5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Ethnographic research has long advanced "immersion" as a methodological modality of engaging with the fieldsite. This session aims to interrogate the notion of immersion by engaging with the feelings, sensations, and embodied responses that ethnographic methods are often accompanied by. Feminist approaches to ethnography as a method demonstrate how vulnerability, risk, and sexualization of the researcher require us to re-interrogate the relationship between the body and the ethnographic encounter. This session aims to build on this line of thinking by asking: what do we do with the feelings, sensations, and emotions produced, experienced, and encountered during fieldwork? Unpacking this central question allows for a conversation that centers ethnography as a deeply emotional process and sparks the following provocations: How do feelings shape findings? How do ethnographers work with and/or around fear, danger, or pain in their research? How does one account for fun and pleasure during fieldwork? Is the body an ethnographic tool or a field site in and of itself? Bringing these provocations to bear on questions of power, intersectionality, positionality, and epistemic violence, the intention of this session is to move away from feelings from being a footnote in the sociological imagination.