The stickiness of emotions in the field: complicating feminist methodologies

This art icle was downloaded by: [ UZH Haupt bibliot hek / Zent ralbibliot hek Zürich] On: 09 January 2015, At : 06: 47 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ cgpc20 The stickiness of emotions in the field: complicating feminist methodologies a Nicole Lalibert é & Carolin Schurr b a Depart ment of Geography, Universit y of Toront o Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, ONL5L 1C6, Canada b Depart ment of Geography, Universit y of Zürich, Wint ert hurerst r. 190, 8057 Zürich, Swit zerland Published online: 09 Jan 2015. Click for updates To cite this article: Nicole Lalibert é & Carolin Schurr (2015): The st ickiness of emot ions in t he field: complicat ing feminist met hodologies, Gender, Place & Cult ure: A Journal of Feminist Geography, DOI: 10.1080/ 0966369X.2014.992117 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 0966369X.2014.992117 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 06:47 09 January 2015 Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Gender, Place and Culture, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.992117 INTRODUCTION The stickiness of emotions in the field: complicating feminist methodologies Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 06:47 09 January 2015 Nicole Lalibertéa* and Carolin Schurrb1 a Department of Geography, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6, Canada; bDepartment of Geography, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstr. 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland (Received 24 April 2014; accepted 7 July 2014) This editorial theorizes the emotional entanglements that constitute spaces of fieldwork. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s notion of sticky and circulating emotions, we develop the concept of emotional entanglements as a way to engage with the methodological implications of the emotional turn in geographic research. Beyond providing empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies, we argue that an attention to emotions in fieldwork has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality. In addition, a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. As the papers of this themed section demonstrate, analysis of emotional entanglements in research pose critical questions with regard to power relations, research ethics and the wellbeing of research participants and researchers alike. They also make visible how the power relations of sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate and constitute the emotional spaces of the field. We use the notion of emotional entanglements as a way to situate the five articles of the themed section and to highlight the contribution of each paper to debates about the emotional field. Keywords: feminist methodology; ethnography; field; emotions; intersectionality Anthropologist Patty Kelly opens her book Lydia’s Open Door with a declaration of love to her rather unconventional field site, the state-regulated super-modern model brothel ‘Galactic Zone’ in Chiapas, Mexico. ‘My decision was a visceral one,’ she wrote, ‘unmarked by thoughts about the realities of career, funding, and fieldwork. Something like love at first sight, it was deeply felt and not particularly logical. I had found my field site’ (Kelly 2008, xiv). She then describes how she established rapport with key persons such as members of the conservative right-wing National Action Party (PAN), both politicians and gynaecologists, who ‘opened’ the doors of the Galactic Zone to her. Tuxtla’s director of public health [ . . . ] introduced me to the newly elected mayor, also a panista2 gynecologist. Young, good-looking, and charismatic, the mayor extended a hand to me [ . . . ]. I liked him. My fears about working closely with members of a political party whose conservative views on sexuality, religion, and politics were so different from my own all but vanished. (Kelly 2008, xiv) *Corresponding author. Email: nicole.laliberte@utoronto.ca q 2015 Taylor & Francis 2 N. Laliberté and C. Schurr Access to the Galactic Zone, however, was not the same as access to the intimate lives of those working within the Zone. The awkwardness of Kelly’s initial attempts to ask questions led two of the women of the Zone to take her aside and offer advice. Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 06:47 09 January 2015 “I have something to say, and I hope it doesn’t make you mad, but if you go around asking questions like ‘How long have you worked here?’ ‘What do you earn?’ ‘How old are you?’ ‘Are you married’ no one’s going to answer you”. Such things, said Lorena, were better learned through friendships. Lorena and Desirée cautioned me to be careful and hinted at the divisiveness that I would later find permeated relationships in the zone. (Kelly 2008, xvi) It is emotions that deliver Patty Kelly to her field site and that shape her relationships in the field. Friendships, and the feelings of trust associated with them, are crucial to shaping her access to the Galactic Zone and her knowledge of women’s and men’s everyday lives within that space. Yet Kelly’s account also hints at how emotional encounters in the field can be troublesome, even inimical, yet constantly changing through time and space. Gaining access to her research site, for example, required Kelly to appear complicit with politics and ideologies contradictory to her own beliefs. Negotiating these contradictions is an emotional experience, one which makes tangible the power geometries (Massey 2005) that shape the places in which we work. In this themed section, we delve into the multiple, complex and often ambivalent emotional entanglements of fieldwork to trace the power geometries that shape our field sites and our research practices. Our use of the phrase ‘emotional entanglements’ self-consciously draws upon Sharp et al.’s (2000) use of the phrase ‘entanglements of power’ to conceptualize both the metaphorical and material tetherings of various forms of power within particular socio-spatial landscapes. This is emphatically not an attempt to simply ‘personalize’ our accounts of fieldwork through descriptions of emotional experiences (for a critique see Coffey 1999; Nagar 2002); rather, it is a demonstration of how a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. Feminist geography scholarship has increasingly attended to intimate spaces (Pratt and Rosner 2006; Smith 2012) and emotional geographies (Pain 2009; Sharp 2009). This emotional turn makes an engagement with the methodological implications of research focused on the intimate and the emotional even more pressing. Yet, while it currently seems (at least feminist) common sense that fieldwork is never an ‘emotionless experience’ (Spencer 1992, 59), Longhurst and Johnston (2014, 268) lament the lack of work reflecting on ‘embodied fieldwork’, and Sharp and Dowler (2011, 154) highlight that ‘the significance of the embodied challenges of the field (often physically and emotionally at the time) is often silenced in the written and presented accounts of methodology’. Emotions are still marginalized to field diaries (Punch 2012), email exchanges (Schurr and Abdo in this themed section), prefaces (as in the case of Kelly), acknowledgements (e.g. Wright 2006) or the informal spaces of receptions, diner conversations or coffee chats. Emotions are much more omnipresent in these hidden spaces and fringes of knowledge production than in published accounts where they present the object of inquiry. Feminist researchers, it appears, still struggle with finding a ‘place of/for emotions in research’ (Bondi 2005; Widdowfield 2000). The most obvious application of investigations into the emotions of fieldwork is to provide empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies; however, we maintain that it can offer much more. In particular, we argue that a critical attention to emotions in research has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality, the mainstream applications of which Nagar and Geiger (2007) criticize for perpetuating the Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 06:47 09 January 2015 Gender, Place and Culture 3 reification of categories. Simply identifying one’s self as a white, middle-class lesbian does not, they would argue, suffice for understanding the complex power relations which permeate knowledge production. Instead, they contend that we must think of reflexivity and positionality as processes; processes that constantly interrogate relationships of power around and through research. We argue that critical engagements with emotions during research will address Nagar and Geiger’s call for a practice of reflexivity and postitionality that challenges the reification of categories. To attend to emotions within research is to attend to the evershifting social landscapes in which we and the knowledge we produce is embedded. In thinking (or rather feeling) through the methodological challenges of reflexivity