also encounters between the two of you, eg while doing your collaborative transcription, as this way of working seems core to your understanding
Hungry Translation – yes! This is a concept from a recent book bt Richa Nagar that we came across a few days before we recorded our presentation, so it is something we are reading more about – Mubina might be keen to discuss this further in Monday’s session as well!
And yes, the challenges of empathizing without drowning in research on things like social stigma/inequality that can be heartbreaking at times. This is definitely something we struggled with at the time of the research and endured through conversations in our daily debriefs about how we were feeling, taking a break when one or both of us were feeling overwhelmed or ‘blown’, experiencing solidarity from other researchers/activists/NGO workers in our communities, and having conversations early on in the research about what stress/overwhelm looks like in each of us/how we can support each other when we observe these things in each other. I think these conversations are really important to have at the start of collaborations of any kind to help identify when someone is struggling and to know how to support them (because lots of folks are good at pushing down their struggles until they are totally blown) – it’s an exercise I used to do with my management teams when i supervised reforestation projects in northern Canada too!
After engaging with some of these practice-oriented literatures about distinguishing between different kinds of empathy (cognitive/affective), I am interested to see how I can put these ideas into practice in future work, because Mubina and I certainly had moments of practicing affective empathy and drowning – evidenced in our journals/field notes! I thought I would share this distinction in terminology/language in the presentation to see if it resonates with anyone else in practice and might help us to navigate this line!
I love the idea about writing up an encounter in transcribing and debriefing – we have chosen/written about 2 encounters so far and are going to select 2 more, so we will give it some thought!
Paola – I loved your presentation with your clear articulation of a decolonial research approach. I am excited to see how your project shapes up as you go forward!
I appreciated your concrete practices researchers might engage in to go ‘beyond the known’, participating in more-than-human worlds with participants. Like Sango, I wanted to hear a bit more about your storytelling and participatory photo and video methods. I wondered if you would also engage in ethnography with the women during their daily activities eg. in the fields working. I wondered this in part because while I like the idea of going beyond the known through taking part in rituals / spiritual practice, I often think about how much of everyday life (such as people’s engagement in food production working in the field) is also participating in more-than-human worlds that hold spiritual meaning/agency, that I might not grasp. How does a focus on emotions help you to know the more-than-human?
Alice, thank you for your comments and inquiries. I mentioned only very briefly that I plan to conduct ethnography in two peasant communities, but, I haven’t explained more. Yes, the ethnographic work I will conduct is based on the everyday life, working in the fields with the peasant women (or at least trying! hehe), shelling maize by hand, cooking, etc. And definitely, the spiritual dimensions are present in this everyday of going to the fields, receiving the rain, listening to a bird.
A focus on emotions is helpful because peasants don’t relate to the more-than-human only through a rational dimension but also through an emotional one. Paying attention to emotions from a collective experience can lead me to observe how the relations with the more-than-humans are currently lived and how this is determinant for the ways of knowing of peasants.
Dan – I really enjoyed your presentation, particularly the focus on power and the role of emotion in the emergence of collective subjectivities. One question I wondered about is whether/how you find your own embodied emotional reactions relevant for making sense of the emotional performances at the meetings you attended.
Thanks for your question, Alice. I found a lot of similarities between Josie and Mubina’s descriptions of making emotional connections across difference, particularly given my own experiences of being a foreign researcher in India. Reflecting back, I think some of my strategies for managing emotions in challenging situations were similar to what they described. For instance, Mubina described using restraint when encountering the rude dog-owner. There were many times during fieldwork when people were rude to those I was working with, and stereotypes about adivasis being lazy drunks who don’t work or raise their children were frequently voiced by local government officials. In such circumstances, I largely followed the approach of those around me. Most often, in the face of such insults, people would exercise restraint and not engage with the person disparaging them. I followed suit, but with the occasional glance, like what Josie described, that indicated I understood the situation. Afterwards, we would debrief and discuss the incident to get a better understanding of how people understand such encounters. That said, as I indicated in response to Sango, people wouldn’t often name their emotions, and would instead discuss how they learned to manage their emotions, or discuss what consequences would have followed had they not restrained themselves.
I think a common theme among the talks in this panel are the ways that history and power shape our own emotional expressions as researchers working outside our familiar contexts. In particular, the tension between wanting to connect with those with whom we work, while needed to respect our status as guests in another context/country seem to shape many of the ways in which we conduct ourselves during fieldwork. Listening to these talks has been very helpful for me, and I look forward to discussing more during the live session.
Lisa – I really enjoyed your presentation, and the way in which you performed the video (esp. the slightly blurred, shaky camera at the start; it gave me the experience of unease, not really knowing what was going on, which fit perfectly with the presentation.
Listening to your presentation brought me back to the moments in my own fieldwork in Cambodia, particularly the story about your interrogation. I really liked the reciprocity of fear concept you worked with, and your observation that sometimes the most ethical position is to leave some stones unturned.
