Researching the researcher: producing emotionally-sensed knowledge in migration research

ABSTRACT

Reflexivity has been central to recent debates in migration studies, focusing on how migration scholarship can become more equitable, inclusive, and attuned to the power dynamics inherent in research processes. In this article, we advance these debates by demonstrating the role of emotions as crucial tools for knowledge production. Drawing on feminist qualitative research, we introduce our emotionally-sensed approach to account for the role of emotions across the different, yet inter-related, stages of the research process. More specifically, we operationalise the processes of constructing, generating and producing emotionally-sensed knowledge and illustrate them with examples from our ethnographic research on the impact of Brexit on EU migrants in the UK. The paper makes the case for emotionally-sensed knowledge as part of the reflexive turn in migration studies and provides strategies to more consistently incorporate researchers’ emotions in processes of knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• reflexivity
• knowledge production
• emotionally-sensed knowledge
• power relations
• migration research

Introduction

Traditionally, emotions have been seen as unwelcome intrusions in rigorous academic projects, often resulting in concerted efforts to desensitise research outputs. Such sanitised and often disembodied research accounts have been long critiqued by scholars who have recognised the importance of emotions and embodiment for human understanding (Ahmed 2004; Burkitt 1997; Hochschild 1983; Silvey 2004; Vacchelli 2018). Yet, while researchers’ bodies have been considered, their emotions have continuously been seen as individual issues, accompanied by warnings about narcissistic indulgence that may lead to silencing participants’ voices (Widdowfield 2000, 202). In short, emotions have been seen as a hindrance to “objective” knowledge production, as irrelevant or, have been subsumed into wider considerations of embodied knowledges.

In this article we draw on our ongoing research on the impact of Brexit on EU migrants in the UK to further debates on emotions in migration studies, focusing specifically on the role of researchers within what has now been recognised as a field infused with emotions (Borrelli 2022). We thus aim to contribute to ongoing discussions about de-colonising migration studies and interrogating the categories, questions and problematisations that currently prevail in this field (Amelina 2022; Schinkel 2018). Whereas theoretical debates on the ethical, epistemological and political challenges involved in doing migration research are being advanced (Dahinden and Anderson 2021), less attention has been paid to how to translate these debates into research practice. To fill this gap, we develop an emotionally-sensed approach to interrogate the role of emotions in knowledge production throughout all stages of an empirical research project.

We begin by highlighting key lessons from feminist scholarship on the role of emotional reflexivity in qualitative research, before outlining the key tenets of the reflexive turn in migration studies. We then bring these two bodies of literature together to outline our approach that offers practical lessons for understanding processes of (i) constructing (designing the study), (ii) generating (conducting fieldwork) and (iii) producing (analysing data and presenting findings) emotionally-sensed knowledge in migration studies. These inter-related stages of the research process are then further operationalised and illustrated with examples from our project on the impact of Brexit on Italian and Bulgarian migrants in the UK, thus extending the consideration of emotions beyond border studies where reflections on their relevance are more advanced (Parmar 2023; Vrabiescu 2022). The conclusion highlights the need to include researchers as actors in the emotion-laden migration field, emphasising the value of emotionally-sensed knowledge for producing situated knowledges that seek to challenge, rather than reproduce, othering and racializing discourses (De Genova 2013; Schinkel 2018).

Emotional reflexivity in qualitative research

Feminist scholarship has long critiqued disembodied scientific knowledge in the social sciences, emphasising the importance of emotions and partiality in knowledge production (Silvey 2004). Haraway’s (1988) work on situated knowledges has been pivotal in understanding the merits of partiality and embodiment. According to Haraway, (feminist) objectivity focuses on partial perspectives, limited location and situated knowledges as “[i]t allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (1988, 583). With regards to empirical research, Okely has argued how fieldwork should be viewed as “experienced” and not “conducted” (2012, 5), noting that “[t]he fieldworker works through the body, emotions and not cerebral distance” (2012, 78). This chimes with Ahmed’s (2004) focus on the “doing” of emotions, which enables us to explore the links between emotion, power and embodiment, highlighting the social and relational character of emotions and their productive nature, especially in relation to (in)justice. Learning through the senses does not preclude objectivity; on the contrary, it helps to build awareness of the phenomenon under scrutiny and our position within it by combining knowledge and experience. Objectivity is achieved through reflexivity.

Considerations of the role of emotions in the research process have initially been brought to the fore in relation to ethics, and the emotional harm that research can inflict on research participants (Mason 2018). When the researcher has been the centre of attention, most studies have explored the emotional labour inherent in fieldwork and its toll on researchers, especially when researching sensitive issues (Dickson-Swift et al. 2007; 2009; Evans et al. 2017). Increasingly however, scholars have argued that emotions always shape knowledge production and affect both researchers and participants across the research cycle. This has prompted new discussions about the importance of emotional reflexivity and the role of emotion in knowledge production (Holland 2007; Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, and Kemmer 2001), with Mauthner and Doucet (2003) arguing for the importance of extending reflexivity to data analysis and reminding us that our intellectual and emotional reactions to other people constitute sources of knowledge. This view is shared by Holland (2007), who asserts the impossibility to study emotions with emotion-free methodologies, thus highlighting the integral role of emotions in knowledge production in general.

