Embodied Encounters: Bodies, Emotions, and Sensibilities In Ethnography

What do we do with the many feelings, sensations, and emotions produced, experienced, and encountered during ethnographic fieldwork? Part of the challenge of conducting ethnography is to recognize it as a highly embodied and, often, deeply emotional process that must be negotiated in the field site. But how do we reflect on these affective engagements in writing? How do we investigate one's own embodied, multisensory experience in field sites, but also articulate it in textual forms and in meaningful ways? This session aims to offer conceptual resources and critical reflections on these embodied negotiations, and to act as a forum for sharing creative responses to these questions. For some researchers in the field there is an added element of risk for their own or other bodies that must be negotiated. For example, 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. Posing such reflexive concerns about embodied sensibilities and their negotiation brings in questions of power, intersectionality, positionality, and epistemic violence.

We wish to spark prompts and provocations in this area, including (but not limited to):

• How do feelings shape findings?
• How do ethnographers work with and/or around negative feelings such as fear, danger, or pain?
• How does one account for fun, pleasure, joy during fieldwork?
• How are risks perceived, negotiated, processed by the embodied researcher?
• Is the body an ethnographic tool or a field site in and of itself?