Beyond the “Confessional Tale”: Writing, Emotions, and Epistemic Transformation In Qualitative Social Research

Although emotions are increasingly recognized as integral to the research process (Berger, 2013; Bergman Blix & Wettergren, 2015; Boler, 2018), a significant gap remains between the ‘messiness’ of fieldwork and the production of formal academic knowledge (Keller & Pierce, 2024; Bloch, 2016). This session invites scholars to reflect on writing – during and after fieldwork – not merely as a reporting tool but as a primary site for managing, negotiating, and transforming emotional labor into knowledge. It addresses an observed tension between the unavoidable presence of emotions throughout the qualitative research process and the limited consideration of them within formal academic structures.

How can writing “behind the desk” function as a second life for emotional labor, where the “wound” opened by the encounter with the Other is processed into a reflexive resource (Grippo & Russo, 2026)? We encourage exploring how the act of writing can foster a “disciplined reflexivity” that integrates the researcher's subjectivity (Hubbard et al., 2001; Keller & Pierce, 2024). We welcome contributions on how institutional expectations shape, discipline, and sometimes marginalise emotional experience in the production of knowledge; field diaries and journals as spaces for processing affective experience; methodological strategies that allow transforming emotional “perturbations” into analytical processes; negotiating the tension between analytical clarity and the ethical responsibility of remaining “touched” by the field; as well as other ways of integrating emotions into research as epistemic resources.

Our goal is to reclaim space for emotions while maintaining the rigor necessary to make social complexity comprehensible.