Importantly, Hubbard et al.’s work highlights strategies to effectively utilise “emotionally-sensed knowledge”, which “refers to the epistemology of emotions, where emotion contributes towards understanding and knowledge” (2001, 121). They argue that the emotional labour required to establish rapport with participants influences researchers’ interpretations of respondents’ lives, the data collected and, in some cases, their personal and professional identities. They demonstrate not only how respondents’ emotions can be used as data but also how emotionality in one interview may affect how researchers manage emotions in the next. Crucially, they illustrate how researchers can use their emotional responses to a participant’s experience as sources of data through the following questions: “Why is what the respondent is saying making me angry? Why is the respondent not upset about their current situation? What does this tell me about how the respondent makes sense of his and her life?” (Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, and Kemmer 2001, 131).

McQueeney and Lavelle further elaborate on the practical side of emotional reflexivity by discussing emotional labour in the field as a way to “connect the dots between personal lives and the larger historical, economic and social relations in which they are embedded” (2017, 102). They detail how they transformed their unwanted emotions into analytical insights through three strategies: (1) contextualising emotions, which meant stepping back from their negative reactions and focusing instead on the larger socio-political contexts affecting their participants’ lives, paying particular attention to systems of inequality; (2) unmasking power in the research process, which involved conceptualising emotions as traces of larger power relations and using them for asking new questions and testing hypotheses; (3) linking emotions to their personal biographies, which allowed them to see how the latter shaped their feelings and those of their participants (McQueeney and Lavelle 2017). Such conceptualisation of emotional reflexivity chimes with Gray’s (2008) argument that reflexivity should interweave the personal and the structural, thus moving beyond reflexivity as a disembodied cognitive practice (Burkitt 1997).

Finally, feminist scholars have highlighted how reflexivity and emotions also need to be extended to the relationship between the researcher and the object of study. Mauthner and Doucet (2003) have highlighted the importance of the institutional context of research training, reflecting on the ways it shapes methodological thinking and approaches. Gray (2008) takes this aspect of reflexivity one step further by exploring how emotions and feeling also shape the object of study. She argues that feeling and emotion are powerful motivational factors in the design and conduct of research projects; shape the relationship between the researcher and their object of study and their understanding and interpretation (Gray 2008, 937). In her view, knowledge claims need to be located at the intersection of feeling, intellect, and politics.

In summary, feminist scholarship has emphasised the importance of situated and embodied knowledges. It has shown how emotions affect knowledge production across all stages of research and it has outlined practical ways to achieve emotionally-sensed knowledge. It has also demonstrated how reflexivity and emotional labour can be used to link the personal and the structural, highlighting the importance of the institutional and socio-historical context in which research takes place.

Reflexivity in migration studies

In comparison, reflexivity has been relatively less prominent in migration studies, which have historically been dominated by positivistic approaches often interested in comparative designs with a policy dimension (Favell 2019; Schinkel 2018; 2019). Until recently, reflexivity in migration studies was considered mainly methodologically, focusing on the positionality of the researcher and their insider/outsider status vis-à-vis the participants. Such research has recognised that the role of an insider is neither a straightforward one, nor one that remains unchanged throughout the research process (Burgess 1984). As Moroșanu (2015) notes, in migration studies insiderness has often been closely associated with (primarily) shared ethnicity between researcher and participants. Increasingly, however, scholars have not only critiqued the overt privilege of shared ethnicity but have also highlighted the importance of adopting a more intersectional perspective (Moroșanu 2015; Nowicka and Ryan 2015). However, influenced by post – and de-colonial scholars (De Genova 2013; Garelli and Tazzioli 2013), migration studies have recently experienced a more profound reflexive turn, which has questioned the contours of the discipline itself and how the objects of study have been conceptualised and imagined (Dahinden, Fischer, and Menet 2021; Ruokonen-Engler and Siouti 2016), with some arguing for a departure from neo-colonial forms of knowledge production (Favell 2019; Schinkel 2018; 2019). These debates include the desire to move beyond methodological nationalism, questioning the nation-state as the dominant epistemological category for understanding migration (Anderson 2019; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002); critiques of groupism (Grzymała-Kazłowska and Phillimore 2018) and methodological ethnicity against studies that homogenise groups and privilege one axe of difference (ethnicity) over others (Nowicka and Ryan 2015). There has also been much reflection about the tendency to “migrantise” issues by over-attributing difference to mobile populations, and thus inadvertently reproducing and creating artificial distinctions between “us” and “them” (Dahinden 2016; Dahinden and Anderson 2021; Dahinden, Fischer, and Menet 2021).

Although important, these two strands of reflexive migration research have developed in parallel, leaving the intersection between theoretical and methodological aspects of knowledge production largely unexplored. We believe that further attention needs to be paid to the inter-related ways in which both abstract and situational considerations pertaining to knowledge production are operationalised, not only when designing research, but also when conducting it and analysing the data.

