When does research end? The emotional labour of researching abjection

Abstract

In this article, I ask the question: when does research end? I am motivated to engage with this question because I still labour over my doctoral research that I completed a few years ago. Feelings of guilt, shame, and above all, abjection, continue to haunt my subject position of researcher and academic. I seek to trouble the idea that research has clear beginning, middle, and end points, and I reflect on the politics, labour and emotion involved in conducting research, particularly when it involves understandings and experiences of violence. I expose how theoretical and pragmatic decisions, as well as incidents and accidents, leave mnemic traces on our bodies. I demonstrate how personal, theoretical and methodological decisions are complexly intertwined in research, and I argue that it is incumbent upon researchers to think through what they research, why they do it, its effects, and consequences – for researcher, researched, and society.