Full Description
Intimacy, expressed through the feelings and sensations of the researcher, is bound up in the work of a feminist geographer. Tapping into this intimacy and including it in academic writing facilitates a grasping of the effects of power in particular places and initiates a discussion about how to access and tease out what constitutes the intimate both ethically and politically throughout the research process.
This collection provides valuable reflections about intimacy in the research process - from encounters in the field, through data analysis, to the various pieces of written work. A global and heterogeneous pool of scholars and researchers introduce personal ways of writing intimacy into feminist geography. As authors expand existing conceptualizations of intimacy and include their own stories, chapters explore the methodological challenges of using intimacy in research as an approach, a topic and a site of interaction.
The book is valuable reading for students and researchers of Geography, as well as anyone interested in the ethics and practicalities of feminist, critical and emotional research methodologies.
Contents
Introduction 1. Muddling intimacy methodologically Part I: Methodological challenges 2. An uncomfortable position: making sense of field encounters through intimate reflections 3. 'I'm here, I hate it and I can't cope anymore': writing about suicide 4. In the skin: intimate acts in economic globalization 5. Navigating intimate insider status: bridging audiences through writing and presenting Part II: Emergent effects of including one's own story 6. Intimate creativity: using creative practice to express intimate worlds 7. Writing/drawing experiences of silence and intimacy in fieldwork relationships 8. Open for business? First forays into collaborative autobiographical writing in extractive northern British Columbia 9. Walking the line between professional and personal: using autobiography in invisible disability research 10. Are we sitting comfortably? Doing-writing to embody thinking-with Part III: Multiple aspects of researching intimacy 11. Accelerating intimacy? Digital health and humanistic discourse 12. To hold and be held: engaging with suffering at end of life through a consideration of personal writing 13. Inhabiting research, accessing intimacy, becoming collective 14. Intimacy, animal emotion and empathy: multispecies intimacy as slow research practice Part IV: Analytical methods as part of writing 15. Bearing witness to geographies of life and death: intimate writing and violent geographies 16. Becoming fieldnotes 17. Hiding in the garden: autoethnography and intimate spaces 18. Death, dying and decision-making in an intensive care unit: tracing micro-connections through auto-methods 19. Places of the open season 20. Concluding remarks: intimate research acts
