Emotional Encounters During Fieldwork: Researching Brazilian Women Migrants as a Brazilian Women Researcher

Abstract

This paper addresses the ethical implications of doing qualitative research among migrant women while being a migrant woman researcher myself. Brennan (2014)’s affective turn shows us how affect (both positive and negative) irradiates powerfully between one subject and another; while Ahmed (2010) reminds us that our affective situation may shape what/how we will feel. Based on experiences and reflections, since my PhD in 2008, on Brazilian migrants’ experiences in Portugal, I borrow Teresa Brennan’s concepts of affect and Sara Ahmed’s notion of emotion to look at how our encounters throughout our fieldwork with migrant women affect our bodies and vice versa. Moving away from the insider/outsider dichotomy, I argue that our knowledge production practice with migrant women is a reciprocal emotional reaction, surrounded by inequality power dynamics, which entails a set of ethical implications when translating these emotional reactions as research outputs.