Studying Intimacies that Matter: Affective Assemblages in Research Interviews with Forced Migrants

ABSTRACT

This article explores methodological challenges in studying intimacies through analysing affective assemblages in research interviews. The participants in this study are forced migrants trying to reunite with their transnational families. Building on scholarship where affect is considered precognitive, meaning that it happens prior to emotions, this article approaches affective knowledge through methodological exploration. The analysis explores two research encounters from a data set which include interviews with 55 forced migrants in Finland, some of which were done together with a research assistant working as a translator. In addition, data include the researcher’s notes on re-listening to six interviews. The research question is how affect influences research interview situations and what effects these affective assemblages have on all involved. Additionally, the interest is in what these assemblages reveal about empathy and difference. The results show that intimate relations may manifest through a shared, intense affective assemblage where the borders of the researcher and participant become blurred. Difficult experiences of losses and injustices in the realm of intimacies may also cause affective dissonance. In these research encounters, difference between the researcher(s) and the participant(s) is left unsolved. The unresolved difference may reveal power relations between the researcher and participant.

KEYWORDS:

• Family separation
• affect
• atmosphere
• transnational families
• forced migration

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the three research assistants who made this study possible: Ahmed Zaidan, Zeinab Karimi and Edris Bayan Shenwarai. I am also grateful for the valuable comments which I received from the gender studies research seminar at the University of Oulu. Special thanks for detailed comments to Johanna Leinonen, Tuija Huuki and Seija Jalagin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under Grant 308249.

Notes on contributors

Johanna Hiitola

Johanna Hiitola has a title of Docent (comparable to Associate Professor) in Social and Public Policy and Social Work and she is a University Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research includes intersectional feminist family studies, forced migration studies, citizenship scholarship and, most recently, research on family separation of forced migrants. She is the first editor of Family Life in Transition. Borders, Transnational Mobility and Welfare Society in Nordic Countries (Routledge).