Embodying the Field: Centering Emotions through Feminist Decolonial Ethnography

Emotions in the social sciences are often undervalued and perceived as disruptive, unscientific and sources of bias. The image of the disembodied researcher remains prevalent, and discussions of embodiment and emotions are limited to considerations of positionality, without deeper exploration of what emotions does to research, researchers and participants. Drawing on our fieldwork experiences with women ex-guerrilleras in Colombia and with migrants in Senegal, we explore how emotions, when openly discussed and shared, have informed our research practices. By centering on “emotional-embodied-experiences” (Chacón 2016) in our fieldwork, we have been able to navigate both the joyful and challenging aspects of the research process, appreciating the importance of emotional awareness in scholarly inquiry. To do so, we argue that decolonial feminist approaches enable researchers to place emotions at the center of scientific inquiry, emphasizing the ethnographic encounter as a shared space where different embodied subjects co-create trust—a process that inherently involves emotions and feelings, and presupposes that all those involved render themselves vulnerable. With the intention of considering how emotions are both produced and felt during the fieldwork encounter in different complex settings, we divide our argument in three moments. The power to be affected: the first section delves into friendship, rage and solidarity as fundamental emotions in our fieldwork. We work through these sometimes-contradictory emotions and how they shape and are being shaped by our research in the field. The working of emotions on methods: second, we explore what emotions open methodologically, which means how emotions have allowed the techniques beyond those traditionally used in our disciplines. The emotional collective journey: in the final section, we reflect on the role of emotions in creating alternative spaces for knowledge building and explore the strategies that helped us navigate the challenges we encountered.