A small number of migration scholars have started to grapple with these issues. Dahinden, Fischer, and Menet (2021, 536) have emphasised the importance for researchers “to critically reflect on their research objects and theories, the relations they establish in the field, the data they generate and their interpretations of this data”. They have specifically focused on issues of categorisation when conducting empirical research, concluding that categories are perspectival, political and performative with participants engaging in self-reflexivity to challenge the categories they are presented with. Although they acknowledge that reflexivity is an important tool for the co-construction of knowledge, their work privileges the reflexivity of the participants. Amelina (2022) too is concerned with bridging theoretical and methodological debates in knowledge production re-invoking the role of the researcher. Her work moves the discussion away from a focus on (individual) positionality to one on (collective) standpoints, which aim to avoid the essentialisation of the researcher based on specific traits and biographies. Amelina (2022) proposes the concept of “standpoint reflexivity” which illuminates the collective (usually politicised) standpoints from which knowledge is produced, which are often muted in the name of neutral and “objective” research prevalent in migration studies. Finally, Kalir, Achermann, and Rosset (2019) argue that in the contested field of migration control, researchers need to reflect on how negotiations around getting access shape the kind of data that can be gathered and ultimately the knowledge that is produced. The risk, in their view, is that academics, in their effort to be allowed entrance by state authorities, compromise their research designs, becoming complicit in the reproduction of the migration control field they wished to critique. We agree with these authors about the importance of standpoint and ethical reflexivity. However, one aspect that remains unexplored concerns the role of emotions.

Even though migration scholarship has gone through its own emotional turn, the exploration of emotions has largely been confined to three key domains. First is the role of emotions in participants’ accounts of their migratory journeys, settlement, and family relationships. Most recently, this has been aptly captured by the literature on Brexit (among many, see Gawłewicz and Sotkasiira 2020; Lulle, Moroșanu, and King 2018; Zontini and Genova 2022). The second domain is more methodological in nature, exploring field encounters in relation to positionality (Moroșanu 2015), with emotions acknowledged as part of self-reflexivity only in passing. Recently, however, critical border and postcolonial studies have started exploring the affective dimension of statecraft (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015), illustrating how the migration apparatus is infused with emotions (Eggebø 2013; Vrabiescu 2022). Scholars have highlighted the productivity of emotions in terms of power, othering, and racialisation (Ahmed 2004; Borrelli 2022), illuminating, for instance, the affective contours of race in policing migration (Parmar 2023). However, little attention has yet been paid to the role of researchers within this emotional field, how emotions may “stick” to them as embodied (migrantised) subjects (Ahmed 2004) and how emotions shape what they do while they attempt to navigate this field.

In this article, we bring together insights on how to produce emotionally-sensed knowledge drawn from feminist qualitative research with migration studies’ concern with categorisation, the relationships between the researcher and their object of study and the importance of positional and standpoint reflexivity. We do so by introducing our emotionally-sensed approach as a heuristic device to account for the role of emotions in shaping researchers’ practices across all stages of the research process.

Developing emotionally-sensed knowledge in migration research

Below we offer a how-to-guide on emotional reflexivity in migration research. In line with feminist theory (Ahmed 2004), we argue that both participants’ and researchers’ emotions are sources of knowledge as emotionality is co-produced not only within fieldwork contexts but also beyond them. Such contextual sensitivity requires reflexive engagement and consideration of the relationship between the researcher and the object of study, fieldwork and data analysis (see Figure 1). We thus agree with Blakely that emotionally engaged research is guided by the ethics of care (2007, 62), where emotions should be understood as intra-subjective or a “convective medium in which research, researchers and research subjects are necessarily immersed” (Bondi 2005 quoted in Doucet and Mauthner 2012, 162).

Figure 1. Our emotionally-sensed framework.

In reflexively accounting for the role of emotions in migration research, we must explore the inter-related stages of constructing (formulating the topic, initial categorisation and design), generating (all aspects related to fieldwork) and producing (analysing the data) emotionally-sensed knowledge.

In practice, our approach entails considering first our entanglements with the object of study (Gray 2008; Ruokonen-Engler and Siouti 2016) as well as our own positionality and standpoints (Amelina 2022; Dahinden, Fischer, and Menet 2021). Here, this is related to our situatedness as both critical migration scholars and as EU migrants who were undergoing processes of migrantisation (Amelina 2021) in the period in which the research we are considering took place. This step also involved a critical reflection of the categories we used and how they were resisted and/or appropriated by our participants and how their self-reflexivity impacted on our own sense of self as well as the design of the study. We carefully considered our interest in the topic and involvement in fieldwork as “[…] emotionally mediated apprehensions of the object of study and the practice of critical reflexivity cannot be separated when conducting research” (Gray 2008, 947). We asked similar questions to those of Ruokonen-Engler and Siouti (2016), including what personal experience did we have with the research topic? How did we come to study the specific topic in the field? What was our relationship to the topic being investigated? Finally, we considered the social and institutional context within which the research was being produced (Mauthner and Doucet 2003), something which is rarely explored in debates about insider/outsider status in migration studies but whose importance has been highlighted by feminist researchers.

The second step entails considering how emotions manifested themselves in fieldwork and how we turned them into analytical tools. Here we drew as much on researchers’ emotions and senses as we did on those of the participants. We captured how people talk about and do emotions, including reflections on our own emotional reactions to their responses and the fieldwork encounters. For us, this has included on the one hand, asking questions such as “What are people’s emotional journeys in making sense of Brexit? How is Brexit felt daily? How are Brexit emotions narrated?”. On the other hand, we asked ourselves similar questions to those of Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, and Kemmer (2001, 127–130), including: why are we empathising with some respondents more than with others? Why does this situation make us feel uncomfortable? Following McQueeney and Lavelle’s approach (2017), we tried to interrogate these emotions by contextualising them, by using them to understand power relations manifesting in the field and by exploring the links they had with our biographies and our standpoints. In interpreting our and our participants’ responses, we also recognised that emotions are culturally produced (Evans et al. 2017) and that our fieldwork encounters and reactions were shaped by specific cultural scripts which include how emotions should be managed and expressed (Hochschild 1983).

