Reflexive uncertainty: Fieldnotes and emotion in participatory visual gender research in Cameroon

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: What about fieldnotes in comparative and international education research? Approaches, practices and ethical considerations

Proposal

“To be able to trust, yet to be skeptical of your own experience…” (Mills, 1959, cited in Kleinman & Copp, 1993, p. 57)

Despite the power of emotion to fuel the passion and resistance that motivates research (Holland, 2007), researchers’ emotions remain underreported and contentious. The study of emotion in research and in fieldwork is certainly not new and often leads to calls for greater reflexivity within attempts to better account for researcher subjectivity and positionality (e.g. Kohl & McCutcheon, 2014; Sultana, 2007). Reflexivity, while fraught (Pillow, 2003; Rose, 1997), remains a critical methodological tool for the production of thoughtful, situated research. My interest here is the use of reflexivity in accounting for and navigating researcher emotion through fieldnotes (Kleinman & Copp, 1993). Working with fieldnotes, researchers have identified the critical role of emotions both in influencing the research process (Widdowfield, 2000; Arditti et al., 2010) and in understanding the phenomena being studied (Humble, 2012). Yet the relationship between emotion and the production of fieldnotes is understudied. Drawing on the ‘emotional’ or ‘affective’ turn (Davies & Spencer, 2010), the relationship between emotion and writing (D’Mello & Mills, 2014), and what Punch (2012) called the ‘hidden struggles’ embedded within field diaries, this paper explores questions about reflexivity and emotion in fieldnotes.

My doctoral work explored the gendered nature of the waterscape in Southwest Cameroon using participatory visual methodologies (photovoice and participatory video). Working collaboratively with local organizations and academics, I co-facilitated media-making and analysis workshops that emphasized collective interpretation. However, I wrote my fieldnotes privately. My stream of consciousness writing style blurred the boundaries between my research and personal experiences (Thompson, 2014), aligning with feminist calls to consider the politics of the personal and to position myself in my work in order to better situate the knowledge produced. In addition to documenting a running record of the research activities and my observations in the field, my fieldnotes provided me with a safe space to notice, process, and address my feelings. These included my queries about my role as an outsider doing research in Cameroon, about my email correspondence with my colleagues, and about my emotional, embodied practices related to writing my fieldnotes.

Reviewing my fieldnotes post-fieldwork, I was surprised to find myself coding significant sections of writing as ‘self-doubt.’ In this paper, I revisit these uncertain passages to explore the relationship between reflexivity and emotion in fieldnotes practices. Is uncertainty precisely the type of critical reflexivity required in order for researchers to continue asking pertinent questions of themselves and of their research topic and methods? When does reflexivity foster self-doubt? In what ways does reflexivity rely on privilege and/or loneliness, or at least adequate time and space for making reflexive notes? Through a gender lens, in what ways do complicated intersections of power and vulnerability (Caretta & Jokinen, 2017) influence researchers’ willingness and capacity to be uncertain? I conclude by calling for greater attention to 1) how fieldnote texts offer important emotion data, and 2) how emotions mediate fieldnotes practices.

Author

• Jennifer Thompson, Durham University