Caught in the middle: early career researchers, public health and the emotional production of research

ABSTRACT

In this short report, I discuss how public health research, its assessment, and its dissemination outside the academy are produced, in part, through emotional circumstances. Using current debates on e-cigarettes as an example, I show that researchers find themselves uncomfortably positioned in complicated moral and affective landscapes, often making it difficult to represent the nuance of their research. I draw from the experiences and discussions of early career researchers to argue that this pressure can be intensified by the influence of senior colleagues, research communities and wider publics. While the social construction of knowledge has been acknowledged within much disciplinary introspection, the emotional and affective dimensions of knowledge production are perhaps under-appreciated and it is those dimensions that this report seeks to foreground.

KEYWORDS:

• Tobacco research
• electronic cigarettes
• early career researcher
• emotion

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge all of the researchers who took part in the seminar event in 2016, subsequent discussions and kept patience with me through many drafts of this report. I would also like to acknowledge the contributions in editing, commenting, and discussing this report of Katherine Smith, Sarah Hill, Marisa de Andrade, Heide Weishaar, Ben Hawkins, Leonie S Brose, Duncan Gillespie and Theresa Ikegwuonu. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Critical Public Health for their constructive, detailed and thought provoking comments on earlier drafts of the report.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This paper builds on discussions from the ESRC seminar series `Tobacco and Alcohol: Policy challenges for public and global health’ (Grant No: ES/L001284/1; esrc.ac.uk), in which Sarah Hill and Katherine Smith (both University of Edinburgh) are co-investigators.