and positionality in an emotional field, we draw on Sara Ahmed’s work on emotions to move past the idea of emotions as individual experiences and towards emotions as embodied experiences of social relations. According to Ahmed (2004a), the performativity of emotions works through the iterative attachment of certain emotions to certain bodies. In analysing our emotional experiences in research, therefore, we must acknowledge that how a certain body (marked through signs of gender, sexuality, race, etc.) feels about another (differently marked) body is not simply a matter of individual impressions but that this ‘contact is shaped by past histories of contact’ (2004b, 7). Ahmed emphasizes that while subjects may stick certain emotions consciously to specific bodies and places, emotional encounters are always mediated by the unconscious and bodily memories. Arguing that an ‘analytic distinction between affect and emotions risks cutting emotions off from the lived experiences of being and having a body’ (2004a, 39), she provides a means by which we can move past the fierce debates between feminist emotional geography and non-representational geography of affect that have recently characterized geographic engagements with both affect and emotion (for an overview, see McCormack 2006; Thien 2005; Tolia-Kelly 2006). Attending to the circulation and stickiness of emotions gives insights into how and why researchers become emotionally entangled in particular ways in the power-saturated social structures of the field. Acknowledging that our actions in the field are emotional reactions, in the sense that ‘what we do [in the field] is shaped by the contact we have with others’ (Ahmed 2004b, 4), is a first step towards a critical practice of reflexivity via our emotional entanglements in and with the power saturated field. Paying attention to how we as researchers ‘feel our way’ in the field serves to understand how emotions are bound up with the securing of social hierarchy, or as Ahmed (2004b, 4) puts it: ‘emotions become attributes of bodies as a way of transforming what is “lower” or “higher” into bodily traits’. By suggesting that we should try to track how emotions circulate between bodies and examine how they ‘stick’ as well as move, Ahmed’s cultural politics of emotions opens up the possibility to turn what could first be seen as emotional ‘navel-gazing’ (Nagar 2002, 180) into a political analysis. Bringing Ahmed’s theories into the field offers the possibility to rethink our emotional encounters in the field – to understand them as an outcome of bodily memories and histories of contact between racialized, gendered, sexualized, and otherwise differentiated bodies. Attending to our emotional actions and reactions in the field, therefore, can offer insights into our positionalities as researchers enmeshed in larger power structures. The papers of this themed section look at a number of different intersections of identities and social structures to understand how sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate the emotional spaces of the field. Feeling through these emotional spaces, they complicate their own intersectional positionalities as feminist researchers and discuss their own entanglements in the imperialist geopolitics of knowledge (Faria and Mollett; Smith), the heteronormativity of Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 06:47 09 January 2015 4 N. Laliberté and C. Schurr the field (Kaspar and Landolt; Cuomo and Massaro) and capitalist nature of social laboratories (Schurr and Abdo). These larger power structures influence the course of fieldwork from moments of seeking access to the field (Schurr and Abdo), to conducting empirical work in the field (Kaspar and Landolt; Cuomo and Massaro; Faria and Mollett) to the writing up and publication of our field work accounts (Smith). Tracking and analysing how certain emotions stick or circulate between our own and other bodies in the field can facilitate reflection on how our emotional entanglements evolve and transform over time and in different spaces of the field. Our fluctuating emotional geographies during research are produced through processes of identification and desidentification emerging and unfolding in different spatial and temporal contexts of the field. As Valentine (2007, 15) has shown, ‘particular identites are weighted or given importance by individuals at particular moments and in specific contexts’ so that ‘some categories such as gender might unsettle, undo, or cancel out other