Feeling Our Ways: Convergences and Differences in Our Positionalities and Theoretical Perspectives As Ethnographers of Emotions

The aim of this paper is to engage with the body of a researcher as a means of exploring emotions and to relate it to recent ethnographic educational research (Zembylas 2016; Gallagher 2016; Schoerer & Schmitt 2018). In doing so, the affective atmosphere in the classroom and the ‘norms’ it produces will be explored, as four researchers reflect together on their positionalities and emotions in the field. Thereby, we are engaging with two ethnographically oriented research projects in primary and secondary school classrooms in England and Germany, and compare our field experiences and emotions with each other in a performative approach (Denzin 2018), as we are visibly engaging with our shared dialogue.

We explore the different narratives and attributions of specific emotions in the context of researching social inequalities (Ahmed 2004/2014) and how they shape the learning and research space, impacting who participates in it and how, and who and what we engage with as researchers entangled in the emotional playing field (Denzin 2018). For this, we look at the constellations of "discomfort" and "feeling powerful" in different scenes across our studies, and compare them and reflect them in the experiences of the other. Thereby, our ‘researcher bodies’ act as means of knowledge and are simultaneously reflected in the process of reflection and resonance. Drawing on Ahmed (2014) in the sense of "feeling our way", we reflect on the complexities of a sense of ‘empowerment’ in the classroom: A reversal of status thereby highlights problematic norms.

We engage with the ambiguity of emotions, but believe that dialogical reflection can help to illuminate different aspects beyond the researcher's individual reflections. Our performative, dialogic research on emotions (discomfort interacting with feeling powerful) is new in itself and can also enrich the scientific debate with both reflection and experience through the researcher's body.