The third step concerns transparency regarding interpreting perspectives in data analysis. We used both our theoretical and emotionally embodied knowledge as a starting point to navigate the research, helping us to ask new questions and problematise the responses we were receiving, as well as offering initial clues for data analysis. This step is strongly linked with the previous one as the emotional labour that occurred during fieldwork continued to be used as analytical tool to further illuminate our topic of study and shape our writing. In deploying this approach, we aimed to produce structural/personal reflexive accounts of the kind advocated by Gray (2008), which went beyond individual accounts of positionality (Amelina 2022) and shed light on how we produced our emotionally-sensed knowledge (Evans et al. 2017; Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, and Kemmer 2001). We paid attention to emotions that stemmed from our biographies and positionality (in terms of our own migration journeys and experiences as well as our intersectional locations) but also from our standpoints as critical migration scholars interested in social justice. In what follows we illustrate how we used emotions throughout the research process as tools for knowledge production in migration research.

Constructing emotionally-sensed knowledge (object of study)

To reflect on the role of our emotions as tools for knowledge production, we need to start by reflecting on why we were “moved” (Gray 2008) to study our topic. We had both previously studied the settlement and sense of belonging among EU migrants in the UK and were already interested in how these experiences were affected by processes of nationalist revival. Brexit intensified this interest from both an academic and a personal perspective. With regards to the former, we wanted to develop knowledge that made a difference in terms of social justice, documenting the impact of Brexit on EU migrants (Genova and Zontini 2020; Zontini and Genova 2022). We approached the project from our standpoint as critical migration scholars, aiming to enact the “doing migration approach” (Amelina 2021) by studying the social transformation of Italians and Bulgarians from EU citizens into “immigrants” through privileging their own ways of sense-making. However, understanding how mobile individuals are turned into migrants “through a variety of routinised institutional, organisational and interactive [… .] routines” (Amelina 2021, 2), was not just an academic interest for us, stemming from a gap in the literature. It was also a desire to understand an experience that was happening to us too.

As an Italian and a Bulgarian studying the migrant groups we belong to in the UK, debates about insider/outsider status might seem relevant here. However, what emerged as salient was not (dis)similarity to our participants in terms of ethnicity, gender and age but the fact that we were directly affected by the events we wanted to investigate. We were trying to make sense of them as they unfolded and as they challenged our own settlement rights in the UK. In our previous work, we described Brexit “[…] as a complex affective event that has simultaneously unlocked feelings of joy linked to ideas of national sovereignty as well as fear and resentment towards migrants and everything European […]” (Zontini and Genova 2022, 643). These negative emotions “stuck” to us (Ahmed 2004) and our participants as migrant subjects, shaping our experiences. For us and our research project, this also manifested itself in an institutional context where there was initially no protection or support for EU migrant workers who had to navigate their changing status individually. This was compounded by a general level of distrust for those who studied topics associated with Brexit, including calls to make lists of EU employees in large organisations. Doing a project focused on Brexit, while simultaneously navigating the processes of securing our own rights in the UK, resulted in a lot of anxiety, frustration, uncertainty and anger. Such negative emotions, as Gray has highlighted, were “powerful motivational factors in the design and conduct of [our] research project” and “shaped the relationships between the researcher and his/her object of study as well as understanding and interpretation” (2008, 937). Put simply, our emotions not only informed and intersected with our standpoint but were also central to our research direction and fieldwork, something we reflexively considered throughout.

Our original aim was to compare the settlement experiences of migrant workers before and after Brexit. We initially designed the project based on a comparison of nationality groups – Italians and Bulgarians as examples of “old” and “new” (in terms of length of EU membership) Europeans. Wary of the academic critique of groupism and the tendency to privilege ethnic/nationality categorisations (Moroșanu 2015; Nowicka and Ryan 2015) and intending this as a starting point, we adopted an intersectional perspective that was attuned to other axes of differentiation. We thus included a diverse range of people in our study and continuously interrogated how they were categorising themselves.

Despite thinking that nationality (associated with length of EU membership) would bear importance to understanding our participants’ experiences, it was not the most salient distinction. We quickly realised that their engagement with specific categories was an act of resistance to the wider Brexit context of emboldened European hostility. Respectively, some rejected the category “migrant” whereas others downplayed the role of Brexit on “people like them”. Our initial surprise with their positions forced us to question further what they were doing with their talk rather than just focus on what they were saying. While we initially felt upset that some of them did not express what in our view was sufficient anger about what was happening to them, we became more reflexive about the different strategies that participants were adopting to navigate the new order, which for some individuals involved reinvigorated efforts at inclusion based on the management of their emotions (Zontini and Genova 2022). These reflections, which also accounted for the wider context, helped us re-classify our participants: from an initial categorisation based on nationality (“old” and “new” Europeans) to one focused on when/why their migrations occurred (“Eurostars”, post-accession, crisis migrants) to a subsequent one focused on the emotional displays they manifested (betrayal, ambivalence and indifference). This demonstrates both the need for iterative reflexive consideration of participants’ categorisations and the key role of emotions in processes of knowledge production.

