Elke Emerald

Vulnerability and Emotions in Research Risks, Dilemmas, and Doubts

Researchers are familiar with ethics applications that endeavor to ensure the safety of their participants, but only recently have they been urged to examine the short- and long-term effects of research on themselves and consider the risks to their own safety and well-being. This article considers some of the risks to researchers of engaging in research by exploring some emotional dangers the authors encountered while engaged in their own research. The authors use their autoethnographies to create a co-constructed narrative to identify some of the emotional risks that can be associated with being a researcher. The risks are discussed in terms of vulnerability, emotional labor, emotions as data or evidence, and emotionally sensed knowledges. It is Laurel Richardson’s argument that “the ethnographic life is not separable from the self” that informs the authors’ efforts to understand, rather than simply know, the potential of emotions in research.

Sensory narratives: capturing embodiment in narratives of movement, sport, leisure and health

Narrative research has been employed by many researchers in the field of physical culture (including movement, play, dance, sport, leisure, physical pursuits, physical activity, physical education and health). From our storied worlds, narrative research reveals complex embodied and emplaced social phenomena within this field. However, there are still many questions about how we might begin to take more seriously the lived body, the phenomenological and subjective experiences of those people whose practices constitute this field. From a methodological and epistemological perspective, we face ongoing challenges in understanding physical culture and its constitution in storied and embodied ways. This paper explores the possibilities for narrative research to be extended using a framework of intersections between three research moments (field texts, interim research texts and research texts) and four epistemes (senses, sensual experience, sensory geographies and sensational learning/turning points). We explore sensory narratives as forms that capture embodiment in rich ways, providing multimodal possibilities, new timespace possibilities and new insights. This paper is an attempt to move beyond telling stories of us having bodies to address us as bodies [Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer], emplaced, and whose movement and sensations are crucial to learning, knowing and understanding. We grapple with two core conundrums for researchers who use narrative: how to capture, analyse and represent storied worlds in embodied ways and how to capture sensed and embodied experiences in narrative. Finally, we discuss implications for (re)telling enduring and new narratives using emerging sense-focussed epistemologies and methodologies to communicate narrative at the three research moments.

The Scholar Retires An Embodied Identity Journey

This article is inspired by Laurel Richardson’s ongoing work as a scholar and researcher during her “retirement.” Lorelei has been inspired by Laurel to imagine her retirement as still a time of productive scholarly contribution. This, despite the messages she has received, overtly and covertly, of her redundancy. Here, we follow Lorelei as she stories the disruption, conflicts, and tensions of transition from work life to retirement. Her introspection reveals that this life transition is unlike any other for her. This one is defined more by loss than gain, and Lorelei finds it uncomfortable to embody the juncture of “productivity” and “age”—clearly on the “wrong” side of each binary. Three issues are at the heart of her process: the importance of identity, the process of transitioning from employment to retirement, and the identities that society makes available postemployment. We use autoethnography with commentary to understand Lorelei’s experience in the context of the present social, cultural, and political historical moment. Laurel Richardson and her scholarship are integral to this piece in the permissions she has granted us: to both explore this space and to explore it in this way.

Autoethnography: Is My Own Story Narrative Research?

Narrative researchers have long understood the power of a story to capture a reader’s attention, link them emotionally to a topic and then use that attention and connection to communicate a theoretical or practical point. And further, the story can itself communicate the social/cultural/political. Autoethnography asserts that when we publically story our experiences, they transcend the private and the personal and assume political import. It is a particular research method that connects the personal to the political, social and cultural in captivating, stirring and most importantly, insightful ways that move us to action. Autoethnography is a comfortable companion for many forms of narrative research.

Researching the researcher: the heart and mind in sub-prime times

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to gather research-stories, that is, the stories of the researcher themselves. The authors gather stories that situate researchers in their social, political, personal and professional contexts to learn about being a researcher in a University at this particular historical moment. Design/methodology/approach – The authors’ stories began with the naive question – “What is it like to be a researcher in a University right now?”. The authors asked this question of Julie White’s (2012) “disposable academics” (p. 50); short-term and casualised staff with insecure teaching or research contracts. They asked White’s (2012, p. 48) “academic infantry” the mid-career researchers who have felt the labour intensification of recent times. They also asked senior academics, established professors with established research histories and the security (they hope) of a steady track record and a list of external grants. Findings – The answers were not simple. They were stories of the prag...

Intersecting global and local: the intercultural and intersubjective constructions of “expatriate” and “local” teachers in the search for the “x factor”

In 1998, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region began a large-scale project to import qualified, experienced native-speaking teachers of English into Hong Kong secondary schools. The Native-speaking English Teacher (NET) scheme later expanded to include Hong Kong primary schools. Currently, teachers from around the world are placed in local (Hong Kong) classrooms and staffrooms. This intersection of local and global teaching professionals is the site for the examination of interculturalist theories through interactionist methodologies. Data in the form of a semi-structured interview with a Local English Teacher (LET) is analysed using Membership Categorization Analysis. The analysis addresses two key questions. First, how are intercultural categories and attributes talked into being? Second, how can examination of these categories lead to improved understanding of the intersubjective relations between local and expatriate teachers? Findings from analysis have implications for teachers’ professional development in cross-cultural contexts.

Narrative Research in Practice: Navigating the Terrain

This chapter endeavors to map the terrain of the narrative landscape. In so doing we use two broad categories, firstly methodological questions, which includes the ontological and epistemological basis of the research, the nature of the relationship between the researcher and researched, and whether the research focuses on the individual or on societal contexts and concerns. Secondly method questions, which includes the nature of the evidence, the analytical processes used, and the representation of the research product. We seek to draw attention to the way the same terms are used by different authors in different ways. We hope this assists narrative researchers in the field further develop ideas in a continued commitment to the scholarship of narrative research.

Minding the Senses in Global South Ethnographies

When we first discussed this book, it was a humid, coastal day. It was the kind of day in Whaingaroa/Raglan, Aotearoa/New Zealand that was sure to go one of two ways: either pouring with rain, or bright, woozy and sunny. The wet heat pressed in on us, like a smelly woolen dog.

Proem: Archipelagoes of Pan Pacific Ethnographies

Ethnography-ethnographic writing, ethnographic fi ctions and narratives and performances and many other multi-faceted incarnations-depends upon, as Geertz above puts it, “the way we talk about it.” But, for us, the questions still linger: what is ethnographic writing, what is ethnography itself? Long passed (and past) are the days when one single “defi nition” could encompass what this multi-faceted, multi-layered, traditional and experimental, theoretical and praxis-oriented catch-all has become.

LEAPing into Youth Work: PAtR in a Cultural Profession

This chapter provides an example of Gregory’s critical engagement with action research approaches. It illustrates the way that power is always already present before you even enter the research space and the way that always already present power can drive the process. This example is not presented here as a perfect example but as a ‘best effort’ in the given context and one you might use to better understand the practice and its complexities, tensions and contradictions, both in theory and practice. Unfortunately, a tendency exists in some of the reported AR literature to tell stories through compelling exemplars that sentimentalise, romanticise or grossly oversimplify the process and the outcomes. This propensity for simplification or exaggeration may be for personal or political reasons such as presenting sanitised reports in order to win funding or to mobilise allies through partisan rhetoric. However, the danger is that this can lead to naive, mechanical, distorted or even erroneous understandings of the change process promoted by PAtR.