Performative interviewing: affective attunement and reflective affective analysis in interviewing

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this essay, we develop an affective framework that offers performance ethnographers new methodological ways of orienting to and analyzing interviews. Affective attunement is the notion that individuals relationally orient themselves to spaces, encounters, events, histories, futures, and other selves through somatic interplay. Reflective affective analysis involves a form of retrospective sense-making where researchers reflect on the ways in which affects, rhythms, and intensities animated the interview. We suggest a shift in terms of how we think of what an interview is, what the role of the interviewer and interviewee are, how we navigate through the interview, and how we make sense of it all after the fact.