Abstract
This article explores how anxiety, and its bodily affects, influences the experience of encounters within and around research spaces. Throughout, I offer up autoethnographic excerpts from field notes which contextualise my experience of anxiety while undertaking social geographical research. Through these vignettes, I ask: What does embodying anxiety in academic and research spaces feel like? How can we understand, conceptualise, and attach meaning to forces which influence how researchers experience anxiousness? And what opportunities for reflexive research practice and critical knowledge production might be created by attending to the bodies and embodied experiences of anxious researchers? Responding to these questions, I position anxiety as an affective state which, as deeply embroiled within the body and subject position of researchers experiencing anxiety, cannot be disentangled from the socio-materiality of research spaces. Recognising the relationship between anxiety and researchers’ capacities to feel embodied ‘ease’ in academic life, I encourage readers to reflect on their own experiences of anxiousness, folding these into their reflexive practices, writings, and research outputs. I conclude by urging researchers to continue to both recognise the messy realities of researcher positionality through a feminist approach attentive to the specificities of researching bodies, and move beyond privileging and perpetuating the fallacy of a detached and always-already stable researcher; tropes which continue to pervade and are consciously privileged within academic spheres. Doing so, I argue, could enable researchers to push against the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable to feel and embody in academia.
Highlights
As I write this, I can very distinctly feel blood flowing through my wrists, an uneasy charge emanating across my body
Catungal (2017, 298) encourages social researchers to interrogate their ‘felt embeddedness’ in emotional and social realms, in order to account for how ‘our situatedness in broader social worlds affects our knowledge production practices as well as how we navigate and feel research sites, institutions and relationships’. These attempts to explore the filtering of embodied emotions experienced in research spaces into geographical researchers’ everyday lives are developed by Caretta et al (2018), who engage in collaborative autoethnography to shed light on their experiences of stress and weariness as early career researcher women within neoliberal academia
As Tolia-Kelly (2010, 363, original emphasis) reminds us, feminist work asks social researchers to ‘feel the formation, dissemination and analysis process that lead to the production of cultural geographies,’ and to consider the affects which emerge out of bodies which are produced as ‘other’
Summary
ISSN: 0966-369X (Print) 1360-0524 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc. Experiencing and embodying anxiety in spaces of academia and social research James D.
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