categories such as sexuality’. Analysing how certain identity categories become decisive or lose importance in the course of our fieldwork reveals how particular subject positions and intersectional encounters also frame the research process. Reflecting on their – often uneasy and disturbing – emotions in the field, the papers in this collection question the dichromatic colouring of the field (Faria and Mollett), the innocuousness of sexualized field encounters (Kaspar and Landolt) and the ambiguity of our emotional entanglements with different subjects in the field (Schurr and Abdo). Further, emotions of unease and guilt experienced in the field have pushed the authors to think about strategies to redefine their intimate relationships with research participants and to protect their own emotional well-being in and beyond the field (Smith; Cuomo and Massaro). The complementary analyses provided by the articles in this themed section demonstrate how, as an epistemological practice, attention to emotional entanglements during fieldwork provides a means by which to assess our unfolding positionality within complex sets of social relations. Such attention provides analytic insights into the power geometries of our respective fields and our embodied practices of negotiating and effecting change within these spaces. This critical attention to the emotional ‘encounter[s] that confront, engulf, and even overwhelm us’ (Dewsbury and Naylor 2002, 256) provides a potential approach to navigating what Nagar and Geiger (2007) describe as ‘the complex questions of power, privilege, and social change’ in research. This themed section opens with Caroline Faria’s and Sharlene Mollett’s challenge to racialized assumptions of authority that continue to ‘color the field’ (Abbott 2006; Kobayashi 1994) in feminist geographic research. Reflecting on their racialized encounters in their respective fields of South Sudan and Honduras, they both show how race is produced through momentary, performed, affective and fleeting encounters. In particular, they demonstrate how their emotional encounters in the field are shaped by research participants’ racialized imaginaries of the researchers’ white body. Heidi Kaspar’s and Sara Landolt’s article switches our focus to how emotions stick to and move between differently sexualized bodies (Cupples 2002; Diprose, Thomas, and Rushton 2013). Kaspar and Landolt use their own emotional experiences of navigating unsolicited flirtation during research to illuminate how sexuality re-shapes positionality in research encounters. By examining mundane expressions of sexuality rather than extreme events, Kaspar and Landolt bring attention to sexualized (and often heteronormative) power relations that inform feminist research – whether or not it is acknowledged. In their contribution, Carolin Schurr and Katharina Abdo examine how emotions are manipulated in social laboratories to produce particular types of capitalist subjects. Paying close attention to their own emotional entanglements in the very power relations they were seeking to critique through their research, Schurr and Abdo do not shy away from the Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 06:47 09 January 2015 Gender, Place and Culture 5 emotional and ethical messiness of their entanglements (Bondi 2005; Widdowfield 2000). By acknowledging that the researcher is part of her research environment, something feminists have long argued, they ask us to embrace the emotional ambiguity of determining ethical best practices ‘in the field’. Sara Smith challenges the boundedness of ethics by highlighting the colonial resonances of the contemporary turn to ‘the intimate’ in feminist geopolitics and related fields (Pratt and Rosner 2006; Smith 2012). Smith discusses how her positionality as researcher and as a member of a Ladakh family shaped her emotional encounters in the field between herself and women belonging to different religions, ethnicities and nations. Smith argues that for her the key challenge of intimate research is producing written accounts about such intimate encounters in a way that does justice to the complexity, confidences and nuances of people’s intimate stories. In the final article of this section, Dana Cuomo and Vanessa Massaro reclaim the practice of boundary making as a feminist intervention against a recent tendency to aim to break down boundaries in feminist research (Hyndman 2001; Sharp and Dowler 2011). In relationships that blur the line between research, personal and