Affective Ambush: An Autotheoretical Approach to Understanding Emotions as Useful to the Research Process

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay considers the use of emotions in life narrative research. Using autotheory the authors recount and reflect on their experiences of a phenomenon they are tentatively calling ‘affective ambush’, wherein during the course of research the researcher unexpectedly experiences significantly heightened affect—or ‘big feelings’—stimulated by research materials. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed, they position sites of affective ambush as feminist spaces of encounter that yield rich data accessible through embodied modes of enquiry such as autotheory and autocriticism. As such, in this essay they seek to trouble and problematise the dominant detached and ‘objective’ academic position, and investigate how moving outside of this paradigm has unique implications for scholars of life narrative, trauma and grief. They propose instances of ‘affective ambush’ as sources of affective information that, if integrated into the research process, can reveal new insights about the texts and subjects that we investigate as life narrative scholars.