Generating emotionally-sensed knowledge in the field

Emotion management has long been key in reflexive fieldwork accounts, especially in relation to discussing researchers’ emotional labour when studying difficult or controversial topics (Blakeley 2007; Dickson-Swift et al. 2007; 2009; McQueeney and Lavelle 2017). We contend that migration studies make no exception. Researchers’ emotional labour in the field is not simply an unwanted or unexpected by-product of fieldwork to be managed, but rather an important aspect of the research encounter that can be scrutinised to generate emotionally-sensed knowledge. Below we share some examples of the emotional dimensions of our fieldwork, outlining instances when we experienced discomfort, uneasiness, embarrassment or frustration as these emotions prompted us to question what was provoking these feelings, why were we feeling this way and how this was impacting on the wider process of knowledge production. Drawing on McQueeney and Lavelle (2017), we noted the contexts within which specific social norms and our own dispositions interacted with those of the participants, thus highlighting the role of emotions and the power dynamics within which they were embedded when shaping data generation.

The first example relates to building rapport with participants which is generally associated with positive emotions of making the participant feel comfortable, the expectation being that this frames the rest of the research encounter, thus yielding richer data. Yet, such simplistic assumptions not only minimise the efforts required to establish positive emotions but also fail to consider the relational aspect of emotions and that negative emotions can be important epistemological triggers. An example is a pre-interview conversation between Elena and a young, male participant:

Daniel: “I agreed to chat to you, but can you tell me what this is all about”.

Elena: “Of course. I am a lecturer at the University of Nottingham and … ”

Daniel: “You’re a lecturer?” [looking surprised]

Elena: [Here we go again, I thought, getting a bit annoyed]“Yes.”

Daniel: “Really?!” [even more surprised] “Isn’t there some sort of an age requirement or a barrier”

Elena: “ … No, why?”

Daniel: “Well, you are a young girl … I mean you look a bit young to be a lecturer at university”.

Elena: “I am not as young as I look. I have a BA, MA and a PhD” [as I was saying this, I did notice that I instinctively stressed the number of degrees I have instead of stating how old I was. Perhaps I was trying to make a point?]. (Memo, late July 2018).

This research memo clearly highlights the strong presence of not only explicitly recorded emotions in Elena’s reflections but also their implicit operation, evident in the curt, affirmative answer to the participant’s question about her job. Here this informal chat rather than aiding in making the participant feel at ease resulted in the researcher’s feeling of discomfort. A closer look reveals how the participant’s surprise provoked Elena’s annoyance, triggering a justification of age that clearly signalled an attempt to reaffirm her professionalism (by stating the name of her workplace) and, in fact, the deservingness of her status through outlining her degree qualifications.

The second example also refers to a situation of discomfort provoked by a (male) participant questioning the researcher’s professionalism. In Elisabetta’s case, this took place during the interview when an Italian participant, noticing her eagerness to find out how Brexit had impacted him, in giving her a narrative that was different from what he thought she wanted, stopped and asked, “are you going to put this in your project?”. This startled Elisabetta at the time as she felt a mixture of shame and unsettlement in thinking that he was questioning her “objectivity” and her ability to portray his views when different from hers. Similar to the example above, this moment of discomfort also prompted her to reflect more rigorously on her positionality and how it shaped her views on the subject she was researching.

These two examples, questioning in one case our credentials and in another our research integrity, provoked subsequent reflexive conversations regarding the wider context of the research, the power dynamics within it and the links to the researchers’ biographies. In Elena’s case, the encounter had triggered the same defence mechanism that she had employed in multiple everyday experiences, both pre – and post-Brexit, when her right to reside and work as a Bulgarian migrant in Britain was questioned. In Elisabetta’s case, her own experiences of arriving in the country at the height of multiculturalism, which strongly contrasted with the post-referendum environment she witnessed, implicitly translated in her expectation that her Italian participants would share her view of a general deterioration of the attractiveness of the UK as a country of settlement. It was by feeling uncomfortable or offended in the field that we were able to advance in our analysis by making more transparent the differences between our social positionings and those of our participants, highlighting the importance of accounting for privilege. What clearly emerges from these examples is that the process of categorisation is indeed relational and emotional. In considering the emotional labour of fieldwork, it becomes clear how the process of data generation shapes the subsequent data analysis, revealing the interconnectedness of all stages in emotionally-sensed knowledge production.

The process of generating emotionally-sensed knowledge gradually transformed into one of becoming more reflexively attuned to interrogating further the sources of researchers’ (dis)comfort vis-à-vis the participants’ emotional dispositions. Our experiences here differed significantly. For example, Elena encountered participants who heralded Brexit as a “good thing”, which they saw as either serving as a levelling up tool among all Europeans in the UK or as a deterrent to the arrival of “undesirables” often understood in ethnic, socio-economic and legal terms (e.g. Roma, welfare frauds and criminals). Such expressions of “happiness”, combined with overtly racist and classist statements, made her uncomfortable, yet she deliberately chose to suppress her own emotions and leave participants’ accounts unchallenged. While this was mostly driven by her motivation to understand their reasoning in a non-judgmental manner, upon reflection she realised she was also conforming to a cultural script which dictates demonstrating respect for elders as was the case with 46-year-old Krasimir and 55-year-old Lily who had expressed such views. This clearly demonstrates not only the intricate culturally scripted power geometries in co-produced data and emotions but also the temporal dimension of emotional reflexivity.