professional, drawing clearly defined lines around where, when, and how research occurs can function to empower everyone involved in the research to be part of shaping the representation and interpretation of ‘the field’ being studied. Furthermore, as Cuomo’s fieldwork highlights, such bounding can also protect the emotional safety of the researcher if they choose to study emotionally difficult topics. ‘Emotions are what move us’ (Ahmed 2004a, 27); they move us to think about and contribute to processes of social change. We opened this introduction with a description of how emotions drew Patty Kelly into her research in the Galactic Zone. In her conclusion to Lydia’s Open Door, Kelly (2008) returns to emotions as a motivation for research in general. She is inspired by the faith, defiance, and dignity that endure even the midst of such extraordinary constraining circumstances. And it is these things – faith, defiance, and dignity, along with the realization that we’ve created this place and time and so can change them – that encourage imaginings of something better. (213) Like Kelly, we use emotions to help us understand what is and imagine something better. Reflecting on our emotional entanglements during research is not, therefore, an aim in itself. Rather, we imagine it as part of a wider feminist practice that aspires to contribute to social change. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the contributors to this special issue for their enthusiasm for the collective project of this themed section; we are indebted to their willingness to delve into their personal research experiences in such critical and insightful ways. We would also like to thank the editorial board of Gender, Place and Culture for their belief in this project, and Pamela Moss, in particular, for her invaluable support and guidance in the writing of this introduction. Finally, Faria and Mollett are grateful to Linda Peake for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of their piece. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes 1. Email: carolin.schurr@geo.uzh.ch 2. Member of the PAN. 6 N. Laliberté and C. Schurr Notes on contributors Nicole Laliberté is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada. Nicole is a feminist geopolitical geographer and studies the intersection of development and militarization in northern Uganda. She also studies anti-oppression pedagogies in and beyond the classroom. Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 06:47 09 January 2015 Carolin Schurr is a Branco Weiss Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Carolin is a feminist political and economic geographer and studies the expansion of markets of assisted reproduction and transnational surrogacy in Mexico. References Abbott, Dina. 2006. “Disrupting the ‘Whiteness’ of Fieldwork in Geography.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 27 (3): 326– 341. Ahmed, Sara. 2004a. “Collective Feelings.” Theory, Culture and Society 21 (2): 25 – 42. Ahmed, Sara. 2004b. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bondi, Liz. 2005. “The Place of Emotions in Research: From Partitioning Emotion and Reason to the Emotional Dynamics of Research Relationships.” In Emotional Geographies, edited by Davidson Joyce, Bondi Liz, and Smith Mick, 231– 246. Aldershot: Ashgate. Coffey, Amanda. 1999. The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage. Cupples, Julie. 2002. “The Field as a Landscape of Desire: Sex and Sexuality in Geographical Fieldwork.” Area 34 (4): 382– 390. Dewsbury, James, and Simon Naylor. 2002. “Practising Geographical Knowledge: Fields, Bodies and Dissemination.” Area 34 (3): 253 –260. Diprose, Gradon, Amanda Thomas, and Renee Rushton. 2013. “Desiring More: Complicating Understandings of Sexuality in Research Processes.” Area 45 (3): 292– 298. Hyndman, Jennifer. 2001. “The Field as Here and Now, Not There and Then.” Geographical Review 91 (1– 2): 262– 272. Kelly, Patty. 2008. Lydia’s Open Door: Inside Mexico’s Most Modern Brothel. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kobayashi, Audrey. 1994. “Coloring the Field: Gender, ‘Race’, and the Politics of Fieldwork.” The Professional Geographer 46 (1): 73 – 90. Longhurst, Robyn, and Lynda Johnston. 2014. “Bodies, Gender, Place and Culture: 21 Years On.” Gender, Place and Culture 21 (3): 267–278. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. McCormack, Derek. 2006. “For the Love of Pipes and Cables: A Response to Deborah Thien.” Area 38 (3): 330– 332. Nagar, Richa. 2002. “Footloose Researchers, ‘Traveling’ Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 9 (2): 179–186. Nagar, Richa, and Susan Geiger. 2007. “Reflexivity and Positionality in Feminist Fieldwork Revisited.” In Politics and Practice in Economic Geography, edited by Tickell Adam, Eric Sheppard, Jamie Peck, and Trevor Barnes, 267– 278. London: Sage. Pain, Rachel. 2009. “Globalized Fear? Towards an Emotional Geopolitics.” Progress in Human Geography 33 (4): 466– 486. Pratt, Geraldine, and Victoria Rosner. 2006. “Introduction: The Global and the Intimate.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34 (1/2): 13 –24. Punch, Samantha. 2012. “Hidden Struggles of Fieldwork: Exploring the Role and Use of Field Diaries.” Emotion, Space and Society 5 (2): 86– 93. Sharp, Joanne. 2009. “Geography and Gender: What Belongs to Feminist Geography? Emotion, Power and Change.” Progress in Human Geography 33 (1): 74 – 80. Sharp, Joanne, and Lorraine Dowler. 2011. “Framing the Field.” In A Companion to Social Geography, edited by Vincent Del Casino Jr., Mary E. Thomas, Paul Cloke, and Ruth Panelli, 146– 160. Oxford: Blackwell. Sharp, Joanne, Routledge Paul, Philo Chris, and Ronan Paddison. 2000. Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance. New York: Routledge. Smith, Sara. 2012. “Intimate Geopolitics: Religion, Marriage, and Reproductive Bodies in Leh, Ladakh.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102 (6): 1511– 1528. Gender, Place and Culture 7 Downloaded by [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] at 06:47 09 January 2015 Spencer, Paul. 1992. “Automythologies and the Reconstruction of Ageing.” In Anthropology and Autobiography, edited by Okely Judith and Helen Callaway, 50 – 62. London: Routledge. Thien, Deborah. 2005. “After or Beyond Feeling? A Consideration of Affect and Emotion in Geography.” Area 37 (4): 450–454. Tolia-Kelly, Divya. 2006. “Affect – An Ethnocentric Encounter? Exploring the ‘Universalist’ Imperative of Emotional/Affectual Geographies.” Area 38 (2): 213–217. Valentine, Gill. 2007. “Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography.” The Professional Geographer 59 (1): 10 – 21. Widdowfield, Rebekah. 2000. “The Place of Emotions in Academic Research.” Area 32 (2): 199–208. Wright, Melissa. 2006. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. London: Routledge. ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS La pegajosidad de las emociones en el campo: la complejización de las metodologı́as feministas Esta editorial teoriza los enredos emocionales que constituyen espacios del trabajo de campo. Basándonos en la noción de emociones pegajosas y circulantes de Sara Ahmed, desarrollamos el concepto de enredos emocionales como forma de involucrarnos con las implicancias metodológicas del giro emocional en la investigación geográfica. Más que proveer evidencia empı́rica para la investigación sobre geografı́as emocionales, argumentamos que prestar atención a las emociones en el trabajo de campo tiene el potencial de revigorizar las prácticas feministas de la reflexividad y la posicionalidad. Además, una participación critica con las emociones puede ofrecer técnicas epistemológicas nóveles para estudiar las polı́ticas de producción de conocimiento y los paisajes de poder en los que, como investigadorxs, estamos insertxs. Como lo demuestran los trabajos de esta sección temática, los análisis de los enredos emocionales en la investigación plantean cuestiones crı́ticas con respecto a las relaciones de poder, la ética de la investigación y el bienestar tanto de los participantes en la investigación como de los investigadores. También hacen visibilizan cómo las relaciones de poder del sexismo, racismo, capitalismo, nacionalismo e imperialismo permean y constituyen los espacios emocionales del campo. Utilizamos la noción de los enredos emocionales como una forma de situar los cinco artı́culos de la sección temática y para resaltar la contribución de cada trabajo a los debates sobre el campo emocional. Palabras claves: metodologı́a feminista; etnografı́a; campo; emociones; interseccionalidad 田野中的情绪黏着性：复杂化女性主义方法论 本论文集理论化构组田野空间的情绪牵连。我们运用莎拉．阿赫美（Sara Ahmed） 的“黏着与循环的情绪”之见解，发展情绪牵连的概念，作为涉入地理学研究情绪转 向的方法论意涵之途径。我们超越提供情绪地理学研究的经验证据，主张对于田 野中的情绪之关注，具有潜力再度復兴女性主义的反身性与位置性之实践。此 外，批判性地涉入情绪，能够对身为研究者的我们所身处的知识生产政治与权力 地景之研究，提供创新的认识论技巧。如同本主题论文集的文章显示，分析研究 中的情绪牵连，对于权力关係、研究伦理，以及研究参与者和研究者本身之福 祉，提出批判性的质问。这些文章同时让性别歧视、种族主义、资本主义、国族 主义及帝国主义之权力关係如何贯穿并构组田野中的情绪空间得以被看见。我们 运用情绪牵连的概念，作为将五篇文章置放于本主题论文集之方法，并凸显每篇 文章对于情绪性田野之辩论的贡献。 关键词：女性主义方法论; 民族志; 田野; 情绪; 相互交织性