I would love to talk with you more about the place of the researcher’s fear, and I wondered if you had read my work in this area? Esp. 2018 piece with my collaborator Laura Schoenberger (“They Turn Us into Criminals”: Embodiments of Fear in Cambodian Land Grabbing), which discusses similar concepts in the context of land conflict. Maybe some interesting parallels there between conservation and land grabs, and the different contexts of Africa and SE Asia? We also wrote a piece about the idea of ‘leaving some stones unturned’, and thinking through how else we might go about learning in contexts of fear, through bringing together an assemblage of methods that allow us to do fieldwork removed from the space of conflict. We drew on Nancy Heimstra’s concept of periscoping – which “combines a feminist perspective on the everyday with the recognition that no space, even those intentionally obscured, can be fully contained”. I wonder what periscopal methods might look like in your context?
Dear Alice, thanks a lot for letting yourself in with the presentations – and its slightly unusual and indeed uncomfortable mode… I am really glad that some of the thoughts and feelings that guided my drawings were conveyed to the unknowing listener and observer. Especially the resonance with your own experiences… and vice versa, because: of course, I have read your article with Laura Schoenberger in awe – and felt very understood. It was serendipitious because I just came across it after I handed in my dissertation but it helped my tremendously in supporting my own arguments in my defence – and I have to thank you very much for this!
I agree: There is usually little room for acknowledgment about researcher’s fears, and I would love to hear more of your thoughts about this now – 4 years after you have written “They turn us into criminals”. Also, I was not aware about these parallels between Central Africa and South East Asia – and nature conservation as land grab… there is some pattern to explore.
I am very curious about your ideas for an ‘assemblage’ of methods – something similar to what I called an “emotional ethnography”? Could you send me the article / or name? My aim is to develop a methodological toolbox for researchers in political ecology in particular – and Hiemstra’s ‘periscoping’ with all its possible prisms and mirrors sounds like an intriguing entry point (and great picture!)! I hope we can explore a little bit more about these parallels and possibilities next Monday in person. I am much looking forward to it. Warmest, Lisa
Josie and Mubina, I enjoyed pretty much your presentation. Looking forward to read about your other experiences and to know how your different subjectivities and positionalities delineated your reactions in particular contexts.
The explanation you provide on how to minimize the social distance through embodied expression, or using the body to show empathy, makes a lot of sense to me. Even more in a situation where the same language is not shared. It reminded me old fieldworks where I did the same, let’s say spontaneously without a previous reflection on that. I am prone to think that as long as we are cultivating empathy in our regular life, these embodied expressions in the field will emerge somehow instinctively. Would you say this was a more spontaneous or planned strategy? And would you say there was some kind of instincts involved? I am thinking out loud now about the connections between the animal body of the researcher – instincts – emotions.
Hi Paula,
Thanks so much for watching our presentation and for these questions! I think at the time that we did these interviews, there was definitely a lot of spontaneity, especially at first, in terms of how we both navigated ‘empathy’ and our strategies in minimizing social distance and in connecting with respondents. However, as we spoke and engaged with more and more respondents, we were able to strategize and be more intentional in both the ways that we were working together/representing ourselves in doing the interviews and in the ways that we were engaging with respondents. So I suppose the short answer is that instincts, reflection, discussion, and planning were a continually iterative process through this work!
I also really enjoyed hearing about your upcoming research around Cusco and your in-depth discussion of your conceptual framework in combining FPE with Indigenous and Decolonial approaches and the sharing and visual methods you plan to use! In our session on Monday, I’d love to hear your reflections on Sango’s question in response to the keynote around your positionality in this research – how it might shape your processes of engaging with and interpreting emotion in the research via these methods?
Dear Mubina, dear Josie – thanks a lot for this presentational storytelling: I truly felt being taken by the hand and guided through your experiences so that I could sense and see clear pictures in my head. You have ‘explained’ empathy by creating it, amazing. I would have loved to hear more of these dog-like encounters of double-emotional perceptions from you both in relation to the women – and maybe there is room for this in the session: I was wondering how the emotional reflections by the two of you informed your insights into the women’s emotional worlds? Did you find overlaps in your interpretations ‘about’ the women’s body language, wording, mimics – and what did the women express themselves about their personal feelings? In the dog story I have heard about fear but also about exclusion?
On a different note – tying in with Alice – I would love to hear more about your understanding and ideas how to decolonise such ethnographic fieldwork practices, especially when trust potentially needs a long time to develop?
I am looking forward to talk about all this on Monday – and will read “Hungry Translations”, you really gave an amazing inspiration there, thank you! Warmest, Lisa
Thank you Lisa for these comments and prompts! I am also looking forward to chatting through emotion as a part of decolonizing ethnographic research and building trust with the group on Monday! I have rambled on a bit in my comments above in response to Alice and Sango’s comments – but yes, you are right about fear and exclusion, as well as relief. It’s really amazing how fast these moments happen and the plethora of emotions that can be experienced and communicated so quickly in a small assemblage of people! It’s really such a great session and prompt in this symposium to be able to think through these nuances and discuss together.
