REMEMBER TO DOUBLE SIDE.
WEEK SIX 
Emotions in Feminist Research
Alina and Adrianne
WAGS 422 Seminar Presentation

SUMMARIES and KEY POINTS
•	 Erica Burman and Khantidja Chantler, “There’s No Place Like Home: Emotional Geographies of Researching “Race” and  Refuge Provision in Britain,” Gender, Place and Culture 11, 3, 1004." an exploration of how power is used in relationships between women: between women workers and  women managers, or women living with domestic violence and refuge workers.” (386)
•	 complex emotional geography of denied or reactively constituted identifications demands urgent attention" (386)

•	"Women who leave violent partners and go to refuges.... home-like places. In this sense, characteristics of refuges that are unwelcoming can be linked to  `non-places'” (386)
•	three key inter-linked aspects of what might contribute to a sense of belonging and `place' (or lack of belonging and `non place') in a refuge: physical space, emotional space and structural positionings."(386)

•	anti racist framework
•	"As well as there being literally `no place' for many of our participants (in the sense of even refuges denying access to some women), it also seemed that symbolically we struggled to.. .  a place for our work together".(389)
•	an issue for women seeking refugee is ensuring women are provided with secrecy
•	domestic violence is sometimes replaced by racial violence
•	"Here the emotional geography of the refuge unhelpfully replicates that of the abuse (see also Haaken, 1999)."389
•	emotional geographies
•	research team as demanding too much?? 
•	"Such work also highlights the need to bridge the traditional divisions, not only between the individual and social, but also the ways these map onto models of the relations between public health and mental health provision"392
•	"The gendering of public and private space is not only intensified, but also transgressed by, both institutional (publicly funded) refuge provision and by the ways the state intrudes upon, as well as produces, sites of oppression by aiding perpetrators through racist and sexist immigration legislation."392
•	emotional geographies of non places may shift 
•	emotional geography as method and topic

•	reflexivity is the hallmark of feminist practice

•	purpose of study was to:  identify  Irish, Jewish, African and African Caribbean and South Asian women living in or escaping from domestic violence.

Gill Hubbard, Kathryn Backett-Milburn and Debbie Kemmer, “Working with Emotion: Issues for the Researcher in Fieldwork and Teamwork,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 4, 2, 2001, 119-137.
•		sociology of emotion

•	 developing strategies in which researchers can manage emotions

•		fieldwork can involve emotional experiences
•		different effects of face to face interviews opposed to data collection and qualitative research
•		understanding emotionally sensed knowledge in research
•		emotions as defined as a series of cognitive and social/cultural experience
•		emotional labor in research
•		emotional risks in place for interviewees: anxiety, harm, stress
•			ways to avoid this:
•			referrals 
•			pace the interview: breaks
•			debrief before and after
•			therapeutic intervention
•		"Hutchinson et al. (1994) for example, have categorized the many benefits to participating in research for the respondent, these are: catharsis, self-acknowledgement, sense of purpose, self-awareness, empowerment, healing and providing a voice for the disenfranchised." 124
•		emotional involvement in the interview for the interviewer
•		"Game’s main point is that emotions are the means by which we make sense of, and relate to, our physical, natural and social world. In this sense, emotion has epistemological significance because we can only ‘know’ through our emotions and not simply our cognition or intellect" 126
•		"This means that research tends to teach us the ‘outcomes’ from the experience rather than providing us with a fuller appreciation of the ‘processes’ and details of the experience" 126
•		emotion may be used in data
•		emotion in one interview may influence how the researcher manages emotion in the next
•		emotions may be an important part in the reflexive process of interviewing
•		emotion can impact the researcher's professional and personal identity
•		"Finally, perhaps the greatest challenge facing researchers is not about developing research teams where emotional labour can be successfully managed, but about recognizing that emotions have epistemological significance. Being emotional is a way of knowing about, and acting in, the social world and is just as significant for how we make sense of our respondents’ experiences as our cognitive skills" 135

Helen Cylwik, “Notes from the Field: Emotions of Place in the Production and Interpretation of Text”, International Journal of Social Research Methodology,  4, 3, 2001, 243-250.
researcher as important to research process

•	 relationship between interviewer and interviewee

•		"sheltered housing block run by the local authority, and the impact of these feelings on subsequent data analysis and text production"
•		“emotions in research"245
•		collection of quantitative and qualitative data
•		researcher feeling like an intruder, impersonalable
•		conflict between languages: interviewer interviewing Greeks, ... misunderstand of the meaning of the word home for instance
•		"Graham (1984) suggests that in ‘research-structured interviews, the respondent becomes a repository of data, while interpretation and analysis remains the prerogative of the investigator. In stories, data and interpretation are fused, the story-line providing the interpretive framework through which the data are constructed’ 248
•		the researcher as separate from the text
•		"‘interpretations are produced in cultural, historical, and personal contexts and are always shaped by the interpreter’s values"’ 248
•		"data interpreted in the framework of the researcher and his personal experiences and beliefs often remain invisible" 249
•		"Emotions that are unconsciously triggered and evoked while doing research"249
•		"The concept of distance (emotional, temporal and spatial) and intersectionality of emotion, time and space as a confluence of culture and subject positions, can be used to operationalize emotions as data."244
•		"researcher as aware of his intensity of emotions interplay of movement between researcher, place and interviewees that is important and the effects of this interplay on text production." 249
•		"Rather than being ignored or marginalized and added on as an afterthought, emotions (past and present) should occupy a central position in the research process" 249
•		emotions produce contextuality and relationality
•		emotions as operationalizing
•		unconsciously entering into the process of text production

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1) Erica Burman in  “There’s No Place Like Home: Emotional Geographies of Researching “Race” and  Refuge Provision in Britain,” discusses places as having emotional geographies and how places or non-places affect researchers and interview participants.  Develop on this idea and explore the various geographical (both physical and mental) factors which can add and contribute to affecting good research. Furthermore, Burman’s research looks at subjects who have escape or who are involved in domestic violence. Could Burman’s research be somewhat violent by opening up issues of emotions and pain? In terms of her intent and methodological strategy, how can we gage her research?
2)  Gill Hubbard, in  “Working with Emotion: Issues for the Researcher in Fieldwork and Teamwork,” writes that “emotion has epistemological significance because we can only ‘know’ through our emotions and not simply our cognition or intellect" (126). Can emotionally charged research still be noteworthy? How do we see Burman’s concept of emotional geographies interplaying with Hubbard’s point about the emotional as the powerful, especially in the idea behind Born into Brothels?  This controversial Documentary  explores a researcher’s attempt to gain access into a red light district in India through the use of the  children who live in the brothels. What problems are presented in this piece of research? 
3)Helen Cylwik, in her article“Notes from the Field: Emotions of Place in the Production and Interpretation of Text”, writes about a form of insider, outsider status which a researcher adopts when she invades the same and emotions of her interviewees. How could emotions play for her in terms of creating successful responses in her research? Cylwik writes that as a "researcher [you are] aware of this intensity of emotions interplay of movement between researcher, place and interviewees that is important and the effects of this interplay on text production." 249. To what extent is this power that the researcher has over the interview positive and to what extent does it hinder the process?