Navigating the emotion-embodiment-language nexus in international research: Stories from a foreign researcher and local interpreter

Keywords: International feminist research, interpretation, emotion, embodiment, Southern urban practice, India
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

We draw upon our field diaries, interview transcripts, and collective biography methods to excavate the ways that we, a foreign researcher/outsider (Wittmer) and local interpreter with an insider/outsider positionality (Qureshi), co-navigated the complexities of emotion, language, and embodiment in a multi-year qualitative study. The study focused on women engaged in low-income informal recycling labour in the city of Ahmedabad, India and used interview and group discussion methods to explore women’s livelihood experiences through a moment of municipal solid waste policy change. This study was premised on connecting with low-income women workers and valuing their stories and expertise.

In this paper, we provide methodological insights into the strategies we implemented and the challenges we encountered in connecting with participants and in interpreting and valuing their stories. By retrospectively analyzing specific moments in the research, we grapple with a nexus of language, the body, and emotion which were constantly shifting in our relational strategies and improvisations in navigating multi-lingual, intercultural research encounters.

We aim to contribute to anti-colonial feminist approaches to urban knowledge production by unpacking how engagements with emotion, embodiment, and language might inform international research teams in more concretely define and practice empathy, care, and solidarity in interpreting encounters and building narrative trust. Finally, we hope that this piece promotes a deeper engagement with knowledge production processes across languages/positionalities and the ways that emotion (and inter-cultural interpretations of emotion) can shape how we understand responsibility and the obligations we have to the people we work with/places we work in.