Emerging Emotions in Poststructural Participant Ethnography in Education

• In Event: Methodologies of Researching Emotions in Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

The paper analyzes the emotions emerging in the researcher, in the participant teacher and in the community during reflexive participant ethnography in sensitive school contexts, and discusses their methodological implications for doing participant ethnography. This paper is informed by poststructuralist perspectives, which acknowledge the constitutive effects of emotions as discursive practices. This means that emotions are seen as interrelated with power relations, and emotional expressions are seen as performative and producing reality. In other words, emotions are not seen as private possessions or simply as socially constructed but as both: as personal and emerging within specific within specific socio-historical contexts.

The paper is based on a reflexive participant ethnography conducted in a small school in a reindeer herding village in Finnish Lapland. The village school was a forum for multiple personal, local and societal sensitive emotional issues and conflicts, such as substance abuse, deaths through own hand or that of another, and severe disagreements between reindeer herders and school representatives of the purposes and methods of education and the open conflicts arising from these disagreements. Reflexive participant ethnography refers to (a) a form of research that fully acknowledges and utilizes a researcher's subjective experience as an intrinsic part of research and, (b) critical reflection on the broader theoretical, cultural, political, ideological, and narrative contexts of the interaction.

Based on this research, the following methodological conclusions can be made regarding reflexive participant ethnography in sensitive school contexts: Firstly, reciprocity in research should be seen as a continuous relational process, during which the researcher will be appropriated by participants in ways the researcher cannot control, and the researcher's positionality should be seen as an ongoing relational process taking place in the everyday. Secondly, the research relationship is a transformative process to all involved in the research. These conclusions have ethical implications for participant ethnography in sensitive contexts - especially for establishing and maintaining rapport with various participants during and after the field work, for making openings for various forms of reciprocity in ethnography, for the implicit everyday expressions of positionality, and, for the subjectivities emerging during the research for the participants. These implications translate into practical ethical and methodological questions such as: how to balance between reporting openly and honestly and being sensitive to the personal, difficult emotional issues of participants; how to establish and maintain rapport in practice with participants of conflicting perspectives without choosing sides while living in the village; how to enable the 'becoming' of all participants in school ethnography as "good", regardless of the issues at hand.
The paper contributes to the emerging poststructural body of research which explores how research itself produces subjectivities for both the researcher as well as participants. Taking the perspective that research not only represents reality but produces it, the paper discusses how to conduct research which is sensitive to the various subjectivities and realities it produces.

Author

• Maija-Liisa Lanas, University of Oulu