Therapy as Fieldwork: Reflexivity, Moral Ambivalence, and Embodiment when Researching Urban Violence

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Theory, Methods, and the Body

Abstract

This paper introduces “therapeutic reflexivity” as a methodological innovation for ethnographic research on violence. Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork in Puerto Nuevo, a marginalized urban neighborhood in Callao marked by chronic poverty, police abuse, and recurrent lethal violence, I analyze transcripts from my concurrent psychotherapy sessions as sociological data. While scholars such as Ruth Behar, Loïc Wacquant, and Veena Das have foregrounded vulnerability, embodiment, and the everyday life of violence, reflexivity in qualitative sociology remains largely cognitive and retrospective. This paper addresses a methodological gap by conceptualizing therapy itself as a parallel ethnographic field in which the researcher’s emotional and bodily responses become analytically productive. Through thematic analysis of therapy transcripts in dialogue with fieldnotes, I identify five interrelated processes: the body as a site of saturation, the normalization of violence, the moral ambivalence of care and redistribution, the regulatory force of gossip and gendered boundaries, and the gradual shift from over-involvement to analytic distance. Therapy documented how violence imprinted itself somatically—through exhaustion, hypervigilance, and illness—while also revealing how emotional numbing mirrored community survival strategies. Acts of giving and rescue functioned simultaneously as solidarity and as attempts to manage classed guilt, exposing the moral economies underpinning field relations. I argue that emotions are not distortions of sociological knowledge but vehicles of it. By treating psychotherapy as a structured, dialogical site of analysis rather than private coping, this paper expands the sociology of emotions and reflexive methodology. Therapeutic reflexivity renders visible the affective conditions under which knowledge about urban violence is produced and invites sociologists to integrate disciplined emotional self-examination into research practice.

Author

• Andrea Roman Alfaro, University of New Mexico