I thought your presentation was so interesting and I love the care and creativity you put into representing and recording it! Watching your presentation yesterday made me think of a twitter thread by Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega about the literatures on the impact of difficult fieldwork on researchers… you might want to check it out and add any work you have published to the list! It was really interesting to hear your conceptualization and reflections on reciprocity and fear in the context of conservation/ the ’peace park and the violences of exclusion, surveillance, threats, war, etc. There’s really so much to ask and discuss! Perhaps to start, I’m curious about the visual ethnography/photo methods you chose to use and how they were taken up by the people you were working with. I’m also curious about your collaboration with the local researcher/colleague you mention – did you also have an interpreter? Are there any further emotional insights or implications you have in working across languages and with local collaborators in this context?
Daniel, thank you for delivering this dramatized presentation, definitely adds to the content you present. As Sango, I am also interested to know more about the methods you used and the methodological framework you developed. Personally, it is interesting to me if your previous methodological planning changed during the fieldwork – since my research is at a very early stage.
Besides that, I wonder if you consider affects as well when you say that “emotions help subjectivities to emerge in relation to caste and class”. I have seen that some authors addressing emotional geographies prefer to not make distinctions between emotions and affects and others prefer to mention explicitly that they will work with emotions. Actually, this could be a question for all the presenters, do you prefer to conceptualize affects separated from emotions, or considered them as the same idea?
Hi Paola,
Thanks for your questions and kind comments. To your first question, my research definitely changed throughout and after fieldwork. In particular, I wasn’t even aware of emotional political ecology until after my fieldwork was complete. I went into the field wanting to know how people’s encounters with wildlife related to their beliefs about the legitimacy of conservation regulations in Melghat. When I got into how they legitimize regulations, the work started moving more toward the relationship between caste, class, and emotions, with a significant layover in the moral economies literature. I have found emotional political ecology to be a useful frame with which to view these dynamics, particularly within the context of land dispossession. But it was definitely a theoretical framing that came after data collection.
And I think I will defer to conversation about emotions and affect until the live discussion. Like Prof. Nightingale suggested, the distinctions between these do not seem terribly clear to me, and I have largely gone the route of those emotional geographers who do not distinguish between the two. I will say, though, that I have found Raymond Williams’ concept of Structures of Feeling to be very helpful for thinking about the role of emotions and the emergence of subjectivities. And I have seen that cited by people investigating affect and by people investigating emotions. But there’s definitely lots to think about there.
Lisa, I was touched by your presentation. I could feel your concerns and the importance of the topics you raised. And I really appreciated the dedication you put into the handmade presentation, it certainly adds some textures and awakens some particular emotions in who is listening.
In the case that you present of the D.R. Congo, which and how were delivered the indications you gave to the volunteers who took pictures and made notes?
Dear Paola, thank you so much for appreciating this slightly different form of presentation! I am happy to hear it conveys (some of) the feelings I have had and still have, and that are translated and mediated through this sketchy art-work.
Your question is very important indeed: my Congolese research partner organized meetings with potentially interested people from the park-bordering villages and informed them about the risks, responsibilities and choice of withdrawal at any time when taking part in the camera project. The final volunteers were instructed by him as well to – if possible – make one photo of their everyday experiences per day and to write a diary entry about the photo what it means to them. Via my Congolese partner, all participants were renumerated for their work and hold copyright over their images.
In case you are interested in the outcome of the photo diaries in the DRC, maybe have a look here 🙂 – I have published this article in Gender, Place and Culture (it is open access):
“Navigating fearscapes: women’s coping strategies with(in) the conservation-conflict nexus in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0966369X.2022.2035695?needAccess=true
Hi all!
I am so sorry for being so late to comment here! I moved from Canada to Switzerland and started a new postdoc this week, so life this week has been a bit hectic… and emotional! I finally had a chance to spend time with the keynote and your presentations today – what a joy to hear about all of your work!
I have typed out a few responses to your comments above and will take some further time to reflect and respond to the remaining questions and pose some questions of my own tomorrow! Thanks for your patience with my delay this week and see you all on Monday!
Josie and Mubina:
Thank you very much for these brilliant reflections! I would be very interested by your take on the value of auto-ethnography- how this type of method can contribute to change our ways of doing research / our ways of being in and doing academia. Doing research- in- (emotional) relation – between 2 persons as you did – seems to be much more powerful for an auto-ethnography than when there is a single researcher. It seems that it does not end up being mostly about the researcher but about the flow of emotions envisaged as having the potential to think beyond the status quo.
Thank you very much for the discussion today. I felt that time passed too fast, and we were all very engaged in the conversation. I wanted to say something in relation to one methodological question from Prof. Nightingale. She asked where do we think we find emotions? are they reflected in the body or what kind of signals do we read as emotions? I think that the reading of these signals is developed in each particular relationship between researcher and research collaborators. Then, as researchers, we do need to cultivate our sensibility through other spaces outside academia in order to navigate these contingent forms for finding emotions. For instance, as I believe Lisa did with her draws, or Mubina with her poem. And I suspect that the others have their own ‘alternative spaces’ as well – which could not be necessarily related to your research. The time dedicated to those ‘alternative spaces’ could be considered part of our methodologies? Would be this possible in the context of academia? And with this question, I am linking to Alice’s comment on why we should restrict to expressing ourselves within traditional academic formats.