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

Abstract

Feminist researchers engage reflexively with questions of how power operates through intersubjective processes like building rapport, obtaining consent, and being accountable in the ‘field.’ But how do researchers build these connections across embodied and linguistic differences in interlingual research involving local interpretation? In this paper, we delve into our experiences as a foreign researcher and a local interpreter conducting interviews and group discussions with low-income women waste workers in India. We focus on our co-navigations of positionality and power with a focus on language, emotion, and embodiment in connecting with participants and reflect on how interpretation and translation processes can mediate, complicate, and enrich connection-building. We argue that emotional, embodied, and linguistic challenges and opportunities are not uniformly experienced between differently positioned team members and require space to grapple with divergent experiences, understandings, and outcomes that emerge across this nexus. We detail three research encounters, analyzing the nuances of positionality in our divergent roles; our navigations of care and refusal manifesting across the triple subjectivity of encounters; and our strategies for working across languages, embodiment, and emotion in the colonial past-present. The paper contributes to feminist, anti-colonial methodologies by providing insights into our experiences of connection-building in the ‘field’ and revealing the ‘scaffolding’ work and relations which support our processes and pursuits of ethnographic research, translation, and accountability.