In contrast, Elisabetta’s fieldwork was rift with accounts of Italians, who like her, felt angered and betrayed by the processes of migrantisation that Brexit had unleashed. She was empathising easily with them, finding their accounts comforting and cathartic. However, she also encountered several participants who expressed gratefulness to be in the country, even though they found themselves in precarious employment, made even more insecure by the protracted Brexit negotiations at the time. Unlike Elena, however, she openly challenged them, which too produced emotional exchanges and rich data. The encounter with Valentina illustrates this well. Valentina had moved to the UK in her 50s with her husband and teenage daughter and found a job in a restaurant. In the interview she consistently emphasised her love for the UK, contending “I never regretted coming [to the UK], never!”. Elisabetta’s surprise at Valentina’s assertions is evident in the recording, captured by her repeatedly stating “really??”. Upon sensing Elisabetta’s surprise, and even scepticism towards her account, Valentina directly challenged her: “You have no idea”. Elisabetta’s reply that many other Italians who have been in the UK a while feel a sense of nostalgia towards Italy was countered by Valentina’s remark: “because you haven’t known the last years!” The most emotional moment happened mid-interview, when Valentina broke into tears and Elisabetta had to reconsider her taken-for-granted ideas:

Elisabetta: What is your relationship with this city?

Valentina: Wonderful! Oh God, I feel like crying.

Elisabetta: Really?? … What is it that you like about this city [sounding very surprised].

Valentina: I’m not joking! Everything! Everything! I’m really grateful to this place, I swear!

Elisabetta: Really?

Valentina: I’m grateful, I’m really grateful!

Elisabetta: Give me some examples of things that you appreciate that you have here and you didn’t have in Italy.

[…]

Valentina: Eh, I can’t give you any examples, I become emotional now. [she begins crying]. Now it will go … . This is the anger I have for Italy!

Elisabetta: You have a lot … .

Valentina: A lot, a lot! I spent 52 years in that place, 52 wasted years, if we had come here when we were 25, 30 years old [the age bracket Elisabetta was when she came], I mean, there are more possibilities, it’s completely different from Italy, thanks’ God! Yes, I’m angry [still crying].

These fieldwork encounters provoked us to discuss the sources of our (dis)comfort, triggering further reflections about both our positionality and our standpoints. This illuminated the power differentials among our participants and ourselves and made us realise that not everyone was in the position to be angry about Brexit. Drawing on McQueeney and Lavelle (2017), we also considered these encounters in their wider social context, simultaneously scrutinising the links with our personal biographies. This then revealed that positive emotions of support for Brexit or gratefulness to be in the country were linked to the participants’ wider pre-migration histories associated with personal and professional struggles in their home countries or experiences of othering once in the UK. The range of emotions our participants displayed actually signalled strategies of resistance towards the wider socio-economic context that had shaped their lives and migratory experiences.

Our joint reflexive conversations helped us to further see how our own migratory experiences were shaping our emotions in the field and approaches to fieldwork. While Elena had experienced years of having to secure her employment and residency rights, Elisabetta had arrived in the UK at the heyday of multiculturalism and European integration. These experiences created both similarity and difference among us and our participants, ultimately producing different sources of (dis)comfort. Yet, as it becomes evident in these examples, researchers’ emotional labour in the field can be a powerful epistemological trigger in the process of knowledge production, as discussed further below.

Producing emotionally-sensed knowledge in data analysis

Our data analysis was multi-staged. This involved firstly creating participant profiles, noting key themes, followed by focusing on how emotions were narrated by participants and embedded in specific contexts (Zontini and Genova 2022). Here we elaborate further on how our emotional readings of specific fieldwork notes and/or interviews translated in how we came to understand and write our data. Using concrete examples, we highlight the relational and contextual nature of emotions experienced with and between researchers and participants, noting our reflexive considerations of those shared moments of emotionality over time.

In practical terms, this process had already commenced while we were still in the field, as previously illustrated. Keeping detailed fieldwork diaries and having regular reflexive conversations, were useful techniques to not only capture the emotions that we were experiencing at the time, but also to subsequently revisit and question our own emotional dispositions in specific contexts. To continue this process of contextualisation of emotions, we decided to enrich our interview transcripts by re-engaging with the data: re-listening to our recordings and noting not only participants’ emotions (expressed through utterances, laughter, pauses, change of tone) but also our own (some of which were present in our fieldwork notes). In line with emotional constructivism, we reflexively considered how participants’ and researchers’ emotions were contributing to co-constructing knowledge. We also aimed to account for the multiple contextual axes which were operating simultaneously or, in other words, how emotions were manifesting themselves at the intersection of the topic/ theme being discussed in combination with the micro-geographies of the interview location (Elwood and Martin 2000), the migratory histories of participants and our biographies as researchers as well as the wider socio-political context.

