When your data make you cry: Feelings in research

What do you do when your data make you cry? Is there a place for feelings in research? My essay addresses those questions through an exploration of the methodological questions that arise when one moves from “participant” to “observer”, that is, when one’s research project focuses on something in which one was intimately involved and only later decides to take as an object of study. After considering and answering the concerns about objectivity that are likely to be raised in this situation, I explore the more pressing methodological issue of “familiarity.” While the task of any ethnographer is to become familiar with the group one is studying, familiarity can also obscure interesting research questions, especially if the participant-cum-researcher shares the common sense of the group she is researching. In that case, the researcher may fail to see the group’s taken-for-granted as a historical product ripe for investigation. How, then, does the researcher make what has become commonsensical to her into a puzzle requiring inquiry and analysis? How do you unravel your own common sense, and how does doing so affect the questions that you ask and the stories that you are able to tell? Drawing from a larger project that analyzes the emergence, meteoric rise, development, and decline of the direct-action AIDS activist movement in the United States, ACT UP, this essay explores these issues, focusing on the role that feelings can play in research. I argue for an understanding of feelings as a source of knowledge that can facilitate a methodological approach that both tacks between familiarity and defamiliarity and treats one’s object historically, emphasizing contingency, conjuncture, and change across time.