Full Description
Why should researchers be interested in their feelings and emotions as they carry out research? Emotion is what it is to exist, to be human, and is present in every sphere of our lives. All activities are infused with emotion, even those that are constructed as 'rational', because rationality and emotionality are interpenetrated and entwined because all thinking is tinged with feeling, and all feeling is tinged with thinking.
This book illuminates the emotional processes of doing social and organizational research, and the implications of this for the outcomes of research. With contributions from leading academics and research practitioners, it addresses the significant issue of the sometimes intense emotional experiences involved in doing research and the implications it has for the theory and practice of social research. By examining the nature of feelings and emotions, it explores how we might understand researchers' emotions and experiences, and considers the often powerful feelings encountered in a variety of research contexts. Topics discussed include: power relations; psycho-social explanations of researcher emotions; paradoxical relations with research participants and the sometimes disturbing data that is gained; research supervision; the politics of research; gender; publishing, undergoing vivas and presenting at conferences.
This book will therefore be a valuable companion to researchers and research students from the start of their career onwards.
Contents
Foreword 1. Why Should Researchers be Interested in their Feelings? 2. Recognising Research as an Emotional Journey 3. Negotiating Identities: Fluidity, Diversity and Researcher Emotion 4. Emotionally Charged Research - Engaging with the Politics of Action Research 5. The Not-so Dark Side of Emotions: Anger as a Resource in Research Apprenticeship 6. A Psycho Social Approach to Researching With Feeling 7. The emotional experience of research supervision 8. Not researching where we grew up 9. Tales from post-field work: Writing Up; Vivas; Conferences; and Publications 10. Researching with Feeling: The Case for an Affective Paradigm in Social and Organisational Research 11. Authorial Confessions: Revealing Our Own Hands
