Emotion and embodiment and the role of the researcher

Among the winners of the 2007/8 ESRC Seminar Series annual competition were Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor and Deborah Dean from WBS, together with Sandy MacDonald from Northampton University. Their seminar series was led by WBS and also involved collaboration with colleagues from LBS and the Universities of Keele, Liverpool, and Northampton.

Five seminars brought together over a hundred research active scholars, research users and early career researchers from across Europe. The seminars were designed to raise issues concerning the context of the researcher, whether in fieldwork, teaching, or writing on their work. The role of researchers' own emotions and embodiment in carrying out their work is often ignored, with the researcher treated as an 'instrument’. Researchers also often treat themselves differently in a particular context than, for example, travellers would in the same context, almost hiding their professional identity and expectations in relation to issues such as fear and fatigue.

Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor of the Marketing and Strategic Management Group explains the impact this can have on researchers and their work, "A number of issues need consideration, not least to do with ethical responsibilities - to ourselves, our colleagues and our respondents. For example, issues of ethics in research are often predicated on the imperative to 'do no harm', but this is seldom considered in terms of any complications for either the researcher or the researched."

Deborah Dean of the Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour Group, explains further, "We wanted to use this seminar series as a forum to open up these relatively unexplored areas for discussion, particularly in relation to doctoral training. For example, despite the 'reflexive turn' in fieldwork-based academic disciplines, empirical research often seems to ignore the role of researchers' emotion and embodiment in the collection of data and in writing. So the orientation of the research framework in terms of analysis might well be critically reflexive, but the conduct of the research itself is effectively positivist in treating the researcher as an 'instrument'. We considered, for example, where and when can they be relevant? What differences can they make to formulating and answering research questions? How do you write these issues into accounts of the research process, especially given lack of space, and often interest, in journals? If you can write them in, is this encouraged in practice by funding bodies? What is the pedagogic rationale for looking at these issues, for example in terms of research training? How generalisable, and indeed acceptable, are these approaches across different fields of study?

The previous seminars in this series took place at four UK universities, and involved participants from around the world. The final seminar Fear and Physicality in Fieldwork was located at the Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava, the University of Warwick's Venice site. This event helped to build closer connections with colleagues outside the UK in both Europe and Asia.

Layla Branicki, a WBS Research Fellow who helped to organise this event, comments, "As an inter-disciplinary researcher it was a great opportunity to attend an event which involved people from such a wide range of different disciplines representing politics, criminology, medical anthropology, theatre and performance studies, industrial relations, sociology, organisation, management and accounting studies."

The impact of the seminars is already making itself felt among those who were involved. After attending the event, a PhD student commented, "I was intrigued by the subject matter. It is most certainly the case that the role of researchers is seldom discussed or even encouraged in an academic setting and therefore I was curious of other researchers' experiences in the field and how I would be able to relate this to my own. I wanted to be able to be in a safe setting where sensitive issues could be discussed in what felt like an informal and non-judgmental way."

Sandy MacDonald of Northampton Business School reflects, "The seminar has already had an impact on the way we deliver doctoral training in the business school and it is hoped that this will be shared with other doctoral programmes across the University.

She continues, "As a result of this seminar series we hope that a deeper understanding of the implications of emotion and embodiment on the research process will help to inform doctoral programmes and early career researchers throughout the UK."

"The last workshop provided a powerful illustration of the complex politics and emotions that can be involved in conducting fieldwork gathering qualitative data" says Professor Mark Easterby-Smith from Lancaster University Management School contributed to the series. He continued, "These features are rarely mentioned in either textbooks or in business school doctoral programmes and yet there is a great need for students to have strategies for dealing with them. Although issues of politics are dealt with in my textbook, the next edition will have more treatment of the emotional dimension as a direct consequence of being involved in this workshop series."