An example was Elena’s interview with 28-year-old Yoana, who chose to be interviewed at a trendy café in the Midlands that attracted middle-class young professionals with liberal views. While Elena had previously noticed that participants mostly opted to be interviewed in Bulgarian so that “people don’t know what we are talking about”, the micro-geographies of this location did not require the same level of intimacy, as Elena reflected in her diary post-interview. Throughout the conversation, Elena easily empathised with Yoana as they were similar age, both had British partners and parents who were disillusioned with the democratic transition in Bulgaria, which stimulated their own migratory projects. They too, were going through the same processes of legalising their status in the UK with Yoana insisting this was not because of Brexit. At one point, the conversation turned into a comparison between the cultural norms in both host and home countries, followed by this exchange:

Yoana: People in Bulgaria worry too much about “bitovizmi” everyday problems. […] Whereas here the mentality is a bit freer … [speaking really fast]

Elena: Um-hum [affirming understanding]

Yoana: [continuing to speak fast] And that's why I feel a bit closer and more comfortable in England. I feel maybe that that’s why I would call it … ho::me [voice goes quitter and elongates the word] here as well.

Elena: I love how you said “home” [emphasising the word] and your voice goes quiet … 

Yoana: Yeah, yeah [saying this quickly and nervously]

Elena: Why are you so afraid of admitting it?

Yoana: Well, I don’t know [2 sec pause] Maybe because I don’t want to [emphasising words]. If I said “yes, I call it my home”, it feels like I am denying my previous background and it feels I’m denying my home back in Bulgaria.

Elena: Can’t one have more than one home?

Yoana: Probably … Erm, but … [pause] probably [pause] that's possible, but that's how I feel. As if I’m gonna hurt someone’s feelings if I say “yes, I call it home here”. That’s why but I mean [speaking faster], something else you haven't asked, but … My partner, he doesn’t like England, even though he’s English [laughs] … [goes on to discuss future plans]

This example clearly illustrates the explicit and implicit ways in which emotions inform the discussion about how “home” is felt and experienced, and the socio-cultural connotations that it bears. Elena not only recognises the discomfort that Yoana experiences in calling England “home” but the previously established empathetic relationship with the participant emboldens her to question Yoana’s uneasiness. Rather than defusing the discomfort this further strengthens it. This is demonstrated by the participant’s hesitation and pauses and the explicit refusal “I don’t want to”, followed by a change of topic that aims to deflect from invoked emotions and to validate the participant’s emotional response. Even though this exchange did not alter the flow of the interview and the established rapport, it is evident how emotions create an affective social ecology embedded in a cultural script that provides an insight into complex experiences. The researcher’s emotions here actively contribute to and shape those of the participant, affecting the findings, which was only realised upon re-listening and enriching the transcript by accounting for the way emotions were manifested in our fieldwork.

Similar to our fieldwork encounters, when re-engaging with participants’ accounts during data analysis, we realised that we needed to question why we were identifying with some participants, while finding the answers of others surprising, disappointing or even offensive. This process of re-engaging with (dis)comfort enabled us to “see” aspects of the topic we had initially neglected. One example is Elisabetta’s encounter with Sandra, who was in her mid-20s, working as an assistant manager in a café/restaurant. Like Valentina, she spent most of the interview justifying her decision to come to the UK, how great her job was, and how easy settling in the city where she was living had been. She also seemed very unconcerned about Brexit and knew very little about its possible repercussions on EU workers. Most of her narrative was focused on work aspects. She discussed how she only had short-term contracts in Italy; how long her shifts were when she did have work; how she could not afford to live independently on the money she made; how her boyfriend could not find work in Italy but how through an agency he could get a job in a British hospital; how no matter what your job is, there are more opportunities in the UK to better oneself through promotions or further study, contrary to what happens in Italy. This was an important side to Sandra’s story. However, another aspect of it emerged when her emotions came unexpectedly to the fore, resulting in an important trigger point for the subsequent analysis. Sandra’s upbeat narrative ended abruptly fifteen minutes into the interview when Elisabetta asked:

Elisabetta: Where do you feel at home?

Sandra: [answering very quickly] I don’t know. [A very long pause – 5 seconds long during which Sandra starts to cry].

Elisabetta: Sorry, I didn’t want to touch … 

Sandra: [laughing and crying at the same time] I had a strange reaction … [more pause, than she clears her throat]

Elisabetta: Do you want to have a break?

Sandra: Oh God, so embarrassing.

Elisabetta: Don’t worry … 

Sandra: [clears her throat followed by more silence] … Well a bit I wanted to leave because [more crying], sorry … oh dear, … mh … .mh … . also a bit to change page [more crying], so don’t really know [we then stopped the recording for a bit].

This interview helped Elisabetta, on the one hand, to recognise the salience of work and the importance of having opportunities to improve one’s working conditions in participants’ accounts; on the other hand, to realise the pain and suffering that it entailed. Until then she had been quite surprised to hear all those upbeat accounts and perplexed that people were not critical of their current social, legal and work situations. However, when discussing our interviews, we began seeing patterns in some participants’ accounts, where negative feelings about the migration experience seemed to have been deliberately suppressed, similarly to what Sandra had done until a specific question triggered her “strange reaction”. These moments, difficult to interpret while doing fieldwork, subsequently contributed to the development of our findings, particularly, the emotional management that some of our participants engaged with to successfully settle in the UK (Zontini and Genova 2022).

