Affective reflexivity: encounters of affects in the material labor of fieldwork

Abstract

This article is a reflective endeavor on the affective dimensions of my fieldwork, which explores Asian migrant women’s desires for educational success in the United States and South Korea. My encounter with affective and material forces pervasive in the field triggers affective reflexivity that supports my own struggle against the (human) tendency to separate between my epistemology and ontology as well as other dualisms I confronted during the fieldwork. Unlike posthumanists’ suspicion around authentic ways of knowing using the method of reflexivity in traditional qualitative inquiry, I contend that affective reflexivity is an inevitable process that allows me to discern affective, active, or vibrant data and helps with understanding reflexivity as a “material” labor to augment ethical accountability and methodological rigor.

Keywords:

• affect
• reflexivity
• Deleuze
• posthumanist research
• feminist ethics

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Professor Nancy Lesko, Teachers College, Columbia University for her comments, which improved this manuscript. I thank Dr. Erica Colmenares at California State University at Chico and Dr. Lydia Namatende-Sakwa for reading the manuscript. I also thank anonymous reviewers for their close readings of my work, which helped me improve this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

EunKyoung Chung

EunKyoung Chung is an instructor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she received her doctorate in 2017. Her interests include transnational migration, posthumanist approaches to curriculum, post-qualitative research in education, posthumanist theories of affect, and new materialism feminist theories.