Moreover, during encounters with participants like Sandra and Valentina, we realised that while we had inadvertently privileged citizenship rights in our focus, for many of our participants labour rights and conditions (especially the possibility of securing permanent contracts and live independently) were more important in their current circumstances than long-term settlement rights and were thus prepared to tolerate a precarious status for what they saw as a more stable economic future. In Elisabetta’s case, it became evident that her identification with certain participants had less to do with the length of stay in the UK and more with the timing of their (and her’s) migration, that is, with what Britain and Italy they, as migrants, had experienced. They all compared their current situation in Brexit Britain with the experiences they had both pre-migration (in Italy) and also within Britain (in the past), which continued to change over time. This highlighted the temporal dimension of migration, something we had originally neglected but emerged as an important finding later considered in our analyses. Thus, the process of re-engaging with the emotional dispositions of researchers vis-à-vis participants and the emotionality of particular fieldwork moments enriched our understanding of the data.

Conclusion

It has long been recognised that emotions matter – not only as they inform how we experience our social realities but also how we understand them. In focusing on the latter aspect, we have brought this still largely “untapped source of information” (Blakeley 2007, 61) to the fore by offering a practical approach to harnessing the epistemological power of emotions, which recognises the relational nature of affect as embedded in social relations and circulating between bodies but also outside them (Ahmed 2004). While research accounts traditionally prioritise the emotional dispositions of participants, often part and parcel of the ethics of care (Blakeley 2007), we argue that researchers’ emotional reflexivity is central to questioning the processes of knowledge production and to creating more robust, rigorous and comprehensive understanding of participants’ experiences. Just as we cannot ignore how various social characteristics shape our individual positionality, we cannot be oblivious to the ways in which our standpoints produce affective fields that inform our interpretation of (migration) categories, objects of study and data. Thus, researching the researcher is not an argument for narcissistically centring research agendas on those who produce them but for taking seriously the kind of “unscientific” objectivity called for by Schinkel (2019, 8) and others that moves away from state-imposed categories and questions, and sufficiently considers the power dynamics inherent in social and migration research. As we have demonstrated, while the migration field is imbued with emotions, understanding how researchers navigate and contribute to it is, in our view, a neglected, yet important endeavour.

We enrich these debates by providing a concrete approach to operationalise emotional reflexivity in practice. Drawing on feminist qualitative research, we have explored the role of researchers’ emotions across the different, yet inter-related, stages of the research process. Using examples from our empirical project on the settlement experiences of Italians and Bulgarians in Brexit Britain, we have shown the importance of accounting for researchers’ emotions in constructing (designing the study) emotionally-sensed knowledge, highlighting the affective aspects of research agendas, design and focus, as well as how emotional reactions are crucial in challenging often taken-for-granted categorisations. Emotional reflexivity is also important for all aspects related to fieldwork (building rapport, conducting fieldwork) which inform how we generate emotionally-sensed knowledge. While most reflections on emotions, ethics and reflexivity in migration studies are generated in the field of migration control and border studies where researchers tend to “study up” (state officials) or “down” (subjects with more precarious economic and legal positions than them), we show the relevance of considering emotions more broadly, including when studying “across” and in areas seemingly less contested. Specifically, we have demonstrated how during fieldwork questioning further the sources of our (dis)comfort and thus empathy and surprise, alongside considering our positionality and standpoints as critical scholars, has enriched our understanding of the phenomenon under study. Recognising that emotions are always relational enables researchers to consider participants’ experiences within the social ecologies within which they are produced and the power geographies that underpin them. The benefit of emotional reflexivity lies also in illuminating the axis of privilege in the different social positionings of researchers and participants and among participants. Finally, when producing emotionally-sensed knowledge in the stage of data analysis, we have shown how emotional reflexivity can not only offer richer insights that otherwise would be omitted but also how it can be useful for accounting for the temporal aspects of migratory projects and experiences.

Overall, the article makes the case for the value of emotionally-sensed knowledge as part of the reflexive turn that is currently underway in migration studies. In researching the researcher, while producing knowledge from the perspective of “those considered migrantised citizens”, called for by Dahinden and Anderson (2021, 34), we also show the complexities and multifaceted nature of these positionalities and remind migration scholars about the situatedness of every account (Amelina 2022; Haraway 1988; Schinkel 2018) and the role of socio-historical and institutional contexts in which research takes place (Doucet and Mauthner 2012; Gray 2008). When produced in migration research, emotionally-sensed knowledge can aid migration scholars in getting a better sense of the subjective experiences of migrant actors and of the affective dimensions of migration, ultimately enhancing transparency and “objectivity”. It can also help to see how categories can be generated relationally in the field, rather than been imposed externally using common sense or policy frames, thus potentially enabling us to mitigate power imbalances between researchers and participants and to challenge, rather than reproduce, new forms of othering and exclusion (Dahinden and Anderson 2021; Meissner 2019).

Ethics statement

The research forming the basis of this article received favourable ethical opinion (Reference: 1718-085-STAFF) in 2018 by University of Nottingham’s School of Sociology and Social Policy Research Ethics and Integrity Committee.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Lucy Harrison for her initial scoping work on this project. We also thank Karen Salt for offering Elena a place on a Rights and Justice-sponsored writing retreat in 2018, which gave her the opportunity to draft the initial manuscript idea. We thank the School of Sociology and Social Policy for enabling Elisabetta to attend a writing retreat in 2022, which helped us advance with the paper. We are indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback, which greatly improved the quality of the manuscript. The responsibility, however, remains ours alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham.